Grigori Rasputin

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The most notorious faith healer in Russian history was the debauchee Grigori Rasputin. Born in an obscure Siberian village, he was the third and last child of Efim Akovlevich, a well-to-do farmer. As well as the gift of healing, he was reputed to be blessed with clairvoyance, as a child being able to detect any missing object in the house and to sniff out the local thieves in his community.

As a child he would also hear the stories of the pilgrims that passed through his town, exciting him and imbuing him with a sense of the religious at an early age. At twenty, he married a local girl, Praskovia Feodorovna, and fathered four children.

According to his daughter, a chance frolic with three Siberian peasant girls in a lake led to a religious revelation, and soon afterwards, in approximately 1900, he joined a maverick religious sect, called the Khlist, who openly advocated sexual indulgence in their philosophy. They were flagellants who believed that man must at first sin in order to be redeemed later, so Rasputin set about sinning in his own inimitable way.

Rasputin proved to have such a natural aptitude for this that he was exiled from his own village by the local priests and so began an odyssey of itinerant wandering through rustic Russia, performing cures and initiating thousands of women into flagellation. Rasputin had an uncanny ability to calm the troubled minds of those who surrounded him. As well as this, he had a virtually unerring ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of character in his contemporaries, an ability that was eventually to be utilized by the Tsarina herself.

By 1905 he had settled in St Petersburg, where tales of his amazing healing powers had reached the ear of both Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. One of the most famous healings that Rasputin administered was to one of his own disciples, Olga Lokhtina. Olga was to be the first of Grigori's upper-class friends. Rasputin purportedly cured her of a nervous stomach disorder, called neurasthenia, that she had been plagued with for five years. In this cure Rasputin used both impassioned prayer and hypnotic suggestion, convincing Olga that he was in league with the Almighty in assuaging the illness.

He rose to become a close familiar of Tsarina Alexandra, mainly because of his ability through hypnosis to help her sick son, Alexis, who was afflicted with haemophilia. The child of Lili Dehn, the Tsarina's lady in waiting, was also cured of a fever by Rasputin after heartfelt prayer. By the end of 1906 he had established a firm reputation as a healer.

Rasputin also gave the Tsar and his wife a feeling of being in touch with the real Russia of the peasants. The notion that true faith was more likely to be found among the people was common, and no doubt this contributed to the allure Rasputin held for the Tsarina. He would assure them that Russia loved the Tsar. Correspondingly, the Assyrian healer Mrs Davitashvili has been quick to emulate this asset and pretend to a oneness with the people. She has said: 'It is every citizen's duty to inform the president of the people's views.' Rasputin used the Tsarina's favour to protect himself and broaden his influence, even though his wild sexual antics were scandalizing the whole of St Petersburg. In 1916, a gang of conservative noblemen, led by Felix Yusopov, assassinated him.