On January 1, 1917, the body of Grigori Rasputin, the advisor to the rulers of Tsarist Russia, was found trapped under the frozen surface of the Neva River. He’d been shot three times and horribly mutilated; his killers, it seemed, had even gouged out his right eye.

Everyone was a suspect. Rasputin was seen as a sorcerer and a corrupting influence on the tsar. He was hated by the Tsarists and the Bolsheviks alike. Even outside Russia, he’d made powerful enemies. Prince Felix Yusupov took the credit for Rasputin’s death, claiming that he and four co-conspirators had killed him together. And to this day, Yusupov’s story is the one that usually appears in the history books.

But Yusupov’s confession didn’t fit a single one of the facts. Every single detail in his story contradicted the autopsy and the evidence—and to this day, no one really knows for sure how Grigori Rasputin met his grisly end.

10 The Death Threat The Morning Before He Died

On the morning of December 29, 1916, Rasputin received a strange phone call. The voice on the other line, he told his daughter Maria, wasn’t one he recognized. The message, though, was clear: Rasputin’s days were numbered.

It was a death threat, though by no means the first one Rasputin had received.^[1] At this stage in his life, Rasputin was used to getting multiple death threats every day. They would come in the mail or through the phone, always warning him that he deserved to die for the greater good of Russia.

This one, though, deeply unsettled him. Multiple sources described Rasputin as “nervous” and “agitated” that day. For some reason, after countless threats on his life, the one he received the morning before he died terrified him.

Nobody knows who placed the call. The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Felix Yusupov, the man who has taken credit for Rasputin’s death. Yusupov spent the day trying to charm his victim so that he could lure him out to his home, and nobody involved in his conspiracy has ever claimed responsibility for the call.

9 The Cyanide That Failed To Kill Him

Yusupov’s plan was to poison Rasputin. He lured Rasputin out to his home, where he had plates full of cakes and wine that had been laced with cyanide by one of his co-conspirators, Dr. Stanislaus de Lazovert. The plan was to feed Rasputin the poisoned food and watch him die.

There is no question that Rasputin went to Yusupov’s house. The last person who saw him was his daughter, Maria, to whom he bid goodbye at 11:00 PM on December 29. Everything that happened after that, though, is a mystery.

Yusupov claims that he fed Rasputin the poisoned cakes and wines and that Rasputin gorged down enough cyanide to kill an elephant. But no amount of poison would hurt him. Instead, Rasputin kept asking for more.

His story, though, doesn’t quite add up. The autopsy notes say that Rasputin’s body showed “no trace of poison.”

Nobody knows for sure why there was no poison in his body. Yusupov’s story seems to imply that Rasputin really did have supernatural powers, but there are certainly other explanations.

Dr. Lazovert, years later, would claim that he only pretended to poison the cakes out of a pang of conscience—but not everybody’s convinced he was telling the truth. More recently, forensic scientist Dolly Stolze concluded that Rasputin was poisoned, but the doctor performing the autopsy missed the signs.^[2]

But then, of course, there’s always the other possibility: Yusupov could have lied.

8 The Gunshot That Failed To Kill Him

Frustrated that his poison didn’t work, Yusupov pulled out his pistol and shot Rasputin in the chest. Rasputin collapsed onto his back, blood spilling out of his body, and convulsed in spasms. It took a full minute for his body to become still, but by then, Yusupov’s co-conspirators had rushed into the room.

“The doctor [Lazovert] declared that the bullet had struck him in the region of the heart,” Yusupov wrote in his memoirs.^[3] “There was no possibility of doubt: Rasputin was dead.”

The conspirators, he claims, then drove to Rasputin’s house, one of the men dressed up in Rasputin’s clothes to convince the neighbors he’d made it home safely that night. Then they came back and got ready to dispose of Rasputin’s body.

“Then a terrible thing happened,” Yusupov wrote. “With a sudden violent effort Rasputin leapt to his feet, foaming at the mouth.”

Yusupov and the other men ultimately shot Rasputin several more times before one of the conspirators, Vladimir Purishkevich, finally took him down with a gunshot to the head. Even while they tied him up and threw him into the river, though, Yusupov insists that Rasputin’s body continued to move.

“I realized now who Rasputin really was,” Yusupov wrote. “It was the reincarnation of Satan himself.”

7 The Autopsy That Contradicts Everything Yusupov Said

Yusupov’s story certainly is exciting—but it doesn’t fit the facts. The autopsy report on Rasputin’s body, conducted by Professor Dmitry Kosorotov, contradicts every single word.

