As New Delhi prepares to host Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday for a high-security, two-day visit, the capital is steeped in anticipation. The Russian leader’s name carries a certain aura of power. Yet history remembers another man whose shadow once loomed even larger over Russia, a mystic whose very name still unsettles the country more than a century after his death.

He was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the Siberian wanderer whose hypnotic eyes and whispered prophecies drew Russia’s royal family into a web of blind faith, scandal, and political ruin. It was said that a single prediction from this dishevelled mystic sealed the fate of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.

Born in 1869 in the icy backwater village of Pokrovskoye, Rasputin grew up as a troubled, wayward youth. The

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