The 200 Point Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto: Part 2, by Adam Lehrer

Bullet points 51 through 100 of the 200 Point Safety Propaganda Conceptual Manifesto

Read Part 1 HERE
Read Part 3 HERE

51. The Death of Rasputin

Was Gregori Rasputin really an occult mystic who used treacherous sorcery to ingratiate himself to Tsar Nicholas II by performing miracles on and curing the pain of the Tsar’s son? Or was he, no less impressively, a most gifted Counter-Agent who disarmed his country’s most powerful rulers through sheer charisma and manipulative charm? The line between magic and psywarfare is often blurry. According to the Tsar’s wife Alexandra, her son’s Alexei’s near terminal hematoma was cured by Rasputin who merely spit on the sick boy. Two days later, Alexei’s bleeding stopped. While it’s of course impossible to know whether or not it was the sorcery or that the hematoma healed on its own, but the legend was made. Rasputin was a healer. But if he was merely gambling and acting out the role, is Rasputin any less praise worthy? The Counter-Agent needs a legend for himself, and Rasputin’s was indisputably mesmerizing. His only mistake was that the legend got away from him. Once Russia’s economy tanked after WW1, the country’s numerous dissidents — the communists, the labor orgs, the peasants, the workers — pointed to Alexandra and her evil sorcerer Rasputin as, if not the sole cause of the economic despair, then at least as a symbol of the decadence that plagued the Tsarist regime. But Rasputin’s legend would live forever as a result of the bizarre circumstances around his murder. Rasputin’s murderers watched him drink three glasses of poisoned wine that seemed to have no effect on him. After that they tried to finish him off with a gun shot to the heart, Rasputin leaped up and attacked the shooter before running off. After being shot three more times, Rasputin was then dumped into a river and died (maybe?). Weeks later, Lenin’s revolution would topple the regime. But Rasputin lingered in the Russian imagination like the memory of a supernatural nightmare. “What was he?” “Who was he?” He was a sorcerer. He was a Counter-Agent. His legend can’t die.