Prince Yusupov had been thinking of killing Rasputin for more than a year. He was an unlikely assassin, but the times were unlikely; a golden boy, heir to the greatest fortune in Russia, one of the best-looking men in Europe, married to a niece of the tsar, whose own beauty and breeding made her a natural snare for Rasputin. The prince wore the olive uniform and white belt of the Corps of Pages, an elite officer training school. Most of his fellow cadets were still in their teens; Felix was twenty-nine, and had no intention of going near the front. He was playing at soldiers, as he had played all his sweet life. In murdering Rasputin, a friend said, he was “acting out a scenario worthy of his favorite author, Oscar Wilde.” He was a fop, an idler, a salon decadent, but the observant noticed a quality of menace in him. “You have God in one eye,” the ballerina Anna Pavlova told him, “and the devil in the other.”
His great-great-grandfather Prince Nicholas Yusupov, a favorite of Catherine the Great and an acquaintance of Voltaire and Pushkin, had founded the family’s colossal wealth. His mother’s prewar annual income was 1.3 million rubles, equivalent to a ton of gold. There were thirty-eight Yusupov houses and estates scattered across Russia, few of which he had seen. The main Moscow palace, one of three, had been built by Ivan the Terrible, and Felix got a thrill of horror from imagining the ghosts of the chained wretches who had died in the subterranean passages that linked it to the Kremlin. In the Crimea the family owned 125 miles of Black Sea coastline so rich in oil that peasants used the surface deposits to grease the axles of their wagons. The highest mountain on the coast had been given to his mother as birthday present. The family had two private railroad trains, one for use in Russia and the other, kept at the frontier, for the narrow-gauge railways of western Europe.
Felix had little interest in visiting these possessions. He was happiest in Petrograd, in the family’s 1760s palace, which fronted the limpid waters and stone and iron bridges of the Moika Canal. Its ocher and white facade was faultlessly classical and restrained. The interior was exquisite. The main ballroom—there were three—was large enough to accommodate an orchestra; the colonnaded picture gallery had paintings by Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Fragonard, and Watteau. The furniture in the petit salon had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the crystal chandelier above the sweep of the main staircase to Madame de Pompadour. A superb Moorish room, with mosaic and a fountain, was inspired by the Alhambra. A Louis XV theater in miniature had gilded boxes and tapestries. It was here that Felix had started dressing up, pretending to be his ancestor Prince Nicholas, a famous debauchee who kept three hundred portraits of his mistresses and traveled with a menagerie of monkeys, dogs, and parrots.
The Yusupovs were eccentrics. Felix’s grandmother devoted her life to collecting stamps and snails, which she stomped on, convinced that crushed snail made a perfect fertilizer for her rose gardens. His father found a dirty, foul-smelling dwarf on a fishing trip and made him Felix’s tutor. On Sundays the dwarf wore a dinner jacket and yellow shoes. Arabs, Tartars, and Kalmyks in traditional dress added to the color of the servants’ hall at the Moika Palace. One servant was employed solely as a lamplighter. When the palace was electrified Felix watched with glee as the man drank himself to death with boredom.
Felix cultivated his own oddities, primarily transvestism. When he was twelve he dressed up in his mother’s clothes, borrowed a wig from her hairdresser, and amused himself standing with the prostitutes on the Nevsky Prospect. He told the men who accosted him that he was already spoken for. He did so in French. At home he liked to irritate his mother’s friends by speaking to them in Russian, a language the older generation of aristocrats hardly knew. From the Nevsky he progressed to the fashionable Bear restaurant, where he enjoyed trying to lasso the heads of his admirers with a string of his mother’s pearls. Visiting a theater in Paris in drag, he was amused to be ogled by the lecherous Edward VII of England. In 1908 his elder brother was killed in a duel and he became sole heir.