In his memoirs, Yusupov claims that he shot Rasputin in the heart and even says that he had Dr. Lazovert check the body and confirm that was where the bullet had hit its mark. Kosorotov’s autopsy, though, found only three bullet wounds, and not a single one had even come close to the heart. Instead, the bullets went through his stomach, liver, kidney, and skull, with wounds that no physician could possibly mistake for a gunshot to the heart.^[4]

Likewise, Yusupov claimed that Rasputin was taken down by a long-range shot from Purishkevich that took him in the back of the head. The bullet in Rasputin’s skull, however, had entered from the front at point-blank range, while Rasputin was lying on the ground.

It’s hard to reconcile Yusupov’s story with the facts. Some have suggested that he blew the murder up to make Rasputin more of a threat—but his account is nowhere near the truth. It’s almost as though Yusupov had no idea how Rasputin died.

6 The Rumor That Rasputin Drowned

Yusupov claims that he saw Rasputin move, even after he’d taken a bullet to the skull. Still, the co-conspirators tied up Rasputin’s arms and legs, wrapped up his body in a piece of heavy linen, drove it to the top of a bridge, and hurled it into the water.

Legend has it that Rasputin was still alive when they threw him in. When he was found, his hands were unbound and lifted over his head. He’d freed his hands under the water, Rasputin’s daughter Maria would later claim, and died drowning.

It’s very difficult to tell what the autopsy says. During the trial, an expert witness claimed that the autopsy showed “there was air in Rasputin’s lungs” and that he had still been alive when he was thrown into the water.^[5]

But this is a rare case where even reading the autopsy report doesn’t give us a clear answer. For some reason, different transcriptions say different things. Even today, you can find copies of Kosorotov’s original autopsy that say there was no water in his lungs and others that say there was. We’ve even found versions of Kosorotov’s autopsy that unambiguously claim Rasputin was alive, saying, “The victim was still breathing when he was thrown into the river.”

Somewhere along the line, whatever Kosorotov wrote was changed. Did the rumor pervade so far that people rewrote his autopsy? Or was the report altered to hide that Rasputin was still alive?

5 The Horrible Mutilation Of His Body And Genitals

Whoever killed Rasputin didn’t just shoot him. They brutally and horribly mutilated his corpse.

The description, in Kosorotov’s autopsy, is nothing short of horrifying:

The left-hand side has a gaping wound inflicted by some sharp object or possibly a spur.

The right eye has come out of its orbital cavity and fallen on to the face. At the corner of the right eye the skin is torn.

The right ear is torn and partially detached. The neck has a wound caused by a blunt object. The victim’s face and body bear the signs of blows inflicted by some flexible but hard object.

The genitals have been crushed due to the effect of a similar object.^[6]

The wounds, Kosorotov would later say, appeared to have been inflicted after Rasputin had died. This wasn’t the result of a violent scuffle. It was the brutal desecration of a dead body, a merciless beating that isn’t mentioned anywhere in Yusupov’s confession.

There are explanations. Some have theorized that Rasputin may have incurred these wounds in the water, while his body floated and dragged underneath a thick layer of rough ice. The ice, it’s believed, may also have broken the ropes off of Rasputin’s wrists.

But every explanation is nothing but speculation. All we know for sure is that his body was mutilated; whether it was by the force of man or the force of nature, we cannot know for sure.

4 Yusupov’s Strange Insistence On Taking Credit

Yusupov and his co-conspirators went to great lengths to cover up Rasputin’s death. They faked him driving home, they threw him in the river, and Yusupov repeatedly told the police that the gunshots from his house had just made by a drunken guest shooting at a dog.

According to police reports, though, the conspirators confessed pretty well immediately. The officer sent to Yusupov’s house, following up on reports gunshots, said that Purishkevich threw open the door and declared:

Listen here, he [Rasputin] is dead, and if you love the Tsar and the Motherland, you’ll keep this quiet and won’t tell anyone a thing.^[7]

The police certainly found bloodstains in Yusupov’s backyard, even if the autopsy didn’t fit his story. And while he denied the murder at first, Yusupov started hungrily trying to profit off his reputation as soon as he was implicated. He even ended up writing a whole memoir describing how he’d killed Rasputin in intricate, storybook-like detail.

When an MGM film called Rasputin and the Empress came out about Rasputin’s death, Yusupov even sued the filmmakers in a court case that, in the end, had Yusupov put down on the legal records as the man who killed Rasputin.

