The Daughter of Rasputin
Maria Rasputin, during an interview (1930)
The world knew the Russian monk Rasputin as a somber influence on the wife of the last tsar, Nicholas II (1868-1918). How did he gain that much power over the otherwise sedate and prudish tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918), who was the grandchild of Queen Victoria of England?
Rasputin with Alexandra Feodorovna and the Romanov children
Well, the tsarina believed that he was a "holy man" who was the only one to be able to save her beloved, only son, tsarevich Alexei Nikolevich. When Rasputin - and later on the Romanovs too - was murdered his children had to fend for themselves.
Only three of Rasputin's seven children survived to adulthood, and two of them died after The Revolution. The one surviving child was his daughter Matryona, who changed her name into "Maria" and somehow got new documents for herself and her husband, the officer Boris Solovyov. That made it possible for the couple to leave Russia, entering a dangerous and difficult journey that took two years before they settled in Berlin for four years until moving to Paris. Difficult as it was, this escape saved the life of Maria, making her the only surviving Rasputin-child.
Her life as an exile reads like something out of a fantasy as she moved around the world, working as a cabaret dancer, a circus performer as well as a lion tamer. At no point did she admit that her father held any guilt whatsoever which is something that doesn't hold water, so to speak. His influence on the Romanov family wasn't healthy, to say the least. As to Maria then, she died in Los Angeles in 1977.
Wikipedia
Ingen kommentarer:
Send en kommentar