Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, (or Grigori Yefimovich Novy) () (–) was a Russian mystic who is perceived as having influenced the later days of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei. Rasputin had often been called the "Mad Monk", while others considered him a "strannik" (or religious pilgrim) and even a starets (, "elder", a title usually reserved for monk-confessors), believing him to be a psychic and faith healer. It has been argued that Rasputin helped to discredit the tsarist government, leading to the fall in 1917 of the Romanov dynasty. Contemporary opinions saw Rasputin variously as a saintly mystic, visionary, healer, and prophet, and, on the other side of the coin, as a debauched religious charlatan. Historians may find both to be true, but there is much uncertainty, for accounts of his life have often been based on dubious memoirs, hearsay, and legend.

For some time, the date of Rasputin's birth remained questionable. "It is still not known with any certainty when Rasputin was born, and all the books which deal with him and his career give differing dates; not even his biographers — and there have been many — have been able to agree. The closest one can come with certainty is sometime between the years 1863 and 1873." It was not until recently that new documents surfaced revealing Rasputin's birth date as January 10, 1869 O.S.

Rasputin was wandering as a pilgrim in Siberia when he heard reports of Tsarevich Alexei's illness (it was not publicly known in 1904 that Alexei had hemophilia). This disease was widespread among European royalty descended from Victoria of the United Kingdom, who was Alexei's great-grandmother. When the young Tsarevich, while vacationing with his family, got a bruise after falling off of a horse, he suffered internal bleeding for days. The Tsaritsa, looking everywhere for help, asked her best friend, Anna Vyrubova, to secure the help of the charismatic peasant healer Rasputin in 1905. He was said to possess the ability to heal through prayer and was indeed able to give the boy some relief, in spite of the doctors' prediction that he would die. Skeptics have claimed that he did so by hypnosis—although, during a particularly grave crisis, from his home in Siberia, Rasputin was believed to have eased the suffering, in Saint Petersburg, of the Tsarevich through prayer. His practical advice (such as "Don't let the doctors bother him too much; let him rest") may also have been of great assistance in allowing Alexei and his worried mother to relax, so that the child's own natural healing process might take place. Others believe he used leeches to stop the boy's bleeding for the moment; however, this is unlikely to have been successful, as leech saliva contains hirudin and other natural anticoagulants. Every time the boy had an injury which caused him internal or external bleeding, the Tsaritsa called on Rasputin, and the Tsarevich subsequently got better. This made it appear that Rasputin was effectively healing him.

Diarmuid Jeffreys has proposed that the medical treatment halted due to Rasputin's intervention included aspirin, then a newly-available (since 1899) "wonder drug" for the treatment of pain. Since aspirin is an antiaggregant (prevents aggregation of platelets thereby interfering with blood coagulation)—this was discovered only in 1971—the treatment would have increased the bleeding into the joints, which was causing Alexei's joint swelling and pain.

The Tsar referred to Rasputin as "our friend" and a "holy man", a sign of the trust that the family placed in him. Rasputin had a considerable personal and political influence on Alexandra, and the Tsar and Tsaritsa considered him a man of God and a religious prophet. Everyone desirous of an audience with the royal couple had to go through him, a situation which angered certain individuals. Alexandra came to believe that God spoke to her through Rasputin. Of course, this relationship can also be viewed in the context of the very strong, traditional, age-old bond between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian leadership. Another important factor was probably the Tsaritsa's German-Protestant origin: she was definitely highly fascinated by her new Orthodox outlook—the Orthodox religion puts a great deal of faith in the healing powers of prayer—but seems to have lacked some discernment regarding its practices.

The legends recounting the death of Rasputin are perhaps even more bizarre than his strange life. According to Greg King's 1996 book The Man Who Killed Rasputin, a previous attempt on Rasputin's life had been made and had failed: Rasputin was visiting his wife and children in his hometown, Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River, in Siberia. On June 29, 1914, he had either just received a telegram or was just exiting church, when he was attacked suddenly by Khionia Guseva, a former prostitute who had become a disciple of the monk Iliodor, once a friend of Rasputin's but now absolutely disgusted with his behaviour and disrespectful talk about the royal family. Iliodor had appealed to women who had been harmed by Rasputin, and together they formed a survivors' support group, with the intention of discrediting or killing him.

Guseva thrust a knife into Rasputin's abdomen, and his entrails hung out of what seemed like a mortal wound. Convinced of her success, Guseva supposedly screamed, "I have killed the antichrist!"

After intensive surgery, however, Rasputin recovered. It was said of his survival that "the soul of this cursed muzhik was sewn on his body." His daughter, Maria, pointed out in her memoirs that he was never the same man after that: he seemed to tire more easily and frequently took opium for pain.

The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it invented by the very men who killed him, which is why it becomes difficult to discern exactly what happened. It is, however, generally agreed that, on December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin's influence over the Tsaritsa had made him a far-too-dangerous threat to the empire, a group of nobles, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the annihilation of the family during the Red Terror), apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a massive amount of cyanide. According to legend, Rasputin was unaffected, although Vasily Maklakov had supplied enough poison to kill five men. Conversely, Maria's account asserts that, if her father did eat or drink poison, it was not in the cakes or wine, because, after the attack by Guseva, he had hyperacidity, and avoided anything with sugar. In fact, she expressed doubt that he was poisoned at all.

