The death of Rasputin - December, 1916. One hundred years ago on 30 December 1916, Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who became a confidant of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, was brutally killed. After supposedly being poisoned, shot and beaten, he was thrown into the freezing waters of St. Petersburg’s Neva River by aristocrats fearful of the influence he wielded over the Romanov court.