Felix had flirted briefly with the left; it gave him the chance to dress up as a beggar and visit the slums. On close inspection, however, the dark people did not please him. “All around us the dregs of humanity, both men and women, lay half-naked, drunk, and filthy,” he wrote with patrician disgust. “The unfortunate wretches quarreled, copulated, used the filthiest language, and vomited all over each other.” He took a valet, chauffeur, housekeeper, and macaw with him to Oxford. His skill with disguise enabled him to pass off his bulldog as a baby to evade British quarantine laws. In 1914 he married the tsar’s niece Irina. The empress disliked him; she had heard of his transvestite escapades and thought him depraved. She was particularly unhappy that he was very close to her favorite Romanov, the young Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, whom she thought of almost as a son. Felix was inseparable from him, and she felt he was a bad influence.
Felix’s interest in politics was trivial. He had, however, an aristocrat’s disdain for the peasant in Rasputin, and a monarchist’s contempt for the damage Alexandra was causing to the throne. These traits combined with his love of self-drama to make him, beneath his spoiled and languid charm, a very dangerous young man. His hostility was encouraged by his parents. His father had had to resign as governor-general of Moscow after the excesses of the anti-German riots. The tsar was warned that Yusupov senior had become a “megalomaniac of the worst kind,” who was turning Moscow into his own satrapy; the dismissal was one of Nicholas’s better decisions. The Yusupovs, however, blamed it on the “pro-German camarilla”—that favorite, foggy, and hate-filled phrase of 1915 and 1916—of Rasputin and the empress. The family anger deepened when, after Felix’s mother, Princess Zinaida, criticized the empress during an audience, Alexandra dismissed her from court with this icy farewell: “I hope never to see you again.” Through the hot summer of 1916, Zinaida sent her son letters from her Crimean estates with coded messages in which Rasputin was “the book” and the empress was Valide, a mocking use of the Crimean Tartar word for “great mother.” “Nothing can be done unless the book be destroyed and Valide tamed,” she wrote him. Yusupov took on a fresh disguise, savior of the motherland.
He had easy access to Rasputin through Munya Golovina, who had originally introduced them before Felix went to Oxford. Munya had invited Felix to her mother’s house in the early fall; she said that Rasputin very much wanted to meet him. Felix was struck by the change in the starets. He had become fat; his face was puffy, and he was wearing an embroidered silk blouse and velvet breeches. His “offensive familiarity and insolent assurance” made him still more repellent to the prince than he had been seven years before.
Felix complained about his health, saying that he was suffering from an intense fatigue, which doctors could not treat. “Doctors don’t know anything,” Rasputin told him. “My dear fellow, I can cure anyone, for I work in God’s own way.… You’ll see for yourself.” They met several times, both at Gorokhovaya ulitsa and at the Golovinas’ house. Once, Rasputin attempted to hypnotize him as part of the cure. The prince felt heat was pouring into him “like a warm current” as his body became numb. “All I could see was Rasputin’s glittering eyes,” he said. “Two phosphorescent beams of light melting into a great luminous ring.” A “merciless struggle” was being fought between Rasputin’s personality and his own. Though the prince prevented Rasputin from getting complete mastery over him, he could not move until the starets ordered him to get up.
Or so Yusupov claimed; the murderer had good reason to demonize his victim. The prince also alleged that he met “seven shady-looking men” in Rasputin’s apartment, four of them “distinctly Jewish,” the other three “fair and curiously alike”—implying Germans—whom he was certain were “a gang of spies.” The spy story has no credible basis. It was later established that several Russians, most notably the exiled Lenin, had dealings with wartime Berlin; nothing has emerged to link Rasputin, or the empress, with German agents. Nor, although there are claims of hypnotic attempts by Rasputin from Rodzianko and others, and many accounts of his troubling stare, is there conclusive evidence that Rasputin hypnotized anyone, successfully or not. The only reliable reference is from Spiridovich, who wrote that Rasputin paid a few visits to a teacher of hypnosis in St. Petersburg in 1913; the motive appears to have been the professional curiosity of a starets, and he soon lost interest in the subject.
