After failing to become a monk, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin became a wanderer and eventually entered the court of Czar Nicholas II because of his alleged healing abilities. Known for his prophetic powers, he became a favorite of the Nicholas's wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, but his political influence was minor.
The Romanovs were to be killed because they were the supreme symbols of autocracy. The irony was that, in Yekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks had turned them into the opposite of aristocrats. In the words of Evdokiya Semenova, “they were not gods. They were actually ordinary people like us.
