Rasputin was born in a village called Pokrovskoe, where the name Rasputin is as common as Smith. The name Rasputin means crossroads.

Rasputin was the son of a Siberian peasant. He was a carter in his teens, and drank and brawled a lot, spent a short while in a monastry, then went back to drinking and womanising.

Around 1890, when he was 20, he married a girl 4 years younger. Their baby son died, and he heard the call of religion. After seeing a vision, he set on a pilgrimmage to Mount Athos in Greece. Two years later he returned a changed man. He built an Oratory in his back yard and spent his days in prayer. His reputation as a holy man spread around the district, and soon he was holding services and preaching to rapt congregations of villagers.

The village priest was resentful and told the Bishop of Tobolsk that Rasputin held orgiastic rites, which was a complete fabrication. He also claimed that Rasputin made his congregation roll around screwing each other, and that Rasputin himself would take his sisters one after the other. In fact Rasputin had no sisters, and when the Bishop of Tobolsk investigated these allegations he found Rasputins prayer meetings were in every way completely harmless.

These untruthful allegations of sexual impropriety by jealous detractors have been repeatedly perpetuated by all of Rasputins biographers. Even Aldous Huxley was taken in by these lies and repeated them in his essay on Rasputin.

Rasputin developed remarkable thaumaturgic (healing) powers, the ones believed to be naturally possessed by all people, which only need developing to be effective. Rasputin generally knelt in prayer by the bedside of the sick, which had the effect of encouraging optimism.

In 1905, when Rasputin was in his mid-thirties, he came to St. Petersburg, which at that time was the mystical centre of the world, where the aristocracy welcomed and respected him. Rasputin was confidant and completely effective in somehow being credited with the cure of the Tsars son on many occassions over several years. Rasputin was very influential over the Tsarina, but the Tsar generally ignored his advice. There is no historical proof whatever of Rasputin being heavily involved in politics at all.

Although Rasputin had a popular following, there were those of high position who were jealous of him and made great efforts to damage his reputation. These were people who disliked the Tsarina, and hated Rasputin because she believed in him.

The first and worst of his enemies was a homosexual monk called Illiodor, who started out as a friend of Rasputin's, then turned on him, when he couldn't handle being outdone by him. Illiodor was a religious fanatic and in 1911 clashed with Rasputin, and Rasputin was summoned before Bishop Hermogen of Saratov. They handled Rasputin unfairly and the Tsar himself immediately banished Illiodor and Hermogen.

He was banished from court several times by the Tsar because of stories of his drunkenness.

The only time Rasputin was involved in politics were the two times he strongly advised the Tsar against going to war. In June 1914, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a young Bosnian patriot, and consequently, Austria declared war on Serbia. The world's destiny was now in the hands of the Tsar, who had to decide whether to stand by Serbia and declare war on Austria, or let the Balkans solve their own problems. At this stage, Rasputins advice would have made the difference between peace and war, but he wasn't around as he was recovering from being stabbed (coincidently at exactly the same time as Archduke Ferdinand) and hovered between life and death for weeks.

Rasputin was finally murdered on the night of December 29, 1916. He had strong forebodings of his imminent death and wrote in a letter to the Tsarina he felt he would be dead by January 1, 1917.

Prince Yussupov shot Rasputin and when he came back for the body with his other conspirators, Rasputin got up and burst through a locked door into the courtyard, and was shot again and beaten with an iron bar, before being dumped in the river through a hole in the ice. When his body was recovered it was discovered he had died from drowning. No poison was found in his body. Yussupov was known for the rest of his life as 'the man who murdered Rasputin' and continued to lie about Rasputin afterwards, even claiming in court that Rasputin had been a German spy, which is an obvious lie that many biographers have exploded. Yussupov, like Illiodor, was a homosexual and his hatred of Rasputin may have had some curious sexual basis.