January 22: Grigori Rasputin

Rasputin, whose first name was Grigori, (not, as suggested by a rumour spread by pop group Boney M, Ra-Ra) was a Russian peasant, mystical faith healer, and trusted friend of the family of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. He was born in 1869 on this date in the new style of calendar.

1. He was known as "the mad monk" but he was never a monk. While it was true he underwent a religious conversion while staying at a monastery at the age of 18, he never joined any order. He had a wife and three children. A lot of what we know of Rasputin comes from memoirs written by his daughter, Maria, who insisted most of the negative aspects of his reputation were based on slander and rumours circulated by his enemies. She eventually became a circus performer and died in Los Angeles.
2. He was illiterate. He never learned to read or write because there was no school in the Siberian village where he was born.
3. His father was a postal coachdriver.
4. Rasputin was named after St. Gregory of Nyssa.
5. As a young man, Grigori was known as a brawler and suffered from physical tics.
6. After his conversion Rasputin gave up alcohol and meat for many years, although he started drinking again after an assassination attempt in 1914 when a woman disguised as a beggar stabbed him and he had to spend six weeks in hospital.
7. In 1907, Tsesarevich Alexei was suffering from bleeding which the doctors couldn't cure. Tsarina Alexandra had met Rasputin while staying in Peterhof Palace because of all the unrest in the capital, and thought the itinerant holy man might be able to do something. Rasputin possibly did little apart from pray for the boy and calm both the patient and his parents down in the process, which in itself would have helped. He may have advocated that Alexei stop taking any drugs the doctors had prescribed. This could actually have been helpful, since Alexei had haemophilia. It was possible he was being given Aspirin for the pain, a drug we now know prevents Blood from clotting and wouldn't have been doing the boy any good at all.
8. While the Russian Queen would have been well impressed by this, there is no evidence Rasputin was ever her lover. However, by this time he held a belief that sex was a means to achieve enlightenment and the more sex you had, the holier you were. So he did have lots of lovers and women were drawn to him despite the fact he was a wild-looking, illiterate peasant who smelled like a Goat and admitted himself that he often didn't change his underwear for six months. The explanation for his way with women may lie in the rumour that his penis was 13 inches long. His member was removed after his death but before the autopsy so there is no official evidence this was the case. In the 1980s, an American called Michael Davenport sold what he claimed was Rasputin's penis at auction, but the object turned out to be a sea-cucumber. Rasputin's penis, it is now claimed, is in a jar of formaldehyde in the museum of erotica in St Petersburg. In other accounts, his daughter pickled it and kept it in a box; and there were rumours that it was worshiped by a female cult in Paris in the 1920s.
9. Being as close to the royal family as he was, Rasputin made plenty of enemies, who didn't like his potential influence on them. He died when a bunch of nobles lured him out of his house, by telling him he was to be the guest of honour at a party. It's said they fed him poisoned cakes, which had no effect, although the autopsy on Rasputin's body found no poison in his system. Maria Rasputin said that her father didn't like sweet or sugary food so it may have been he refused to eat the cakes. So they shot him, but this didn't kill him either and Rasputin escaped. He was chased, shot a few more times, but still was strong enough to beat up one of his attackers. The final cause of his death was drowning, after they threw him into the river.
10. It's possible Rasputin's death was ordered by the British and that an MI6 intelligence officer called Oswald Rayner was there - bullets from the type of gun he would have used were found in Rasputin's corpse. There would have been a motive for the British to do this - they would have been afraid that Rasputin would advise the Tsar to pull out of the first world war which would have meant Britain would lose without their powerful allies. We'll never know, because Oswald Rayner burned all his papers before he died.

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