Did Rasputin ever make false predictions to the royal family?

Question

Rasputin is famous for the many predictions he has made or is alleged to have made to the royal family as well as to other members of the nobility, predictions that turned out to be true.

This includes the various times when he predicted the tsar’s son would survive his disease, that Piotr Stolypine would be assassinated, that joining WWI would bring the end of the dynasty, and that he would be assassinated, most likely by a member of the nobility.

Looking in my book (Troyat, Henri. Rasputin) and on the Internet (Rasputin false prophecies, Rasputin false predictions) however, I do not find any documented instance in which he either gave bad advice to other people (by that I mean advice that was followed but that did not achieve its supposed effects), or predictions to other people that turned out to be unequivocally false.

Did Rasputin ever make false predictions to the royal family?

Answer 1

While it may not be the case that any member of the Romanov family ever explicitly complained that Rasputin got something wrong, it is quite easy to find supposedly correct predictions he made to others which were clearly misremembered or interpreted generously after the fact.

Here are the first three examples I could find:

1. Rasputin once told a miscreant in Pokrovskoye that he would "attain the highest rank". Soon after this, the man was hanged for murder. Rasputin was allegedly clever enough to defend this prediction: "I told you he’d be placed above everybody." (Welch 2014, p. 42)

2. When Anna Vyrubova was to be married, Rasputin encouraged her, writing in letters that it was “a true Easter,” and that her new husband was, “a cross of gold.” (Smith 2016, p. 101). When the marriage failed later, she famously claimed that Rasputin had predicted that her marriage would be unhappy, but this is hard to reconcile with the written record.

3. Near the end of Rasputin's life Anna once asked him about a pain in Alexei Romanov's leg and Rasputin predicted that "Throughout the rest of his life Alexis will not be seriously ill again (Welch 2014, p. 20)." Alexei's health did not improve significantly before he was killed less than two years later.