You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

In a dramatic opening on Great Lives, we're going to start with our subject's death, ice-encrusted and with a mutilated face. The place is Russia, a near frozen river in what was once known as Petrograd, the date, December

1916, the middle of the First World War.

But perhaps the most intriguing detail in the strange and terrible death of Gregori Rasp- Putin

is that, according to police reports, people hurried to the river after the body

was first discovered armed with jugs and buckets they wanted to scoop up whatever

unfrozen water they could find believing it would contain traces of the dead man's strength.

Rasp-Plutin, what a name is that?

I've been staring at photographs and yes as you'd expect unkempt wild beard weird long face but

something missing something none capture or perhaps could that struck everyone who

actually met him his His eyes, his glance, apparently and almost literally riveting.

The hypnotic power shining in his exceptional gaze, remarked one observer.

Deep set and unendurable. "' talking about him today. Time to introduce my guest, the comedian Richard Herring, who once chose Rasputin as his

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