First, Rasputin was never ordained as a monk

No one can escape death. However, an attempt was made on Rasputin’s life before he was finally killed, and the story about his actual death helped propagate the idea that he could not be killed. But it’s more likely these stories were told to help spread the idea that Rasputin was associated with the devil and had “unholy” powers.

Rasputin was a Crazy Monk

And as for his sanity, we don’t really know, although his rivals and those seeking to either undermine or support Tsar Nicholas II certainly worked to position him as crazy. Some of the written records he has left behind suggest he had a scattered brain, but it’s also just as likely that he was poorly educated and lacked the ability to clearly express his thoughts with written words.

Rasputin Was Sex-Crazed

Those who sought to damage Rasputin’s influence certainly wanted people to think this, so it’s likely their stories are exaggerated at best and invented at worst. However, stories of Rasputin’s promiscuity started surfacing as soon as he left his hometown in 1892. But this idea that he was sex-crazed was likely the result of his enemies trying to use Rasputin as a symbol for everything that was wrong in Russia at the time.

The Story of Rasputin

As you can see, most of the things we consider to be true about Rasputin are actually false or at the very least exaggerated. So, what do we know? Unfortunately, not much, but here’s a detailed sumously mysterious life of Rasputin.

Who Was Rasputin?

Rasputin was a Russian mystic who lived during the final years of the Russian Empire. He rose to prominence in Russian society starting around 1905 because the royal family at the time, led by Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra

Feodorovna, believed he possessed the ability to heal their son, Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. Eventually, he fell out of favor amongst the Russian elite as the country experienced considerable political turmoil leading up to the Russian Revolution. This led to his assassination, the gory details of which have helped make Rasputin one of the most well-known figures in history.

Childhood

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in Pokrovskoye, Russia, a small town in the northern province of Siberia, in 1869. Like many of the people in the area at the time, he was born to a family of Siberian peasants, but beyond that, Rasputin’s early life remains mostly a mystery.

Accounts exist that claim he was a troublesome boy, someone who was prone to fighting and had spent a few days in jail due to his violent behavior. But there is little validity to these accounts as they were written after the fact by people who likely did not know Rasputin as a child, or by people whose opinion had been swayed by their opinion of him as an adult.

Part of the reason we know so little about the early year of Rasputin’s life is that he and those around him were most likely illiterate. Few people living in rural Russia at the time had access to formal education, which led to low literacy rates and poor historical accounts.

However, we do know that at some point in his twenties, Rasputin had a wife and several children. But something happened that caused Boeddhistische mannen him to suddenly need to leave Pokrovskoye. It’s possible he was running from the law. There are some accounts that he left to escape punishment for stealing a horse, but this has never been verified. Others claim he had a vision from God, yet this has also not been proven.