3 The British Spy Who Might Have Killed Him

Every bullet in Rasputin’s body, according to the autopsy, came out of a different caliber gun. At least three people—or at least three guns—had to have been involved in his death.

The bullet holes in his stomach and kidney could have been made by Yusupov and Purishkevich’s guns, but the one in his skull didn’t fit. It was made with a revolver, specifically, according to the most popular theory, a .455 Webley—a gun none of the conspirators carried.

A British friend of Yusupov’s named Oswald Rayner, though, carried a .455 Webley on him at almost all times. And though Yusupov denies that he was ever there, a lot of people think that Rayner fired the shot that finished Rasputin off, all under the orders of British Intelligence.

The British had a vested interest in seeing Rasputin dead. He was trying to broker peace between Russia and Germany, and his treaty would have turned the tide of World War I against the Allies. In Rasputin hadn’t died, it’s possible that the Germans would have won the war.

And there’s a letter that seems to completely give it away. A man named Stephen Alley, stationed in Petrograd, sent a missive to England on January 7, 1917, that read:

Our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of ‘Dark Forces’ has been well received by all, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement.

Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you on your return.^[8]

2 The MI6 Archives That Say Otherwise

The British government, more than 100 years later, still denies having anything to do with Rasputin’s death. The suggestion that Rayner killed Rasputin, they insist, is “an outrageous charge, and incredible to the point of childishness.”

They might be telling the truth. Rayner was not listed as an active agent when Rasputin died, and although countless historians have scoured through every available MI6 record, they can’t find the slightest trace of evidence that the British were involved.^[9]

Some of the arguments against Rayner fall flat, as well. One book dedicated to proving Rayner was the killer claims that the bullet in Rasputin’s head could only be “the work of a professional killer”—but that bullet, as we already know, was fired at point-blank range while Rasputin was lying down. It was hardly an expert shot.

Nor was the murder. Police Chief Serda described Rasputin’s murder as the work of “incompetent” killers whose methods were clumsier than he had ever seen in his entire career.

It was, in short, hardly the work of a secret agent.

1 The Burning Body That Sat Up

The most popular explanation for Yusupov’s outrageous story is that he was trying to erase a guilty conscience. He’d killed a defenseless man in cold blood, but he still wanted the people to believe that he was a hero. And so he changed the truth, making himself look better by selling Rasputin as a demonic monster who couldn’t be killed.

But one strange moment in March 1917 almost makes it tempting to believe that Yusupov was telling the truth: that Rasputin really a supernatural being.

A group of soldiers exhumed Rasputin’s body, threw it onto a pile of logs, doused it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They destroyed his body, afraid his tomb would become a monument to the Tsarist regime.

A whole crowd of villagers came out to watch Rasputin’s body burn—and almost every one of them insists that they saw his decomposing corpse rise up in the fire.^[10]

There are scientific explanations, of course. It’s been speculated that Rasputin’s tendons shrank in the fire, causing his body to bend at the waist. Or else the whole thing has been written off as a great mass delusion.

But Rasputin, they say, predicted every bit of it. In a letter that Rasputin (supposedly) wrote to Tsarina Alexandra shortly before his death, he said: “I feel that I shall leave life before January 1.”

Even dead, the sorcerer predicted, he would not be left in peace. His body would be burned, his ashes scattered into the winds.

There is perhaps no man shrouded in more mystery and mythology than Grigori Rasputin.

Born in an obscure Siberian peasant village in 1869, a religious conversion and career as a traveling holy man and healer led Rasputin to the court of the Russian royal family, where he became their closest confidant, chief advisor, and one of the most powerful men in the empire.

But as mysterious a man as Rasputin was, there was something about him that fascinated and repulsed, even during his lifetime. As a result, media both home and abroad used him as a handy weapon to push their own agendas, leading to him becoming the most hated man in Russia and his assassination in 1916. The stories spun, ranging from exaggerations of the truth to the outright fictitious, have become so commonplace that they are still believed over a century later.

Related: 10 Dark Secrets of the Russian Empire

10 He Was the Empress’s Lover

The famous Boney M song goes like this: “Ra Ra Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen.” It is an accusation started by the anti-monarchy media in Russia, who regularly drew cartoons of Empress Alexandra and Rasputin canoodling. These were designed, of course, to discredit the pair, who were both hated by the public by 1916. Indeed, even films and plays were written suggesting the pair enjoyed an illicit affair as if it was an unquestionable fact.

