Most famous Rasputin stories rest on rumours historians cannot confirm
Rasputin was an illiterate Siberian peasant who never held any church office, yet he became the confidant of Russia's last tsar and tsarina. His early life is so thinly documented that one historian calls it a black hole, and many lurid tales about him, from horse theft to sect orgies, have never been proven.
He was born in 1869 in Pokrovskoye, a village on the Tura River in Tobolsk province, the only surviving child of a peasant farmer who also ran goods between Tobolsk and Tyumen; seven siblings died young. Local archives hint at a rowdy youth with drinking and petty theft, but no charges for the grave crimes later pinned on him. He married Praskovya Dubrovina in 1887, and three of their seven children reached adulthood.
In 1897, aged 28, he abruptly left home on pilgrimage. Explanations range from dodging punishment to a vision of the Virgin Mary. At the monastery of Verkhoturye an elder named Makary humbled him, and he may have learned to read there. He came back a vegetarian who had given up drink, and spent years as a wandering pilgrim, perhaps reaching Mount Athos. His secret prayer meetings in his father's root cellar sparked rumours that he belonged to the Khlysty sect, but repeated investigations found nothing to support that.
Church figures in Kazan sent him to Saint Petersburg, where a seminary inspector named Theofan introduced him to aristocratic salons already fascinated by spiritualism and the occult. Two Montenegrin princesses married into the imperial family helped him meet Nicholas II on 1 November 1905; the tsar's diary recorded a man of God from Tobolsk. The couple came to believe he could ease the suffering of their haemophiliac son Alexei. When the boy suffered internal bleeding in spring 1907, Alexandra summoned Rasputin to pray, and Alexei recovered the next morning.
His power peaked in 1915, after Nicholas left the capital to direct the army in the First World War, leaving Rasputin and Alexandra with wide influence. As defeats piled up on the Eastern Front, both grew deeply unpopular. Conservative noblemen assassinated him in December 1916. Many historians argue his sinister reputation helped discredit the monarchy, which fell shortly afterwards.
Source: Grigori Rasputin
