Grigori Rasputin

Grigori Rasputin
Main aliases:	The Mad Monk, Father-Twice-Removed Dyavol
Species:	Human
Place of origin:	Russia
Children:	Dmitri, Maria
First mentioned in:	Doctor Who and the Crusaders
First appearance:	The Wages of Sin
Appearances:	PROSE: The Book of the War AUDIO: The Wanderer
Main voice actor:	Tim Chipping

Grigori Efimovitch Rasputin, called Father-Twice-Removed Dyavol after his initiation into Faction Paradox and then ejection therefrom, (PROSE: The Book of the War) was a controversial Russian mystic with influence over Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra in the later days of Russia's Romanov dynasty. (AUDIO: The Wanderer)

At one point during World War I, the Spy Master disguised himself as Rasputin and took his place. (TV: The Power of the Doctor)

Biography

Life

His sister Maria and his brother Dmitri both drowned. Grigori and Dmitri were pulled from the river but only the former survived. Grigori later named his children after his deceased siblings. In 1903, Ian Chesterton dealt with the eccentric Grigori, a pilgrim in his early thirties, whom he met near the village of Zarechny in Siberia. Rasputin, revealed to be the Mad Monk of historical infamy, gained knowledge of future events from a faulty machine.

Things that he foresaw included Alexandra, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bolsheviks, a great war, the revolution, armistice, Stalin, Nazis, Hitler, another world war, television, computers, space flight, Yuri Gagarin, the Cold War, Cuban missiles, the Berlin Wall, the tenth planet, aliens, invasions, a lunar space station, men on Mars, the Doctor's people, beings beneath the feet, creatures made of plastic, metal, calcium and silicon, Egyptian gods, werewolves, ghosts, and vampires. He learned detailed information about Ian and Barbara Wright's discovery of the TARDIS in Totter's Lane in November 1963, the Doctor being woven through the tapestry of time, his protection of it, and his future, including the Dalek invasion of Earth.

The increasingly insane and sickly Grigori desired to use his knowledge to become closer to God than any man in history — preventing Hitler and disasters such as the Blitz and the Holocaust, helping the Tsar and becoming a confidante and a superior to kings and emperors. The only way to save him was to take him into the Time Vortex and use the TARDIS's telepathic circuits to remove Rasputin's memory of recent and future events. He was left asleep in the Summer Garden in St Petersburg. (AUDIO: The Wanderer)

The Spy Master disguised as Rasputin. (TV: The Power of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Power of the Doctor (TV story)"])

During World War I, Rasputin worked as a trusted adviser to the Tsar Nicholas II. By 1916, however, the Spy Master had taken his place and took up residence in the Winter Palace as part of the Master's Dalek Plan. The plan ended in failure with the Master himself gravely wounded on the cyber-conversion planet. (TV: The Power of the Doctor)

Death

According to another account, upon meeting Rasputin in St Petersburg in December 1916, the Third Doctor, Jo Grant and Liz Shaw realised that the legends about him were just that, and that he was not the evil manipulator that the history books had made him out to be. Liz reluctantly passed on Prince Felix Yusupov's invitation to dinner to Rasputin, knowing that he would be killed, but also realising that history must run its proper course. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin)

Two days before Rasputin's historical death, the Cult of Celebrity Death whisked him away to the Eleven-Day Empire and, to stop the Great Houses from noticing the change to the timeline, replaced him with a custom-grown biomass duplicate. The next day, one day before Rasputin's death, the Celestis offered a deal to the duplicate. The "Rasputin" had been primed to listen to any representatives of the War-time powers, so he accepted the Mark of Indenture.

