Grigori Rasputin Gets Absolutely Bodied
Dead occult icon Rasputin is reading about Louis XV’s pinprick and going, “You call that an assassination attempt?” Though, to be honest, after the way he was taken out, there’s not many people who can hold a creepy candle to his manner of death. There were a litany of attempts on Rasputin’s life, all of which he managed to evade. Couple that with basically being considered a wizard, and what resulted was the kind of assassination usually reserved for a werewolf, not a court advisor.
Though it’s been questioned as being a little exaggerated for poetic effect, we have a description of the murder from the assassin himself, Felix Yussupov. According to Yussupov, he fed a positively bodacious amount of potassium cyanide filled cakes and wine to Rasputin, who showed absolutely no sign of ill health from the poison, at which point Yussupov panicked, borrowed a revolver and shot him. This also did not work. So, as the tale goes, Yussupov gave up on any form of subtlety, chained Rasputin up and threw him through the ice of a frozen river to drown. Water was found in his lungs during an autopsy, indicating that at least some of this might be true.
Either way, by the time Yussupov was done, Rasputin was deader than a hundred-year-old doornail.