There lived a certain man ...

... in Russia long ago (although any similarity to an actual person, living or dead, is purely coincidental). I had to put that last bit in for legal reasons, which Duncan Fyfe will now explain:

Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it ...

 ... For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.

I'm sure you feel better for knowing that. I know I did. You probably know what's coming next and, assuming you're any kind of right-thinking person, you'll feel better for that, too...