Rasputin wore his sunglasses at night.
After two years of travelling to places like Greece and Jerusalem as a religious pilgrim, Rasputin decided that he was a man of special talents in 1903 and became a self-proclaimed prophet. (For a modern-day self-proclaimed prophet, see "Dr." Gene Ray of Time Cube.) A year or so later he was curing the Tsar's son of some hemophelic disease, using some kind of crazy witchcraft hypnosis that only Rasputin could have pulled off. (He told the royalty he was praying him well. In this sense, he could be viewed as a 19th century televangelism scam: a prophet for profit.)
Eventually, the man was called into suspect for sleeping around, getting drunk all the time, and controlling Russian political affairs. All of these accusations were true, but none of them stopped Rasputin from doing what he saw fit. Some rich folks in the Duma, the Russian name for Congress, decided to put an end to Rasputin gallavanting around the palace. They invited him to a private palace, where they served him treats spiked with potassium cyanide, a chemical which in general kills people upon consumption. After the poison had no effect on him, the nobles shot him in the head, chest, and back, then proceeded to beat his body up with a door handle.
Just to be sure, the assassins wrapped him up in a sheet and threw him in a nearby river, which, like all waterways in Russia, was covered with ice. The body was later found, and the autopsy revealed that the weirdo had died not of drowning but of freezing to death. Oddly enough, before he was killed he said God would kill those who would seek his demise. Sure enough, the Romanovs were killed by revolutionaries within the next two years. In conclusion, Rasputin is one of the more kickin', although admittedly creepy, characters of pre-Soviet Russia. So kickin' that the Russian Orthodox Church even considered granting him sainthood. Now that's kickin'.