Rasputin is a very difficult figure to grasp because there is so much myth surrounding him that it is very difficult to disentangle him from all the stories that have accumulated around him. Rasputin's influence at the imperial court was relatively negligible. Nicholas II neither liked him nor fully trusted him, but kept him around to humor his wife and because his folk healing has some calming effect upon the tsarevich. The only prominent figure who took Rasputin seriously was the tsarina Alexandra and this led Rasputin to be the target of various social climbers and this added to his legend for womanizing and other partying. For the mainstream member of the court who were both quite conservative and somewhat snobbish, Rasputin's rough peasant ways and the elements he attracted contributed to the growing dislike for Alexandra, whose German background did not sit well in a period of rising Russo-German antagonism prior to the war. The outbreak of war itself shows the limitations of Rasputin;s political clout; he had advised against Russian entry into the war, even as he recovered from a stab wound from a jilted lover he received on the day of Franz Ferdinand's assassination.

While Rasputin the man had limited sway over Imperial Russia, his image of a debauched and corrupting influence on the imperial family had captured good deal of the public's imagination, especially in Russia's cities which had grown because of the needs of wartime industries. Rumors of Rasputin's debauchery helped to sap the monarchy of its prestige and moral authority during a particularly acute time in Russian history. Before and after his death, many came forward to claim that it was Rasputin who really ruled Russia, but these claims were largely a combination of scapegoating and scandal mongering. Pamphlets detailing the sexual degeneracy of Alexandra and Rasputin were huge sellers in popular literature when much of the censorship apparatus was dismantled in the post-February Revolution. The urban legend nature of his assassination (and I am no sure historians can ever truly parse out what was real and legend in that instance!) added yet another layer to his mystique making him appear like a larger than life figure in Russian history.

source

Figes, Orlando, and B. I. Kolonit︠skii. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.