Born in the small village of Pokrovskoye in Siberia on the 21th of January 1869, Rasputin was born as a farmer's son. We can only assume that he did not receive a lot of education and certainly nobody could foresee the controversial life path he would follow.
Pilgrimage
Rasputin his story gets interesting when at the age of 28, married for 10 years, he leaves his birth town to go on a pilgrimage to St. Nicolas Monastery where he stayed for a couple of months. The time in the monastery changed him, he was more religious, stopped drinking alcohol and became vegetarian.
From then on, Rasputin started living as a strannik, or a Russian religious pilgrim, visiting holy sites all over the world. Over the years, he assembled some followers and had weekly praying ceremonies with them.
Over the next years, Rasputin got the reputation of a holy man that could heal the sick and could predict the future.
The royal family
When Rasputin visited St. Petersburg, he met with several important orthodox church leaders, and he made friends in aristocratic circles. On November the 1st 1905, Rasputin was introduced to Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra and over the next months, they will meet him a couple of times more, until at one point they ask him for the first time to pray for their son. Alexei, the son of the Tsar, suffers from hemophilia.
The first time Rasputin prayed for Alexei, the boy seemed miraculously better the next day, this caused Tsarina Alexandra to put her faith in Rasputin, keeping him as close as possible to her son.
In the summer of 1912, due to a bumpy carriage ride, Alexia started to bleed severely. The Tsarina send a telegram to Rasputin, who instructed not to let any doctor close to the boy, with the message that the bleeding would stop and the boy would live. Doing as instructed, no doctor was allowed close to Alexia, and as Rasputin promised, the bleeding stopped. Until this day, it is still a mystery why the bleeding stopped.
As he got more and more influence over the royal family, the controversy around Rasputin increased. He was notoriously known for his drunk adventures and his attempts to seduce women, even in aristocrat circles, with vulgar language. Some rumors, which were almost certainly false, even accused the Tsarina of having a secret relationship with him. Not willing to send away the one person that could cure their son, the royal family ignored the accusations.
World War I
When the first world war broke out, it was a revelation by Rasputin that made the Tsar travel to the frontlines. He saw in a vision that the troops won't book victory until the Tsar would command the troops himself.
With the Tsar gone, Alexandra relied more and more on Rasputin for his advice. Seeing as she was already mistrusted by the population because of her German roots, and the controversy around Rasputin, it's not hard to imagine that there were more and more opponents that saw this situation as a threat to Russia and wanted to fix the situation.
Unkillable
Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Pavlovich, politician Vladimir Purishkevich, and some other nobles decided that this threat needed to be dealt with. 29 December 1916 our calendar, Rasputin was invited by Yusupov, who offered him cakes and tea. The cakes were poisoned by cyanide, but surprisingly, the poison had no effect. Later that night, Yusupov took a revolver from one of the other conspirators, who were waiting upstairsand he shot Rasputin in his chest. In an attempt to make it look like Rasputin returned home that night, one of the conspirators put on his clothes and they drove back to his apartment.
When they returned, however, all of a sudden Rasputin got up to his feet and attacked the prince. The other conspirators came to his help and they shot Rasputin, who collapsed. After this, they wrapped the body in cloth and threw it in the river.