The sky at dawn had been dotted with what the Tsarina called picturesquely ‘wee pink clouds’. But the weather had then closed in, with severe frosts sending temperatures plummeting below freezing. Rasputin’s daughter Maria claimed that no living Russian could remember a harsher winter than that of 1916. The 18-year-old Maria found herself confined to her father’s flat, where the fusty rooms steamed with fetid warmth and the pervasive smell was of cabbage and hot sheep’s cheese.The streets outside usually pullulated with her father’s followers, the so-called ‘Rasputinki’. Up to 400 had been known to gather before sunrise, waiting as long as three days to see him.Grigory Rasputin’s name was by this time known the length and breadth of Russia: he was the Siberian peasant ‘Holy Man’ who had inveigled his way into the heart of the splendid pre-Revolutionary Court. His mysterious rise had made him an object of hatred, fear and reverence. His claims as a Holy Man, ridiculed and dismissed by some, were accepted, without question, by many who believed he had been sent by God.
