Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869 –1916) was a Russian mystic who is perceived as having influenced the later days of the Russian Czar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei. Rasputin had often been called the “Mad Monk”, while others considered him to be a psychic and faith healer.
It has been argued that Rasputin helped to discredit the tsarist government, leading to the fall in 1917 of the Romanov dynasty. Contemporary opinions saw Rasputin variously as a saintly mystic, visionary, healer, and prophet, and, on the other side of the coin, as a debauched religious charlatan.
From Wikipedia:
1900s
Conservatives feared Rasputin’s significant and increasing influence on the tsar’s wife, and so, on December 29, 1916, he was murdered. Some accounts say that his killers also castrated him, although the official autopsy report claimed that his genitalia were left intact.
According to some, a maid discovered the severed organ at Rasputin’s murder site, keeping it until somehow being acquired in the 1920s by a group of female Russian expatriates living in Paris. The women worshiped the member as a fertility charm, storing it inside a wooden casket. Upon learning of the women, Rasputin’s daughter, Marie, demanded that the item be returned to her. She maintained custody of the object until her death in 1977.
A man named Michael Augustine claimed to have purchased the member, along with a number of Rasputin’s other personal items, at a lot sale following Marie Rasputin’s death. Augustine sold the artifact to Bonhams auction house, but officials quickly realized that the item was not a penis, and was in fact a sea cucumber. It is unclear if the sea creature was the same item worshipped by the aforementioned Russian women in the 1920s, or if Augustine was simply attempting to defraud the auction house.
2000s
In 2004, Igor Knyazkin, the chief of the prostate research center of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, announced that he was opening a Russian museum of erotica in St. Petersburg, Russia. Among the exhibits, Knyazkin claims, is the 30cm (11.8 inch) long “preserved penis” of Grigory Rasputin, along with several of Rasputin’s letters. He stated that he purchased the items from a French collector of antiquities and artifacts for €6,600 (US $8,000). Knyazkin had said that merely viewing the supposed penis will cure males of impotency. It is not known if the genitalia is indeed that of Rasputin.
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Rasputin’s penis in Russian museum picture