But there is no evidence to suggest Rasputin and Alexandra’s relationship was anything but platonic. Rasputin gave Alexandra spiritual companionship during a challenging time. World War I raged, and her husband, Emperor Nicholas II, was commanding the forces near the front lines, and letters between husband and wife show a passionate romance that never fizzled. For all the criticisms aimed at Alexandra, she was without question a deeply religious and loyal woman, madly in love with her husband. Rasputin, for his part, knew which side his bread was buttered on and was smart enough to know such an act would be the end of him.^[1]

9 He Was a Sexual Deviant

Okay, so he certainly did sleep around a bit—we aren’t denying that. His wife, ever patient and understanding, said of this that his affairs were “his crutch to bear.” Most of Rasputin’s followers were female; he spent a lot of time in the company of women and was known (from official police reports tracking his movements) to visit brothels.

However, this sort of behavior is far from that of a sex-crazed maniac who, on more than one occasion, is said to have exposed himself in public when drunk. The reality of the situation was that Rasputin found himself led into temptations: plenty of well-off, bored women became some of his most devoted followers, and some threw themselves at him. Of course, he was as much to blame as they, but like much in his life, the actual reality was grossly exaggerated by the media as part of their campaign against him. The idea of a mystical Russian peasant arriving in well-to-do Russia, exposing himself in public, and sleeping with the wive’s of the upper classes was a too powerful weapon. However, it was certainly only based partly on truth.^[2]

8 He Had a 13-Inch Penis

Going hand in hand with tales of his sexual prowess was the tale that his tail was 13 inches long and, when he made love, he caused women to faint. Adding to this myth, his penis was supposedly severed after his corpse was found in the Little Nevka River in December 1916 and displayed in a museum for years. It has disappeared and reappeared frequently—not what you’re thinking—in history, with the most talked-about being one that appeared in 1994, but after it was tested, it turned out to be a dehydrated sea cucumber.

Still, for some reason, people like the idea of Rasputin’s penis being monstrous in size—a manifestation of his supposed sexual appetite—and the myth that it was removed from his body at some point is a commonly believed one. Even today, the Russian Museum of Erotica holds an exhibition that claims to display the real penis of Rasputin.^[3]

7 He Was a Spy for the Germans

As Nicholas II rushed off to take control of his army, Alexandra (a German by birth) was left behind to govern. Although Nicholas still wrote home, Rasputin stepped in regularly to give advice and recommendations, often suggesting who should be appointed for various governmental positions. Even before Nicholas left for the front, Rasputin regularly gave political advice in the guise of visions and dreams coming directly from God, which often influenced the deeply religious royals.

But one commonly spread story (again, started by the Russian media of the time) was that Russia’s failures on the battlefield were because of Rasputin. And not by accident—he was intentionally misadvising the Emperor and Empress to help the Germans win. Some even claimed Alexandra was on the German payroll as well. Considering he was followed constantly for the last few years of his life, including by British intelligence, there is no evidence of him working for the Germans or anyone for that matter. While the information on spies is usually kept under a tight lid, there is nothing linking him to the German Kaiser. There is no suggestion from the various intelligence networks watching him that anyone ever seriously believed this.^[4]

6 He Was a Spiritual Healer Who Kept the Heir Alive

Now, this is technically true, but the myth surrounding how he did it, which is still not known for sure today, is often wrapped in hocus pocus and mysticism.

Nicholas and Alexandra’s only son was Alexei, a weak boy who inherited hemophilia from his mother’s side and wasn’t expected to live long into adulthood. The disease stops blood from clotting, meaning a simple tumble (as young boys are wont to do) could result in almost fatal internal hemorrhaging. More than once, the priest was called in to read Alexei his last rights.

Yet Rasputin would always come to the rescue, sometimes in person, sometimes with just a letter. Known throughout Russia as a faith healer, even before he first met the royal family, Rasputin became indispensable to Nicholas and Alexandra: their heir could seemingly only be kept alive by the mystic and no one else. But this was certainly not spiritual healing. Some say it was simply a matter of Rasputin sending the doctors from his side and ordering them to leave Alexei alone. This makes sense considering the common treatment for hemophilia at the time was aspirin, which today we know thins the blood, about the worst thing to give a hemophiliac. By insisting the doctors leave Alexei alone, he probably saved the boy’s life—not spiritual healing.^[5]

5 He Was a Monk

The moniker of “mad monk” sure is catchy, but Rasputin was not mad and certainly wasn’t a monk.