Determined to finish the job, Yusupov became anxious about the possibility that Rasputin might live until the morning, which would leave the conspirators with no time to conceal his body. Yusupov ran upstairs to consult the others and then came back down to shoot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell, and the company left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to grab one, and, while at the palace, he went to check up on the body. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes, grabbed Yusupov by the throat and strangled him. As he made his bid for freedom, however, the other conspirators arrived and fired at him. After being hit three times in the back, Rasputin fell once more. As they neared his body, the party found that, remarkably, he was still alive, struggling to get up. They clubbed him into submission and, after wrapping his body in a sheet, threw him into an icy river, and he finally met his end there—as had both his siblings before him.

Three days later, the body of Rasputin, poisoned, shot four times and badly beaten, was recovered from the Neva River and autopsied. The cause of death was hypothermia. His arms were found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice. In the autopsy, it was found that he had indeed been poisoned, and that the poison alone should have been enough to kill him.

Yet another report, also supporting the idea that he was still alive after submerging through the ice into the Neva River, is that after his body was pulled from the river, water was found in the lungs, showing that he didn't die until he was submerged into the water.

Subsequently, the Empress Alexandra buried Rasputin's body in the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo, but, after the February Revolution, a group of workers from Saint Petersburg uncovered the remains, carried them into a nearby wood and burnt them.

After Rasputin's death, his secretary Simonovich realized that Rasputin had moved a lot of money into Maria's account. Indeed, he seemed generally to have set all his affairs in order. Mere weeks before he was assassinated, according to secretary Simonovich, Rasputin wrote the following:

"I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigori has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one in the family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. I go, and I feel in me the divine command to tell the Russian Tsar how he must live if I have disappeared. You must reflect and act prudently. Think of your safety and tell your relations that I have paid for them with my blood. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family. -Grigori"

Why he wrote this prophetic letter, if it was not made up by Simonovich, is still a mystery. Oddly enough, he predicted that he would not live to see the New Year, which turned out to be true. He was assassinated eight days before. Some speculate that Rasputin had a spiritual vision foreshadowing such an event, and, although he did not explicitly say so, there is certainly a strong suggestion in the letter that that might be so. Others believe that Rasputin was conscious of the fact that he was widely reviled by many of the Russian people at the time and that a number of them wanted him dead—although many of his fellow peasants seem to have supported his success with the royal court. After the great speech that inspired Yusupov to make his move, rumours were flying about the Duma that something was soon to happen to Rasputin, and he may simply have gotten wind of the rumors without knowing who exactly the conspirators were. Still, he does come across in the letter as being totally certain of the eventuality, which is strange for one who might only have heard rumours of it. Moreover, after the twenty-five years term purportedly predicted by Rasputin, the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany (1941).

Rasputin's daughter, Maria Rasputin (Matryona Rasputina) (1898–1977), emigrated to France after the October Revolution, and then to the U.S.. There she worked as a dancer and then a tiger-trainer in a circus. She left memoirs about her father, where in she painted an almost saintly picture of him, insisting that most of the negative stories were based on slander and the misinterpretations of facts by his enemies.

The name Rasputin in Russian does not mean "licentious", which has often been claimed. There is, however, a very similar Russian adjective, rasputny (распу́тный), which does mean "licentious"—as well as the corresponding noun, "rasputnik". Some even suggest that his name meant "dissolute".

In fact, "Rasputin" is not an uncommon surname, and does not have a "disgraceful" meaning, as the contemporary Russian writer Valentin Rasputin would be quick to explain. There are at least two options for the root-word: one of them is "put", which means "way", "road", and other close nouns are rasputye, a place where the roads diverge or converge, and rasputitsa (распу́тица), "muddy road season". Some historians argue that the name Rasputin may be a place name, since it does roughly signify "a place where two rivers meet", describing the area from which the Rasputin family originates and where his sibling died. Yet another possibility is the just-mentioned "put" giving rise to the verb "putat", which means to "entangle" or "mix up"—"rasputat' " being its antonym—"disentangle", "untie", "clean up a misunderstanding", etc.

However, the most well-founded explanation is a standard Russian surname derivation from the old Slavic name "Rasputa" ("Rasputko") (recorded as early as in sixteenth century), with the meaning "ill-behaved child", the one whose ways are against traditions or the will of parents.

It is said that Rasputin tried to have his name changed to the inconspicuous "Novykh" after his first pilgrimage to the Holy Land—"Novykh" (from the Russian Новый, meaning "New") connotes "Novice"—but that is the subject of much dispute.

*Cultural depictions of Rasputin *Rasputin's penis *Michael Malloy - a homeless man who was murdered by gassing after surviving multiple poisonings, intentional exposure to extreme cold, and being struck by a car.

*Furhmann, Joseph T. Rasputin: A Life. New York, 1990. *Radzinsky, Edvard, Rasputin: The Last Word. London, 2000.

*The Alexander Palace Time Machine Bios-Rasputin - bio of Rasputin *Rasputin documentary (Discovery Channel) *Okhrana Surveillance Report on Rasputin - from the Soviet Krasnyi Arkiv *Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich, Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia *Russian Revolutions of 1917 *The Murder of Rasputin *Rasputin the Musical by Michael Rapp *BBC's Rasputin murder reconstruction *RASPUTIN Grigory Efimovich - article about Rasputin at Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg *Mark 16:18 - a bible verse believed by some Christians to ascribe Rasputin-like powers to some Christians