On December 30, 1916, Grigory Rasputin was killed in St. Petersburg - he was poisoned, shot and, in the end, drowned in the Neva. Grigory Rasputin was born in 1871 in the village of Pokrovskoye, Tyumen Region, into a peasant family. No reliable information has been preserved about Rasputin's life. Historians do not exclude that he was a monk, but it is likely that Rasputin is just a genius actor.
At the age of 18, Rasputin made a pilgrimage to a monastery in Verkhotur, but did not take a monastic vow. He visited various holy places, walked to Jerusalem. Then he announced that he was a saint and had a miraculous gift to heal people. Rumors of a Siberian medicine man began to spread throughout Russia.
In 1905, at the height of the Tsarevich's illness, he was invited to the imperial court. The imperial family hid the heir's hemophilia, but when the child's condition became critical, the emperor surrendered. The entire subsequent life of an illiterate, with no idea about medicine, Rasputin was inextricably linked with the treatment of the prince. Rasputin settled in the upper strata of society, the capital's elite sought to be represented by the Siberian medicine man.
Soon Petersburg started talking about the extremely indecent behavior of Rasputin. His drunken fights and orgies terrified the townspeople. They said that, using his enormous influence on the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, Rasputin took bribes to promote certain projects or up the career ladder. The odious figure of the elder undermined the authority of the royal family. Then, on the initiative of Prince Felix Yusupov (husband of the emperor's niece), Vladimir Purishkevich (deputy of the IV State Duma) and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich (cousin of the emperor), a conspiracy arose in the imperial environment.
On December 30, 1916, they invited Rasputin to Yusupov's palace to meet with the emperor's niece, and they added potassium cyanide to the treat. However, the poison did not work. Then Yusupov shot Rasputin. But he managed to escape again. When he ran out of the palace, he was greeted by Purishkevich and the Grand Duke, who shot point-blank at the “Siberian elder”. He tried to get to his feet, but they tied him up, put him in a bag with a load and threw him into an ice hole.
An autopsy later showed that the old man at the bottom of the Neva was desperately fighting for his life, but choked to death. Rasputin left 100 canonical prophecies. The most famous is the prediction of the death of the Imperial House: "As long as I live, the dynasty will live," said Grishka Rasputin …
On December 30, 1927, the first industrial synthetic rubber was obtained by the Russian chemist Sergei Lebedev. Historically, it was polybutadiene (divinyl) rubber, which was produced by anionic polymerization of liquid butadiene in the presence of sodium, however, due to its low mechanical properties, it found limited application.
Nevertheless, it was the USSR that became the first country to establish large-scale production of synthetic rubber - in 1932. Nowadays, most of the rubbers produced are styrene-butadiene or styrene-butadiene-acrylonitrile copolymers - and the main branch of their application is the rubber industry.
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