His religious career began after a pilgrimage to a monastery when he was 27 years old. He returned a changed man, a man of God, but he was never ordained by the Russian Orthodox Church. Walking the Siberian wilderness from village to village as a “strannik” (basically a holy wanderer), his popularity soared. It brought him to the attention of local church leaders and eventually Saint Petersburg.

In the capital, he was seen as something of a curiosity, personifying the sentimental idea of the God-fearing peasant. The often bored and spiritually hungry aristocracy were entranced by this crude peasant, who stood amongst them confidently wearing the robes of a monk. Rasputin had no desire to ever enter the church formally, but yet again, that troublesome Russian media said otherwise.^[6]

4 He Came Back from the Dead

We do not know for sure what happened that fateful night in late December 1916 when Rasputin was murdered. All we have is the unreliable account by the murderer himself: Prince Felix Yusupov, whose memoirs recount a story of evil, dark forces, and a noble and selfless act to rid the world of Rasputin.

Yusupov claims Rasputin was brought to his house and fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide. When Rasputin was unaffected, the Prince grabbed a gun and shot him in the heart. Then, thinking the job done and, in some stories, checking for a pulse and finding none, he went upstairs to tell his co-conspirators. When he returned, Rasputin supposedly leaped up back to life, throttled Yusupov, and tried to escape before being gunned down for good in the courtyard.

Although we will likely never know exactly how it happened, suggesting Rasputin came back from the dead can quite obviously be discredited, even more so when we consider the source. Indeed, the autopsy discredits Yusupov’s story immediately, detailing multiple gunshots, one to the head, and various bruises around the body, suggesting he was beaten. Yet even in death, the myth of the devil incarnate within Rasputin was too appealing to pass up.^[7]

3 He Actually Died of Drowning

Another common misconception of his death, although a little lesser-known, is that Rasputin was still not dead when his body was disposed of.

Yusupov and his co-conspirators drove to the Little Nevka River, weighed his body down, and tossed him over the railing into a hole in the ice. When his body was found just a little way downstream, however, false rumors quickly spread that water was found in his lungs, proving that he must have still been breathing when he was tossed in the water, making his cause of death drowning.

Again, this was simply another feather in the bow of the Rasputin myth, a further way of highlighting that the mystic man was a force of evil with supernatural powers of almost invincibility. In reality, the autopsy report said nothing of the sort. He died of a gunshot wound at point-blank range to the forehead. No one is surviving that.^[8]

2 The British Were Involved in His Assassination

This one we can’t discredit entirely, but there are parts of it that we certainly can.

The British were eager to prevent the crumbling Russian Empire from pulling out of the war and leaving them high and dry. They saw Rasputin as a threat due to his calls for belief in him, his influence over the royals, and the ill-feeling he distilled in the Russian population, which then transferred to the Emperor by proxy.

Rumor has it the British intelligence agency advised on, and even participated in, the murder of Rasputin, recognizing he wouldn’t be missed. And with Rasputin out of the picture, any doubt about the war would be gone from Nicholas’s mind, and his rule (and therefore Russia’s stability in the war) would be strengthened. One thing we can’t disprove is them advising on it and possibly encouraging it. Still, considering the amateurish, botched assassination itself, there is no way the British intelligence agency played an active part in it.^[9]

1 He Was Pure Evil

Probably the most commonly accepted “fact” about Rasputin, even to those who know nothing about him, is that he was an evil man. Popular culture has played a big part in this, especially in the West, with Rasputin always playing the bad guy with evil powers and bad intentions.

But while indeed a flawed man, and certainly no saint, at heart Rasputin’s intentions were at best quite noble, and at worst self-serving (often for reasons of protecting himself). While visiting prostitutes and sleeping with the wives of the elite, he did so with the genuine belief that sin was a necessary step to bring one closer to God (an idea shared by the celebrated authors Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). He loved his fellow man (particularly the peasants) and wasn’t afraid to show it, which led to rumors of his indecency and affairs. He loved Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s children dearly, and they loved him. And while the nation spiraled toward inevitable war, he begged Nicholas to relent, grieving at the idea of generations of Russian men being slaughtered and children becoming fatherless.

He was certainly a complicated man, but to call him evil is to believe the propaganda from 100-year-old anti-monarchist Russian newspapers. This propaganda is the basis of all the modern-day Rasputin mythology, from a media who saw him as nothing more than a tool to bring down the establishment.^[10]