What about Rasputin with healthy Alexei?

hey, all. in no small part because i've had Boney M.'s Rasputin stuck in my head for the past week or so, i've been putting some thought into how Rasputin could figure into my ASB ATL. i'd long been considering that he might have a slightly more heroic role for narrative reasons partly because, since Victoria's status as a carrier of hemophilia was apparently a random mutation and not something with an actual history, the alternate version of her wouldn't have that and therefore there's no such problem in her descendants throughout Europe. (i'm using their OTL names here for convenience--in the actual TL they would be named differently) the idea with Rasputin is that he still got into the good graces of the Tsar and gained alot of power and Yusupov and company still schemed to kill him, but ITTL Rasputin managed to survive (using the more folkloric account of his death rather than hard historical fact for narrative reasons) only to eventually be killed by the Bolsheviks after helping the Tsar and his family escape them, ultimately leading to the Soviet Union never coming to be.

more recently, though, it occurred to me--far later than it should've, honestly :p--that it's probably much more plausible that Rasputin never enters the service of the Tsar at all because *Alexei doesn't have hemophilia ITTL. i still want to do something with him ITTL for narrative reasons, though, and it also occurred to me that it might be more interesting if he becomes a separate religious leader in TTL's Russia, possibly in connection to the Old Believers, and something builds from there. the obvious direction to take that in is that he becomes a cult leader in the vein of Jim Jones or similar, but i don't know how plausible that is. thoughts?

(if you're wondering about the Bolsheviks, my current thinking is that they still don't come to power but under different circumstances--the old idea was predicated on an alternate, smaller-scale WWI taking place in the same timeframe but now that's up in the air)
 
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