The campaign is led by ultra-nationalists, some openly anti-Semitic, who have drawn encouragement from the decision of Patriarch Aleksiy II to canonise Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar, and his family in 2000.

The campaign is being taken so seriously by the Orthodox Church that last week a group of about 100 theologians met in Moscow to discuss ways of co-ordinating opposition.

Sergei Chapnin, one of the chief organisers of the conference and editor of the church newspaper Tserkovny Vestnik, said: “These people are trying to rewrite Russian history, to mythologise the figures of Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin. It works against the unity of the Church. This is the path to a schism.”

At first sight, neither Ivan the Terrible, crowned as the first Russian tsar in 1547, nor Rasputin appears to be an obvious candidate for sainthood. Ivan murdered thousands, including many priests. Rasputin’s drunkenness and sexual debauchery helped to discredit the autocracy at a decisive moment in its history. In the last days of the Romanov dynasty there were concerted efforts to dislodge him from his position as confidant to the Royal Family. He was said to have been particularly fond of threesomes involving himself and a mother and daughter.

He was murdered in 1916 and dumped in the Neva River in St Petersburg. One of the leading figures in the movement to have Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible pronounced saints said that they had been much misunderstood. Konstantin Dushenov, editor of the St Petersburg Rus Pravoslavnaya, said: “It is a myth that Ivan the Terrible was a cruel and terrible ruler. It is a lie. He only killed about 3,000 people and most of them were criminals.”

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