If Rasputin had never existed, the makers of the new Kingsman prequel would have had to invent him. A sexually voracious monk who survived numerous assassination attempts seems tailor-made for this larky, saucy action franchise. In The King’s Man, set in the run-up to the First World War, Rasputin is a member of a shadowy international cabal of villains and has become the most powerful man in Russia after getting Tsar Nicholas II and his wife hooked on opium and bending them to his will.

Of course, nobody will look to The King’s Man for historical accuracy any more than they watched the first Kingsman films for insights into the workings of British intelligence. What is remarkable about the film’s ludicrous plot is that it’s less absurd than some of the myths about Rasputin that still hold sway. 

Rhys Ifans, with his long, mournful face and dishevelled charisma, is certainly ideal casting. Fun as his Cossack-dancing, kung-fu-kicking version of the Mad Monk is, I can’t help hoping that somebody will be prompted to cast Ifans in a film that tells the real story of Grigori Rasputin in all its extraordinary detail, while dispelling some of the myths and lies that have proved as difficult to kill off as the man himself (allegedly) was. 

The story of how an illiterate Siberian peasant with appalling table manners became a leading figure in the Russian court is astonishing enough not to need embellishment. Nevertheless Rasputin’s reputation remains barnacled with the gossip and rumours that began to spread about him long before the Great War. 

The American scholar Douglas Smith, author of the outstanding Rasputin: The Biography, points out that people of all political persuasions were spreading disinformation about Rasputin from the moment he first inveigled himself into the favour of the Tsar and Tsarina in 1905.

“With those on the Right – members of the great aristocratic families, leading members of the government – there was a sort of class hatred: they saw a man they viewed as an unwashed, dirty, perverse peasant permitted to be part of the private lives of Nicholas and Alexandra, given access to the most intimate of spaces, to the nursery and to their children. So they would spread stories to try to destroy the image of Rasputin in the hopes that Nicholas and Alexandra would be forced to send him back to Siberia. 

“But then on the Left you had people telling stories about Rasputin, equally scurrilous and unfounded, to emphasise the moral bankruptcy of a regime that could embrace him, and so undermine the throne and hopefully lead to revolution.”

With Soviet archives difficult to access for most of the 20th century, Rasputin’s biographers have in the past been reduced to rather desperately repeating the tall tales about him. But with much more material available these days, historians such as Douglas Smith have been able to bust a few of the big Rasputin myths.

Was Rasputin the power behind the throne?

Rasputin became hugely influential to the Tsar and Tsarina as a spiritual adviser, not least because he was apparently able to stem the haemorrhages of their haemophiliac son and heir, the tsarevich Alexei. It is true that in the year leading up to his death in December 1916 Rasputin did become increasingly powerful, with the Tsar away leading the Russian war effort and the Tsarina making day-to-day political decisions in Petrograd: there was a rapid turnover of prime ministers and other senior government officials during this period, many of them changed at Rasputin’s behest.

Nevertheless the widespread idea that Tsar Nicholas, drugged-up or not, spent years under Rasputin’s thumb is belied by the fact that the Tsar often dismissed his advice. “He begged Nicholas not to go to war in the summer of 1914, because he foresaw the ruin of Russia, and was ignored,” says Douglas Smith. “And right before his own murder, he was telling Nicholas that he needed to make sure that more food was being brought into Petrograd because there were breadlines, and he saw the danger of a hungry populace in the nation’s capital.” It was bread riots that led to revolution in Russia in 1917, and the murder of the Tsar and his family in July 1918. 

Was Rasputin a German spy?

There is evidence that the Germans were keen to exploit Rasputin’s anti-war sentiments and encourage him to spy for them – “they were thinking of offering him money, wine and women, anything they could think of”, says Smith – perhaps even with the collusion of the Tsarina, who was herself German-born. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the German archives to suggest that Rasputin passed on any information. 

“In fact while he’d been against the war from the start, once it started he was one of those insisting that Russia had to keep fighting to the end, to keep off the Prussian horde, if you will,” observes Smith. “If nothing else, in a weird way he was very much a Russian patriot, and a believer in Russia as a superior culture and civilisation to the Catholic and Protestant west.”

Was Rasputin the Tsarina’s lover?

“Ra Ra Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen,” sang Boney M in possibly the greatest ever potted historical biography to top the singles charts. Boney M are not impeccable in their historical accuracy, however – “to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear”, the song alleges at one point, ignoring the fact that Rasputin lived in Petrograd – so can we trust their assertion that Rasputin and Alexandra were lovers?

