Basically what I have heard is that this guy was poisoned, shot, stabbed, thrown into a sack, then thrown into a river, but when they found his body he showed no signs of drowning.

Actually, the rumour was that Rasputin was poisoned, shot, beaten, shot again, then thrown in the river - and that when the body was retrieved it was found that he had drowned. If he hadn't drowned it would be far less impressive, since it would mean that he was dead when he went into the river.

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In fact, Rasputin didn't drown, meaning the earlier injuries were fatal and stories of his supernatural endurance greatly exaggerated - although not entirely. The story goes like this:

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According to (the assassin) Yusupov's memoir, he fed Rasputin enough cyanide poison to kill several dozen men. When this seemingly had no effect, one of the conspirators took out a revolver and shot Rasputin in the chest. The conspirators were carrying the body away when Rasputin woke up, whereupon the would-be murderers freaked the fuck out and started beating the shit out of him. Somehow, Rasputin got away from them and ran out the door, the guy with the revolver shot Rasputin in the back, which brought him down. They gave him one more shot to the forehead, then dumped him in the river.

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So the myth of Rasputin's longevity might have started with the fact that, according to Yusupov, he was seemingly immune to cyanide. However, the men involved in the plot were complete novices in the art of assassination, and it's entirely possible that whoever was tasked with procuring the poison had no idea what he was doing, or perhaps got the poison but then didn't store it properly. As for the fact that Rasputin survived the first gunshot, it's not that unusual for a man to survive a single gunshot to the chest. The fact that the conspirators thought they had killed him with the first shot is, again, probably the result of the fact that they were total amateurs, rather than any spooky resurrection power. It was most likely the final shot to the forehead which actually killed him - like a perfectly normal human being.

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So yes, this has been debunked for a while. If you still enjoy pondering the mystery of Rasputin's assassination, you might prefer to consider the rumour that the man who fired the fatal shots was an British intelligence agent, Oswald Rayner. Although there again you might be disappointed, since the archives for 1917 are now open, and none of them indicate that Rayner had anything to do with it (although I suppose there's still the chance that he did it without telling his superiors).

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