The myth of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, is well-known: He was a scheming sexual predator who insinuated himself into court life with devastating effects on Russia’s royal family. The reality — what we know of it — is much more nuanced.
Most of what we know about Rasputin is thanks to Douglas Smith, historian and translator, who in 2016 published an exhaustively researched biography, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. According to Smith, if the Rasputin you know is the character from pop culture, you don’t know Rasputin.
The real man, Smith says, was “an infinitely more interesting and captivating person” than the simplistic figure of legend.
Who was Rasputin and What Did He Do?
Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin was born in 1869 in the village of Pokrovskoye, in Siberia, a part of the Russian empire. He was a self-taught peasant who left his family farm to become something of a wandering holy man, though he was never ordained. He wound up in St. Petersburg, where he came to the attention of the Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. And that is where the plot thickens.