In spite of the Faction's precautions, the Great Houses noticed something was amiss. Wrongly assuming the Cult of Celebrity Death would take Rasputin at the time of his actual death, they attached a ghost cluster device to Faux-Rasputin (weakening its connection to the timeline) and replaced it with yet another fake Rasputin, which drew stability and tissue from its predecessor. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Jo Grant posed as a maid in the kitchens at Yusupov's Moika Palace, where she disposed of poisoned cakes and wine intended for Rasputin and replaced them with untainted ones. When Rasputin devoured the cakes and remained unharmed, Yusupov became convinced Rasputin was possessed by the Devil and shot him in the back as he knelt in prayer. His accomplice, Vladimir Purishkevich, finished the job, shooting Rasputin repeatedly until he died, then beating his corpse in a fit of rage. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin) However, the Celestis immediately recorporated what they thought was their agent, and Grigori Rasputin rose up again. The confused triple-zombie attempted to lash out against its killers, and then escape. It was repeatedly bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot, before being dumped in the river Neve. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The Doctor found "Rasputin" as it clung onto life, but refused to save it. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin) Its last words were "Thank God" in the Great Houses' language.

In the City of the Saved, three resurrected individuals claimed to be Rasputin. All three were bitter opponents, often publicly denouncing each other, and all three were allied with different political factions. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

As Dyavol

In the Eleven-Day Empire, Rasputin joined the Faction under the name Dyavol. He continued to believe that he could purify his soul enough to have his saviour incarnate in him, but he substituted Christ for Grandfather Paradox, who likely would not have liked being embodied either way.

Dyavol ascended to the rank of Father and took Cousin Anastasia under his patronage. He encouraged her to found the Thirteen-Day Republic and convinced other Russian Faction members to join them. In the Republic, Dyavol set to re-embodying the Grandfather. He began to frequently wander through the wilderness for longer and longer stretches of time. Two days before the fall of the Republic on Valentine's Day, Father Dyavol's body was found in the frozen river. He had been poisoned, his throat had been slit, and he had been drowned. Possible explanations posed by The Book of the War included suicide, a sacrifice by members of the Thirteen-Day Republic to the spirits, or Anastasia's disposal of him as a liability. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Legacy

After the Rasputin incident, the Great Houses, Faction Paradox, and Celestis alike made an unspoken agreement that historical celebrities were not worth the trouble. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

By the 1970s, at least one film had been made about Rasputin while the band Boney M had written a song about him. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin)

According to Ian, "most people looked at him with terror and with fear." (AUDIO: The Wanderer)

The Teselecta once took the form of Rasputin, but with a green skin colour. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler)

Behind the scenes

Tom Baker as Grigori Rasputin in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra.

Tom Baker portrayed Father Gregory in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra (which also starred Michael Jayston as Tsar Nicholas II) and again voiced a character inspired by the real-life figure in Tsar Wars. Christopher Lloyd also voiced a heavily fictionalised version of him in the 1997 animated film Anastasia.

Rasputin's first appearance on TV was nearly in Shada, where he was intended to be depicted as a prisoner of Shada played by Derek Moss. The shoot ultimately was cancelled and the episode was left unfinished.

The unproduced Peter Capaldi-era story How The Monk Got His Habit, pitched by Peter Harness, would have revealed the origins of the Meddling Monk's habit to meddle in History and of his disguise as a human Monk, involving the Twelfth Doctor. A younger Monk (prospectively cast as Matt Berry), only meaning to have a bit of fun, would have been seen to go back to 1917 Russia to make the real Grigori Rasputin listen to the Boney M track "Ra-Ra-Rasputin". To the Monk's surprise, this would have caused Rasputin to go completely mad, throwing human history out of whack; for his penance, the Doctor would have had his old schoolmate regenerate into Rasputin's form and live out his lifetime exactly as it was supposed to go — thus showing not only the first of the Monk's time-meddlings, but also how he got into the habit of posing as a monk, Rasputin being known as "the Mad Monk".

The Master as Rasputin

In a review of the 1999 novel The Wages of Sin, Vanessa Bishop wrote:

"To his credit, McIntee resists the obvious temptation of making Rasputin the Master"DWM 276, paraphrased pull quote

Decades later, Chris Chibnall would depict the Spy Master masquerading as Rasputin in The Power of the Doctor. The original script for the episode had Prince Yusopov appear in the Winter Palace, rather than the Moika Palace, with him attempting murder on the Spy Master, who he took for Rasputin, and have two of his henchmen, likely Dmitri Pavlovich and Vladimir Purishkevich, carry the body of "Rasputin" to the river to dump him in, as was historically accurate. The scene was never shot.