Rasputin's penis
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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When Grigori Rasputin was murdered in 1916, some claim he was also castrated. Since then, a number of people boasting to be in possession of his severed penis and testicles have come forth, although none of them have been able to come up with definitive evidence.
History of the alleged remains
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 it was somehow acquired in the 1920s by a group of female Russian expatriates living in Paris. The women worshiped the organ 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 purchased the penis, along with a number of Marie Rasputin's other personal items, at the Santa Cruz Flea Market following Marie Rasputin's death. Augustine consigned the artifact to Bonhams auction house, but officials quickly realized that the item was not a penis, and was in fact a sea cucumber or geoduck. It is unclear if the sea creature was the same item worshiped by the aforementioned Russian women in the 1920s. Augustine accepted the conclusion of the expert from Bonham's. The auction house later auctioned the manuscripts, letters, photographs and the strange looking 'penis cucumber' from Marie Rasputin's estate.
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 (13 inch) long "preserved penis" of Grigori 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.
