AGONY (Russian 1975)


The Story

The year is 1916 and the Russian monarchy is in decline.  The country is in the grip of a never-ending war and the psychotic Rasputin holds sway over the Tsarina because she believes he’s the only person who can cure her young son from the hemophilia that has afflicted him since birth.  The Tsar wants to send Rasputin back to his home in Siberia , but the latter manages to hypnotize his master, and even inspires him to order some questionable military maneuvers.   Rasputin spends his days engaged in orgies, at least when he’s not creating nutty laws and taking people’s money.  It seems that everywhere Rasputin goes he causes discord, from a party where he starts a ruckus by groping a noblewoman to his own peasant hometown, where he goes nuts after one of his relatives calls him a thief.  As the Czar loses his grip on the populace and the country slips into anarchy, a plot is hatched to do Rasputin in and is carried out one fateful night: Rasputin is poisoned and shot several times, leading to the dissolution of the monarchy and, in the “happy” ending, the rise of communism.

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