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These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

7. The Holy Monk’s Sex Cult

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was an illiterate Siberian peasant, charlatan, mystic, holy wanderer, faith healer, blasphemer, and notorious lecher who led an extraordinary life. As a teen, he was such a notorious womanizer that he earned the nickname Rasputin, meaning “the depraved” in Russian.

Later in life, he somehow managed to soothe the suffering of the child Alexei Nikolayevich, the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne. That earned him the favor of Alexei’s parents, Russia’s emperor and empress. The resulting proximity to the throne made Rasputin an incongruously powerful and influential figure in the Russian Empire’s final years. Before that, however, there was the time when Rasputin ran a sex cult.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.