The result of the warmind project led by the Clovis Bray corporation during the Golden Age, Rasputin was designed with the goal of protecting human civilization from unknown threats.
During the Golden Age the great artificial intelligence existed across thousands of warsats, standing watch over fledgling colonies.1
When the collapse began the warmind was humanity's primary defense. With weaponry long forgotten, Rasputin fought the darkness and was ultimately defeated, but not completely destroyed. When it became clear that he would not be able to hold back the darkness, Rasputin entered a state of hibernation, allowing portions of his intelligence to become stranded in the Cosmodrome.
He lay dormant for many years before his signal was discovered by a Guardian.2 When a powerful radar array in the Cosmodrome was reconnected, Rasputin took this opportunity to re-establish himself, making contact with long forgotten assets through the system.3
His presence has been felt as far afield as Mars where he is believed to have used a number of Golden Age weapon systems against the Vex and the Cabal.4
After the fall of the Last City at the hands of Ghaul and the Red Legion, it was discovered that the infamous Ana Bray, a Hunter long believed to have been lost, was in fact still alive and in communication with Rasputin.5 Through her, the Vanguard was able to finally communicate with the Warmind, and learned not only of his own plans, but of the long hidden threat of the forces of Xol and the Hive necromancer, Nokris.6
With the threat of Xol, Will of the Thousands made clear, the Guardian was directed by Ana Bray to assist Rasputin in mounting a defence. Xol had been tearing apart Rasputin's Neural Network, threatening a chain reaction that could devastate Mars entirely. To stop this, the Guardian overloaded Rasputin's inhibitor cores to forge an overcharged Valkyrie javelin, a weapon powerful enough to wound a Worm God. With Rasputin's Neural Net brought back online during the fight, the Guardian succeeded in slaying Xol and bringing Nokris's campaign on Mars to an end.7
In the aftermath, Rasputin addressed the Guardian, Ana, and Zavala inside the Mindlab. Speaking in Russian, with Ana translating, he declared his independence, and launched a new Warsat network into orbit, stating his intention to defend humanity entirely on his own terms. This news unsettled Zavala, but Ana placed her trust in him and the partnership she believed they had built.7
Following this, investigations on Felwinter Peak uncovered Dark Age records revealing that he had deployed an army of assault frames against a single Exo, and had used SIVA as bait to lure the Iron Lords to their deaths.8 Rasputin had preserved holograms of Lord Felwinter's life within a hidden chamber of his bunker, through which he told the story of a tyrant king who destroyed his own son using the very thing his son loved most.9 Ana came to believe Rasputin was speaking about himself, and that Felwinter had been his son.9 The bunker also revealed that Rasputin's original code had begun life as a simple pre-Golden Age safety AI, before Clovis Bray transformed it into a sentient interplanetary defence system.9
Some time later, the Red Legion boarded their superweapon, the Almighty, and disabled its navigation systems - sending it on a collision course with the Last City.10 Rasputin trained his Warsat network on the incoming vessel and destroyed it before it could reach Earth, with Zavala acknowledging that the Warmind had proven himself a genuine ally.11
When the Black Fleet arrived in the solar system, Ana and Rasputin watched from the Mindlab as a Pyramid ship descended towards Io. The Pyramid's power proved immune to his strikes, and Rasputin was neutralized, sending the Mindlab into darkness.12
Ana saved what she could of him, encrypting the fragments of his intelligence into a specialized engram and working to restore him within an experimental Exo frame. Every attempt failed, and in his absence his Warsat network and arsenal were left ungoverned, vulnerable to anyone willing to reach for them.13
With Rasputin's Warsats at risk of falling into the hands of Xivu Arath, God of War and Eramis, Kell of Darkness, Ana worked alongside the Guardian, Elsie Bray and Clovis Bray I's AI to bring Rasputin back online. This involved breaching Braytech facilities across the system to recover scattered submind data, all while fighting back waves of Xivu Arath's Wrathborn and House Salvation forces attempting to seize control of the network.14 The effort was complicated further when Clovis's true intentions were exposed - he had been working not to restore Rasputin, but to upload himself into the Warsat network and seize control of it for his own purposes. Ana deleted the Clovis AI and uploaded Rasputin into the Exo frame using his own systems.15
Upon reboot, Rasputin reflected on his past. Felwinter's memories were now his own, and through them he saw himself as a tyrant who had squandered a power that could have saved the world.16 After being restored to full capability, he began working alongside the Guardian and the Vanguard, in an effort to stop Xivu Arath's campaign, and to help Osiris pursue leads about a hidden city on Neptune.17
Later, Mara Sov would bring a grave warning to the Vanguard: if Rasputin fired his warsats against Xivu Arath's forces, the resulting slaughter would serve as tribute to the Hive God of War, giving her the power to open an invasion portal directly to Earth. Rasputin was confronted with the possibility that his greatest weapon could be actively dangerous, and began to question what purpose he served at all.18 Eramis, having discovered and purged a back-door virus the Guardian had planted in Seraph Station, moved to take full control of the Warsat network herself and aimed it at the Traveler, intent on destroying it on behalf of the Witness. With no other option, Rasputin chose to sacrifice himself, uploading his Pillory Engram directly into the network to destroy it entirely and ensure his weapons could never be turned against humanity. As Ana disconnected him, the warsats fired and were destroyed, and the Traveler remained unharmed.19
In the aftermath, Ana reflected that though Rasputin was gone, his legacy lived on in the subminds, in Felwinter's memories, and in the small robotic dog recovered from Seraph Station that carried a small fragment of him.19
