Prologue

PROLOGUE

LET’S START WITH the part everyone remembers:
They tried to kill Rasputin. God knows they tried.

They claimed they poisoned him with enough cyanide to kill a horse.
He just kept sipping wine and talking shit.
So they shot him. Point-blank. In the chest.
He got back up.
So they shot him again.
Still breathing.
So they beat him, shot him more for good measure, tied him up, and dumped him in a freezing-ass river.

People claimed his lungs had water in them.
If that’s true, he hit the river still alive.
If not, the legend didn’t care.

You don’t kill Rasputin.
You just slow him down.

But here's the thing: he should’ve never been there in the first place.

Rasputin wasn’t some royal.
He wasn’t a general. He wasn’t a priest.
He was a dirty peasant with a beard like a swamp wizard and eyes that made women nervous.
He wandered out of a Siberian cow pasture, said “God spoke to me,” and within a few years, he was drinking with the Tsar and whispering in the Tsarina’s ear like a Russian Ras Al Ghul.

This man did not climb the ladder of power. He oozed up it.
No education. No plan. Just vibes, visions, and whatever weird mysticism he was running.

And yet, for a solid decade, he was one of the most powerful men in the Russian Empire.

Why?

Because people are stupid.
Because desperation makes kings kneel.
Because when a kid’s bleeding out and no one else can stop it, you’ll take help from a stinky lunatic in a robe if he says the right prayer.

What makes Rasputin fascinating isn’t that he was weird.
It’s that the world let him happen.
The man was a walking shitpost with healing powers and a drinking problem, and somehow he became the spiritual advisor to the Romanovs, the last royal family of Russia, right before the whole country exploded.

He didn’t cause the collapse, exactly.
But he made one hell of a mascot for it.

A dirty, drunken, sex-crazed, bath-hating prophet of doom.

And when they finally killed him?
They made him immortal.