MemeMachineGo!

Rasputin was hard to kill.

[Prince Felix] Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace on the pretext of his wife Irina needing his attentions as a healer. In a dining room in the palace basement, the two plied their guest with poisoned wine and cakes; when the Siberian peasant failed to die, they repeatedly shot Rasputin in the chest, back and head, and beat him around the head with a dumb-bell handle. They then tied the purported corpse into a sheet and dropped it through a hole in the ice into the river Neva, where the sturdy peasant finally drowned, having drifted under the ice, still fighting to free himself.

Even harder to kill is the story that his penis was preserved.

Mike Augustine, of Davenport, a small ocean-side community north of Santa Cruz, was forthcoming. Hell, yes, he’d owned Rasputin’s penis. In 1994 at a storage locker sale he’d bought as a job lot the effects of a Dr Roberta Ripple, onetime president of the Santa Monica Writers Club. Her possessions included her own unpublished stories of World War II women - The U.S. and US and the intriguingly titled Steel Ships and Iron Women - as well as three type-written manuscripts by Marie Rasputin - a hagiography of her father, My Father Rasputin,(with assistance from Roberta Ripple) a sub-Zhivago story of a Russian princess at the time of the revolution My Boots Are Narrow, and a short article entitled ‘Wreck of An Empire’.

Among these papers, in its own velvet pouch, was a wizened, black object resembling the uncircumcised helmet (glans) of a penis. An accompanying note identified it as Rasputin’s genital appendage and said that Marie Rasputin had been given it by Rasputin’s maid and former lover, who claimed she’d been present at his dismemberment. […]

The penis had resurfaced as a news item in The Daily Telegraph’s Weekend Section on (the date may be significant) 1 April 1995. A photograph shows someone called Victoria Blakey-Porter of Bonham’s holding between her thumb and forefinger an item which, the article says, was alleged to have been Rasputin’s penis. It had been included in a sale of relics and scientific instruments, along with Marie’s manuscript biography of her father, but on close examination in a pathologist’s laboratory, it turned out ‘not to be human’. It was, in fact, a desiccated sea cucumber. It was summarily withdrawn from the sale and, presumably, disposed of.

And now a Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburgh claims to display Rasputin’s penis.

Director Igor Knyazkin said he bought the object from a French antiquitarian for €6 600.

I haven’t been able to find anything on the web about the provenance of the French antiquarian’s instance of Rasputin’s penis.

I did not find this corroborating evidence particularly convincing.

Rasputin’s great grandchild John Nekmerson is currently living in the US. He is a grandchild of Matrena Rasputina, Rasputin”s favorite daughter. After her father was murdered, she fled to Europe and afterwards migrated to America, where she began working as a tiger-tamer. She died in 1977. Recently, John Nekmerson has visited St. Petersburg in order to see his ancestor”s private part with his own eyes. The great grandson exclaimed, “This is really it, I’ve got the same one!”

Title from the lyrics by Boney M.