Grigory Efimovich Rasputin
1864-1916
Damn difficult to kill
Rasputin was born in the Tobolsk province in Sibiria in the year 1867. He grew up in the village of Pokrovskoe on the Tura river. We know little of his family, exept that his father was a farmer and cart driver. Rasputin married locally at the age of 18 and had three children. However, he felt the call to become a man of God and joined the Khlysty, or as they were also know; "The People of God", a neo-gnostic sect that taught that self-flagellation and sexual indulgence was the path to God. He experienced a mystic vision of the Virgin in his mid-thirties, who apparently told him that he were to go to St. Petersburg to seek enlightment there. He arrived in St. Petersburg in 1911, and had soon managed to infiltrate the court of the Romanovs, last of the Czars.
The Czarina Alexandra was apparently profundly impressed by the young monk with the hypnotic gaze, and was convinced that he was sent by God to guard her young son, Alexis, who suffered from hemophaelia. At several occasions Alexis lay near death, the finest doctors in Russia was powerless, but Rasputin managed to heal the boy by laying of hands.
Rasputin was also famous for his sexual conduct, he seduced hundreds of women, despite the fact that he very seldom bathed. He was apparently a skilled lover, able to withhold orgasm for a long time before succumbing. One Russian noblewoman relates how she actually fainted from pleasure during lovemaking. The common people loved - and feared - Rasputin, but he wasnīt popular with everyone, several political factions saw Rasputin as a threat that had to be removed. One such faction planned to castrate and murder Rasputin in 1913, but he saw it coming and fled in time.
On the 28 of June 1914, perhaps "coincidentally" on the same day as Princip and his fellow conspirators in the Order of the Black Hand assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Archdutchess Sophia von Hapsburg in Sarajevo, Rasputin was attacked and stabbed in the stomach by 
a prostitute while recuperating in the seaside resort of Yalta. Rasputin survived, although he lost a lot of blood. As a result of the assassination of the Hapsburgs, that what would later be known as World War one was begun. Rasputin seems to have had some understanding of the consequences if Russia declared war, for he wrote in a telegram to the Czar in St. Petersburg that were Russia to join in the war it would be "the finish of all things." Rasputin used later to claim that if he had been well enough to go to Russia he would have managed to convince the Czar and so altered the course of history.
As the war progressed both the socialistic and aristocratic elements within Russia wanted Rasputin dead since he was for the Czar but against the war. Rasputin seems to have predicted his own downfall since he wrote in a letter to the Czar in 1916;
"If I am killed by common assassains, and especially if they are my brothers, the Russian peasants, you have nothing to fear. But if I am murdered by the Boyars (nobles), if they shed my blood their hands will remain soiled by my blood. Brothers will kill brothers. They will kill each other. There will be no nobles in the country.
In December 1916, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich together with right-wing factions of the aristocracy, who belived that if Rasputin were to continue to advice the Czars, the Army would revolt and overthrow the Romanovs, lured him to the Yusupovsky Palace on the pretext that Prince Felix Yusupov would introduce Rasputin to his beautiful wife. Rasputin was led to the cellar and fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide, but these didnīt affect him. Yusupov then shot Rasputin in the chest at close range and he fell to the floor. He suddenly revived and jumped up and started to strangle Yusupov who fled in a panic. Yusupov returned a few minutes later with more men, who found Rasputin in the yard crawling toward the gate. They shot him several times more and bludgeoned him, then tied him up and threw him in the river from the Petrovsky Bridge. He was still struggling as they tossed him in, and when his body was found the next day his bonds were broken and his lungs filled with water showing that he didnīt die until submerged in the freezing waters. Less than six months after Rasputins death in december 1916 the revolution was a fact. The Romanovs, whose blood had ruled one sixth of the planet for over three centuries, was no more.