The legend says he ate cyanide-laced tea cakes, drank poisoned wine, took a bullet to the chest, sprang back to life, was shot again, and only died when thrown into a frozen river. The 1916 autopsy report tells a radically different, deeply human story. This episode peels back the engineered myth of Grigori Rasputin to find the illiterate Siberian peasant who infiltrated the highest echelons of imperial power and became the fatal catalyst for the fall of a 300-year-old dynasty.

It follows the black-hole youth in Pokrovskoye, the root-cellar prayer meetings that spawned heresy rumors investigators never substantiated, and the spiritually starved St. Petersburg aristocracy that craved exactly what he offered. At the center is the empire's best-kept secret: the heir's hemophilia, and an empress whose desperate belief that only Rasputin could keep her son alive handed a peasant the keys to the palace. The botched assassination, it turns out, created the monster myth to cover the killers' own incompetence.

• The autopsy versus the legend: what the 1916 paperwork actually says about how Rasputin died
• From Siberian black hole to holy pilgrim: the transformation his neighbors barely recognized
• The Khlysty rumors: the terrifying sect he was never actually part of, and why everyone believed it
• Hemophilia, the hidden heir, and the mother's terror that built an empire-toppling dependency
• Burned by revolutionaries, survived by a lion-tamer daughter: the strangest postscript in Romanov history