Eighty-eight years after the murder of the “Mad Monk”, a St Petersburg doctor claims to have Rasputin’s preserved penis which, he says, was cut off after his death and taken to France by a fanatical follower. The pickled organ has gone on display at a museum of erotica set up by Igor Knyazkin, the head of the Prostate Research Centre under the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Rasputin, from Siberia, arrived in St Petersburg in 1911 and gained vast influence over Nicholas II and the Tsarina as a mystic. His influence is often attributed to his purported ability to stop their haemophiliac son from bleeding.

But many historians say that Rasputin converted the Tsarina and other noble women to his own sect, a strange mixture of Christianity and sexual practices. Brian Moynihan says in his book The Saint Who Sinned that Rasputin was once challenged to prove his identity after smashing up a smart Moscow club on a drinking binge. He unbuttoned his trousers and waved his penis.

Rasputin was eventually killed by a group of noblemen who feared that his influence over the Tsar was destroying Russia. One legend has it that they castrated and dismembered the corpse. Another says that the member was removed during an autopsy. Dr Knyazkin, 37, claims to have documentary proof that the phallus was taken in a wooden casket to Paris, where it became the object of a cult among émigrée Russian women . Then Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, who was working in America as a circus lion-tamer, gained possession of it. When she ran out of money in the 1970s she sold it to an antiques dealer.

Dr Knyazkin says that he was approached by two French antique dealers in 2000 and bought the casket and its contents for $8,000 (£4,500). “I am 99 per cent sure it is real,” he said.

Eduard Radzinsky, Russia’s best-known expert on Rasputin, was sceptical, adding that Dr Knyazkin evidently believed the article to be genuine. “Stories about Rasputin’s penis started almost immediately after his death. They are all myths and legends,” Mr Radzinsky said.

In 1994 an unidentified man asked the auction house Bonhams to value what he said was Rasputin’s penis. Imperial College London did tests; it turned out to be a sea cucumber.

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