Available and annotated for the first time in English, Aron Simanovitch's memoirs offer an intimate view of Rasputin through the eyes of his dear friend and secretary. Simanovitch reveals Rasputin's progressive ideas for social and economic reform that outraged the nobility. In the process, he depicts the underbelly of early twentieth-century Petersburg society, with its gossip, plots and intrigue. But more importantly, his revelations about Rasputin's humanitarianism lend a three-dimensional view to this controversial figure of Russian history.

This book is an account of Rasputin as a healer, equal rights activist and man of God, and why he was so vilified by the aristocracy that their libelous and slanderous rumors became accepted as history. For nearly a century, Grigory Rasputin, spiritual advisor to Russia's last Tsar and Tsarina, has been unjustly maligned simply because history is written by the politically powerful and not by the common man. A wealth of evidence shows that Rasputin was discredited by a fanatically anti-Semitic Russian society, for advocating equal rights for the severely oppressed Jewish population, as well as for promoting peace in a pro-war era. Testimony by his friends and enemies, from all social strata, provides a picture of a spiritual man who hated bigotry, inequity and violence. The author is the great-great niece of Aron Simanovitch, Rasputin's Jewish secretary.