The Making of Rasputin

A grieving father climbed into the Ural Mountains, walking for weeks with a single question burning in his heart: in a world governed by justice, how could his six-month-old son be taken from him? He bypassed the grand Cathedral of Transfiguration and the famous monks of the Monastery of St. Nicholas. Instead, he went to the tree line, to a small hut where a hermit named Macari lived with his chickens. The hermit spoke about his own sorrows and misfortunes, and something in that encounter changed the man forever. That grieving father was named Grigori. He would become Rasputin.

From Peasant Boy to Pilgrim

Grigori Rasputin was born in January 1869 in Pokrovskaya, a small Siberian town that had grown from a horse-changing station on the route between Tyumen and Tobolsk. His father Yefim had started as a laborer cutting hay and loading boats, but became a state coachman and accumulated a dozen cows and eighteen horses—prosperous by peasant standards. But Yefim and his wife Anna had buried four children before Grigori survived. Named for St. Gregory of Nyssa, whose feast day fell on his birth, he was seen as a miraculous gift.