My grandmother met Rasputin.
He came to her family's house for dinner in Kazan in 1905.He was slovenly, grandiose and was wearing two silk Russian blouses, one over the other, to proclaim his prosperity.
Distracted by anxiety over a neighbor's illness, he stayed only a short time, which was fine with my grandmother.
Rasputin took his leave in the foyer. The children were all present. My grandmother was 10. Her brothers, Dimitri and Alik, stood near their father, a widower. Rasputin put his hand on my grandmother's head. "She will live long," he said.
My grandmother lived to be 97. But everyone else in that foyer died young. During the Communist takeover in 1918, her father was shot in the back of the head and thrown into a lime pit. Red troops found Alik, wounded after a skirmish, bayoneted him and threw him into a river. Dimitri was later shot to death in a Stalinist purge.
Now my nephew is playing with the Rasputin toy that came with his chicken tenders and fries. It's from Burger King's promotional tie-in with the new movie "Anastasia." Pull both arms out and Rasputin's head falls off. Press a button on his back and everything pops back into place.
How do I tell my 6-year-old nephew and my 7-year-old niece that this was no fairy tale? In the animated movie's story, Anastasia, the daughter of the czar, escapes the clutches of the evil Rasputin and somehow later misses being killed with the rest of her family. Then she falls in love with the boy who saved her. How do I tell my niece and nephew that life does not always pop back into place?
The real Anastasia was shot in a basement, her body doused in gasoline, burned and dumped in a pit with her sisters, mother and father. Later, a delusional girl was fished out of an East German river and claimed to be Anastasia. After she died, DNA tests proved once and for all that her story was a hoax.
There's a phrase for what the movie makers did: It's called cultural appropriation. Victims who have led miserable lives and died miserable deaths are reincarnated as heroes. This has been going on since celluloid was invented. But the difference here is that this film is marketing a false version of modern history to children.
I can't tell my niece the truth about Anastasia; she's too young to hear the truth. But for 20th Century Fox, she is not too young to be told a lie.