Over to Douglas Smith: “I love the song, I love the look of the band, but no. She was such a prudish Victorian, frigid, uptight – she did not look to Rasputin for sexual pleasure. And he was a true monarchist, he had great respect for that royal family. And besides, he could get plenty of women out and about in town.”

Did Rasputin have thousands of lovers?

“Russia’s greatest love machine, / It was a shame how he carried on,” tutted Boney M. Rasputin’s daughter Maria, in her biography of her father, explained his appeal to the opposite sex: “His female devotees… were drawn to the worship of his phallus, endowing it with mystical qualities as well as sexual ones, for it was an extraordinary member indeed, measuring a good 13 inches when fully erect… As their passions were aroused, there was a tendency to forget the ritualistic aspect… and the participants would fall into a general orgy.” 

In 1977 Maria sold her father’s penis, preserved in formaldehyde, to the St Petersburg Museum of Erotica. There are reports, however, that tests have revealed the mystic member to be a sea cucumber. 

Douglas Smith concedes that “he was a letch, he would not have done well in the MeToo moment. Any woman that was in arm’s reach was apt to be pawed, petted and stroked. He had mistresses, he had lovers, even though he was married. His wife back in Siberia apparently said: ‘There’s more than enough of Grigori to go round.’”

Nevertheless the number of his sexual conquests may have been exaggerated by his enemies to present him as feral and depraved.  “One of the interesting things I found was that never once did anyone come forward claiming to be carrying his love child. You would think if he had that many women, someone would have said that they were bearing his child. So that suggests the stories of his womanising were embellished as well.”

Was Rasputin bisexual?

The King’s Man portrays Rasputin as a predatory bisexual, attempting to force his attentions on lead characters Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson); attempting to heal Orlando’s war wound, he lasciviously licks his leg. The notion of Rasputin as a bisexual stems from hints dropped in Lost Splendour, the self-exculpatory memoir written by Rasputin’s murderer, Prince Felix Yusupov. 

“He walked up to me, said ‘Good evening, my dear boy,’ and attempted to kiss me. I drew back instinctively,” Yusupov wrote of their first meeting. On another occasion, poor old Yusupov finds himself alone with Rasputin: “Suddenly he leaned towards me, and gave me a long searching look. I turned as cold as ice, for I felt the tremendous power of his gaze. Without taking his eyes off me, he lightly ran his hand over the nape of my neck and, in a soft insinuating voice, asked me if I would have a glass of wine.” Hypnotised, Yusupov accepts, but is saved by the arrival of a mutual friend from further developments. 

Smith’s view? “Yusupov was [himself] a bisexual, who wrote his memoirs in exile when he had no money and had to sell a sexy story. He implied that Rasputin was somehow sexually drawn to him but I think maybe that’s Felix’s own projection, I think maybe he had a thing for Rasputin.”

Did Rasputin fake his religious calling?

Although tales of his debauchery may have been exaggerated, Rasputin was clearly more frat-boy than friar at times, and his enemies seized on his drinking and partying as evidence that he had no real religious calling and simply faked it to gain access to powerful people. 

“I don’t believe that’s so,” says Smith. “I think if you look at his early life, what he went through as one of these holy wanderers – the man wore fetters and walked across Russia several times. You don’t do that if you’re just putting on an act. 

“He believed in [Russian] Orthodoxy, he believed in Christ’s teachings. But he was also one of the early ‘Children of Nature’, who believed that if we have these feelings, love and desire for the good life and feeling and emotion, those clearly must have come from God as well, and to deny them is to deny the fulness of the human experience.”

Did Rasputin have healing powers?

Theories abound. The great British geneticist JBS Haldane wrote that “Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the Tsarevich. It was perhaps an imposture but it is also possible that by hypnotism or a similar method, he was able to produce a contraction of the small arteries.” Rasputin’s enemies suggested that, in collusion with the lady-in-waiting Anna Vyrubova, he had the tsarevich secretly poisoned; the poisoning was then stopped in time for Rasputin to be present to effect a “cure”. 

