Grigory Efimovich Rasputin came to St. Petersburg from his Siberian cabin in 1903 like a projectile from the medieval past, tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time he was murdered thirteen years later, the peasant was the "beloved" Friend  of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra and the sponsor of the most powerful officials in Russia. He had become, a society lady wrote, "a dusk enveloping all our world, eclipsing the sun. How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow? It was inexplicable, maddening, almost incredible. "      Rasputin's name has become synonymous with evil, but his legend has obscured the facts of his life. In this evocative biography, Brian Moynahan presents us with a flesh-and-blood Rasputin, more fascinating than the myth--a man in whom debauchery coexisted beside a real (if erratic) spiritual sense, a man whose coarseness hid a savvy awareness of human psychology. Drawing on confidential police reports, cabinet meeting memos, and other documents, some available only since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moynahan sheds new light on Rasputin's life and disputes some of the widely held details of his death.      The young Rasputin was a drinker, thief, and womanizer. He claimed to have religious visions and became a wandering holy man, preaching that exposure to sin could drive out sin. He stormed the fashionable salons of St. Petersburg, and in 1905 he met Nicholas and Alexandra, who, increasingly despised by the sophisticated, found in Rasputin reassurance that the "real Russia,  the simple and pious peasantry, loved them. Rasputin's mysterious ability to stop the bleeding attacks of their hemophiliac only son, Alexis, sealed the approval of the domineering Alexandra. With royal patronage, Rasputin became increasingly reckless, partying with prostitutes, peddling influence, plotting the disgrace of those who crossed him. Ever contradictory, he was also a devoted family man, a defender of the poor, and a figure of immense charisma. As Germany battered Russia during World War I, as Nicholas's ineptitude as a leader became ever more rampant and the masses went hungry, Rasputin seemed to monarchists to be the cause, and not just the symptom, of corrupt government. A group of conspirators gathered--among them a grand duke and a scion of the richest family in Russia--and one of the most famous murders in history was planned.      Set against the vivid backdrop of prerevolutionary Russia, Rasputin is a portrait of an age as well as of a man. British journalist and historian Brian Moynahan does not spare details of the lechery and drunkenness that Rasputin brought with him on his journey from the squalor of rural Siberia to St. Petersburg, where he captivated the tsar and tsarina with his mysterious ability to ease their hemophiliac son's hemorrhages. Yet Moynahan also credits "the mad monk" with intelligence, generosity, even a weird spirituality. In elegant prose, he retells with panache the saga of an illiterate peasant's rise to a position of fearsome power in the waning days of the Russian monarchy. In this biography of the most notorious peasant in Russian history, Moynahan (The Russian Century, LJ 3/1/95) moves through the extraordinary and mostly familiar story?this is at least the 12th biography?of the events leading to the fall of tsardom itself. Moynahan's style is racy, with the frequent use of four-letter words, and no piece of gossip has been overlooked. He argues that the imperial couple's own personality defects, and not their son's illness, made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation: "Rasputin was an accident waiting to happen." Certainly the reader is left in no doubt that Nicholas II and his wife, she especially, were the main authors of their own and many others' misfortunes. While hardly "a precursor of the modern superstar," Rasputin remains a lurid symptom of tsarism's rot, but not the diabolical cause of its ruin. As Moynahan makes clear, he was a simple man, fallible, uneducated, intensely human, caught up in fantastic and, even now, hardly believable circumstances. This makes for good, even juicy reading; recommended for all libraries.?Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. A biography of the bizarre figure--monk, healer, advisor to the empress, and tireless lecher--who did so much to weaken the monarchy before the Russian Revolution. Moynahan, former European editor of the Sunday Times of London (The Russian Century, 1994, etc.) uses mostly secondary sources to arrive at a more persuasive judgment, though the details are scarcely less bizarre. Rasputin was born in Siberia probably around 1870, and from an early age showed unusual powers. These came to the attention of the empress, whose son, the heir apparent, was a hemophiliac.The evidence seems inescapable that on a number of occasions Rasputin was able to relieve Alexis of his pain and help him to recover when his other doctors des