RASPUTIN: The Saint Who Sinned.<i> By Brian Moynahan</i> .<i> Random House: 384 pp., $30</i>

There must be few people now living who have seen Rasputin. I have: a tall figure in black in a St. Petersburg street, white teeth gleaming in a black expanse of beard. “Look,” said my nurse, “Rasputin--smiling at us!” “Who,” I asked, “is Rasputin?”

On Nov. 1, 1905, Nicholas II of Russia made the following entry in his diary: “We [his wife and he] have made the acquaintance of a man of God, named Grigory. . . .” He was referring to Grigory Rasputin, and the entry marks the beginning of a friendship that proved fatal to all three and contributed, with the help of the myths it engendered, to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the collapse of imperial Russia. Its contribution may not have been as great as is usually assumed (and seems to be by Brian Moynahan), but the assumption is by now part of the many Rasputin myths. So is the most widespread myth of all: that of the dark, powerful, almost medieval figure--a monk in the odd but most popular Western legends--who, in the decade preceding the revolution, was, according to Moynahan, “the real sovereign of Russia.”

Moynahan’s Rasputin is at least as sinister as the drunken lecher portrayed by the holy man’s contemporaries who were also his enemies. Moynahan certainly portrays him as a lecher but also as a faith-healer who achieved spectacular results; a clairvoyant who foretold the consequences of World War I, his own death and the events that would follow, including the disappearance of the Romanovs; and a fervent believer who wielded vast political power. He also treats him, not very convincingly, as a sign of the times. Unfortunately, few available sources of information are entirely reliable. Apart from straightforward police reports, most are pervaded with prejudice, ignorance and imagination. No account of Rasputin’s life can, therefore, be read without many pinches of salt.

Rasputin would have been an ideal subject for the tabloid press. Moynahan has doubtless sensed this and has adopted its style and stance in “Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned”--very readable, eager to impress and surprise, suitably indignant when occasion requires and not too pedantic regarding factual accuracy. Because the tabloids are his model, it is only natural that he should devote the most space to Rasputin’s sexual exploits, “the acrid whiff of sex” (Moynahan’s phrase) that constantly accompanied him.

Promiscuity in no way bothered his wife, who took unselfish pride in his potency, saying appreciatively: “He has enough for all.” His own attitude, in which sex and religiosity were easy bedfellows (so to speak), was that he was saving souls. The way to spiritual salvation lay through repentance: There could be none without sin to precede it, and he was merely supplying God-fearing women with this essential prerequisite.

Malicious and entirely unfounded rumor gleefully included the empress herself among his lovers, unaware that the key to Rasputin’s extraordinary career and his influence at court lay elsewhere and had nothing whatever to do with sex. Moynahan does not emphasize sufficiently, to my mind, the disastrous consequences of the imperial couple’s secretiveness regarding their son Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia (failure of the blood to clot), which he had inherited from his mother. An accidental fall or jolt could cause an internal hemorrhage and with it excruciating pain and risk of death. Doctors were not able to cope. Rasputin was. Seemingly by power of prayer, he succeeded in stopping the bleeding and the pain, while doctors looked on helplessly. In the eyes of Alexei’s parents, particularly his mother, Rasputin became uniquely indispensable to their son’s survival.

On one occasion, when Rasputin was away in Siberia, a drive along a rough road caused Alexei to have a hemorrhage so extensive that the doctors gave up all hope. The empress, in despair, telegraphed Rasputin, while the emperor discussed his son’s funeral arrangements. According to Rasputin’s daughter, on receipt of the telegram, her father retired to pray and prayed with such intensity that it made him sweat and turn deathly pale. When he had finished, he wired back: “God has heard your prayers . . . the little one will live.” The following day the bleeding stopped, and the boy recovered.

Only a garbled version of Alexei’s condition (and no mention of Rasputin) was allowed to reach the public because his disease was a closely guarded secret. Unaware of Rasputin’s role and able to see nothing but his drunkenness and scandalous behavior that brought the emperor and empress into disrepute, neither the Duma nor government could see any rationally acceptable reason for the emperor’s stubborn refusal to dismiss him. For the empress, that extraordinary man’s faith-healing powers became increasingly indisputable as she saw them applied to her son and heard of other cases, some of which are recounted by Moynahan. She became convinced that these “miracles” were inspired directly by God and that Rasputin was guided by the divine spirit not only as a healer but in all his utterances and opinions.

It was the consequences of this conviction that proved so disastrous to everyone, including Rasputin himself. With the emperor’s assumption of the supreme command of the armed forces during the war and his departure in 1915 for general military headquarters, the empress was left in St. Petersburg in charge of the country’s civil administration--free, indeed eager, to seek Rasputin’s advice on all matters. To ignore or even fail to ask the advice of a man of God seemed to her not just senseless but impious. Rasputin fully realized this and multiplied his advice on all subjects: appointment and dismissal of ministers, closing of Duma sessions, even military decisions. Conscientiously and urgently, she transmitted this advice to the emperor in her letters to him. Unfortunately, in common with almost all historians, Moynahan fails to notice how rarely Rasputin’s advice was followed or even acknowledged, except perhaps in ecclesiastical appointments about which his suggestions were more frequently taken up. As a matter of interest, it could arguably have been better for Russia (and the world) if Nicholas II had not ignored Rasputin’s desperate appeal not to enter the war.

Inevitably, Moynahan treats Rasputin as a sign of the times, typical of a disintegrating and increasingly immoral society. Unfortunately, he is handicapped by an inadequate knowledge of Russian history and the Russian social scene. The picture he draws of it, therefore, fails to convince. He confuses events, names, personalities and dates and weakens his case further by falling into the very common trap of citing particular examples to prove a general point.

His implied thesis is that depravity and loose morals so typical, he argues, of czarist society led to the dissolution of the imperial regime and the triumph of the revolution. But his examples of social behavior fail to shock us as much as they do him: Divorce, he tells us, was becoming more frequent; “homosexuality was in vogue” as a literary theme; “sex clubs opened with explicit names: Burnt-Out Candle, Free Love . . . the decadent mystic Vyacheslav Ivanov went to bed at 8 a.m. and breakfasted at 7:30 p.m., devoting himself to the culture of Dionysius” (an odd way of referring to that eminent Russian philosopher-poet’s lectures and writings on Dionysius).

Moynahan quotes with relish and appropriate indignation the Russian novelist Alexis (not to be confused with Leo) Tolstoy’s description of Russian pre-1914 society as one with “a total absence of moral sense,” illustrated by, among other things, the fact that “theaters, movie-houses, amusement parks cropped up like mushrooms.”

Moynahan shudders at what he calls “Russia’s descent into political and social chaos between 1905 and 1917.” Philandering was, it seems, one of the basic causes. Even the “Romanovs joined in the philandering”: One of the young grand dukes “was living with [a] ballet dancer,” and another “had married a twice-divorced commoner.” A descent indeed! The emperor, it is true, did not follow the general trend, but he hardly improved matters by being “an inbred reactionary.” Moynahan gives only two examples of this conservatism (evidently particularly objectionable): He was “a lover of old icons” in preference, it would appear, to modern ones, and he used the “old” spelling, that of his day instead of the new spelling introduced after the revolution by Lenin’s government in 1918.

Moynahan’s summing up of Rasputin’s personality is less startling than his judgment of Russian society, and it is certainly more favorable. “He was at his best,” he says, “humane and perceptive,” bestowing on “the throngs that came to see him . . . innumerable acts of kindliness. . . . When he could, he healed.” And he was more honest than all “of those who came to see him.”