Robert K Massie, in his groundbreaking biography Nicholas and Alexandra, suggested that Rasputin was simply a calming presence: “Weaving his tales, filling a darkened room with his commanding voice, he did in effect cast a spell over a boy overwhelmed by pain. Then, as Rasputin assured him in tones that left no room for doubt, Alexis believed that the torment was receding, that soon he would be walking again… And, as if by a miracle, the emotional change affected Alexis’s body.” 

More prosaically, Rasputin’s suggestion that the Tsarina send away the boy’s doctors and leave the matter to him may have helped: the endless poking and prodding of the boy by his physicians could have exacerbated the bleeding. But however Rasputin managed to help the tsarevich, most accounts of his performing acts of healing on other people have been debunked. 

Was Rasputin murdered by British intelligence agents?

Within days of Rasputin’s murder in December 1916, Samuel Hoare, head of the British intelligence mission in Russia, was meeting the Tsar to formally deny British involvement. As he told his superiors: “As reports have spread, evidently by German agents, that not only had English detectives been conducting an enquiry into Rasputin’s murder, but that English officers had been associated in it, I told His Majesty that as I should be deeply grieved were either he or the empress to believe such an infamous story, I wished to give him the most formal assurance that there was not a word of truth in it.”

Nevertheless the rumours persist, and in 2004 former Metropolitan Police detective Richard Cullen asserted in a BBC Timewatch documentary that British intelligence played a role in his death, in order to prevent him from persuading the Tsar to withdraw from the war. 

One key piece of evidence is the autopsy photograph that supposedly shows distinctive markings around the fatal bullet wound in Rasputin’s head. It has been alleged that these indicate Rasputin was shot by a .455 Webley revolver – a gun manufactured in Enfield, London. 

What does Smith think? “It’s total nonsense. First of all, the markings are so smudgy on the photo that you can’t see anything. And secondly in one of the archives in Moscow, I found among the police files on Rasputin that some of the Russians in the Security Services who had been put in charge of trying to guard Rasputin from assassination were also issued Enfield weapons.”

Was Rasputin almost impossible to kill?

A peasant woman stabbed Rasputin in the stomach in 1914, claiming that he was “a false prophet and even an Antichrist”. Although seriously wounded, he survived. Other unsuccessful assassination attempts fed a legend of indestructibility. 

In 1916 Felix Yusupov plotted with a group of his fellow aristocrats to murder Rasputin because of his excessive influence at court. Having lured Rasputin to his home with the promise of meeting his sexy wife, Yusupov gave Rasputin cake, biscuits and wine laced with cyanide, which appeared to have no effect on him. 

Yusupov then took the simpler step of shooting Rasputin. A doctor pronounced him dead, but Yusupov, “filled with a vague misgiving”, later returned to the basement where the corpse lay. “Then a terrible thing happened. With a sudden violent effort Rasputin leapt to his feet, foaming at the mouth… He rushed at me, trying to get at my throat, and sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws. His eyes were bursting from their sockets, blood oozed from his lips. And all the time he called me by name, in a low raucous voice… A ferocious struggle began… By a superhuman effort I succeeded in freeing myself from his grasp.”

Rasputin then made his way outside through a supposedly locked secret door, but was shot again and dumped in the Nevka. It is often asserted that when the autopsy was performed, water was found in his lungs, suggesting that he survived the poison and several bullets, but ultimately drowned.

Smith is, naturally, sceptical. “The doctor’s autopsy report, the actual text, has been lost, but in an interview later the doctor who performed the autopsy said there was no water in his lungs. 

“As for Yusupov, on every page of his book there are lies and disinformation. There’s only one thing that he says in the whole book that is honest – at one point he admits that what he did was a cowardly crime. For Yusupov to justify what he did, he had to represent Rasputin basically as the Devil incarnate, and [suggest that] only a man of Yusupov’s own strength of character and wiles and bravery could bring him down. He had to embellish the whole death scene as a way to justify inviting an unarmed man over for dinner and then shooting him dead.”

Did Rasputin cause the Russian Revolution?

The Revolution did not come to fruition until after Rasputin was dead, but it might not have happened if the Tsar and Tsarina’s faith in this hedonistic holy man had not alienated so many people. But as Smith puts it: “There are two Rasputins. There’s the Rasputin of reality who was a living, breathing man, and there’s the Rasputin of the imagination – and it’s that Rasputin inside the head of everybody in Russia that became the more powerful, the more influential, the more consequential, that really did help undermine the faith in the regime.” Even a personality as powerful as Rasputin was – and perhaps remains – no match for our old friend, Fake News.