Though he said that he felt “polluted each time I met him,” Yusupov continued to visit Rasputin. The starets’s daughters met him—“an exquisitely tailored young man … faintly repellent, a languid manner not usual in young males”—when they came back from a shopping expedition. They laughed when Felix picked up a wineglass and drained it from the spot on the rim where their father’s lips had touched it. “He’s got ice in his eyes,” young Varya said. Maria asked why he had come. “He has a problem and he needs me,” Rasputin said, nodding when she asked if he would come again.
The prince, inspired by the Duma speech, telephoned Purishkevich and arranged to meet him in his apartment at 9:00 A.M. on November 21. He said that he wanted to talk about Rasputin, who had become an “embarrassment”; the peasant’s disappearance would end the “satanic power which envelops our sovereigns.” They spoke for two hours, the politician noting the conversation in his diary.
Yusupov warned Purishkevich that speeches would accomplish nothing; the tsar had an intense dislike of any attempt to put pressure on him. There was only one answer: “Eliminate Rasputin.” Purishkevich thought that easier said than done. There were no resolute men left in Russia. The government, he said, which might do such a thing, and even do it skillfully, “is controlled by Rasputin himself.” Yusupov agreed that the government could not be counted on. But there were men in Russia, still, who could be relied on.
“D’you really think so?” Purishkevich asked.
“I’m certain of it,” Yusupov replied. “One of them stands before you at this very moment.”
The politician was about to tell his visitor to stop making jokes when he realized that Yusupov was in earnest; he was prepared to kill. He offered his hand; the prince shook it and told him that he had two others in the plot. “Come to visit me if you happen to be free this evening,” he said. “Then you can meet them both.” In such a well-bred, carefree way, the two men, who had not met before, became conspirators.
Purishkevich went to the Yusupov palace that evening. He was astonished to meet Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Alexandra’s favorite nephew, whom she was thinking of marrying to her eldest daughter, Olga, a good-looking boy of twenty-six, with a weakness for drink but beautifully mannered, sympathetic, kind. With him was a Captain Sukhotkin, a convalescing officer of the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment, which had just suffered terrible casualties on the central front. They talked eagerly over dinner. They planned to lure Rasputin to the Moika Palace, using Yusupov’s beautiful young wife as bait. They would poison him—there was a police station opposite the palace, and they were worried that shots would alarm the police. Purishkevich agreed to get the poison from his close friend and physician Dr. Lazovert. They discussed disposing of the corpse by taking it to the front by train and dumping it as a battle casualty. When that seemed too complicated, they decided to carry it out of the palace to an automobile, weight it, and sink it under the frozen Neva. They gave themselves four weeks. Rasputin was to die on December 16, a Friday.
The tsar made a brief trip from the Stavka to Tsarskoye Selo. Rasputin met him at Vyrubova’s cottage; she found Nicholas “depressed and pessimistic.” Heavy storms were cutting food deliveries to Petrograd, and some battalions at the front were reporting shortages. As Rasputin left the cottage the tsar asked him for his usual blessing. “This time it is for you to bless me, not I you,” Rasputin replied. It was natural for Vyrubova to suggest that her idol prophesied his own death in this manner, but other evidence from his daughter and Simanovich suggests that he was in a particularly nervous and uneasy state.
On November 27 Purishkevich bought heavy lead weights in a street market. With Dr. Lazovert he toured the city’s bridges, looking for a convenient place to dump the body. They found an area under the Petrovsky Bridge linking Krestinsky and Petrovsky islands where the flow of the river around an arch was preventing the water from freezing. Lazovert bought a chauffeur’s heavy coat. The conspirators met again on Purishkevich’s hospital train on December 1. Yusupov reported that he had mentioned a meeting with Princess Irina to Rasputin, who seemed eager. They thought of a cover-up. After the killing they would telephone the Villa Rhode and say that they had been expecting Rasputin to come to the Moika Palace but that he had not arrived and would he please come now. They also agreed on a secret sentence to summon each other by telephone on the night of the murder: “Vanya has arrived.”
The enterprise was amateur; the alibi was flimsy, the reconnaissance perfunctory. Purishkevich, the wild man of the far right, had one of the best-known faces in Russia. Leading politicians did not make a habit of buying lead weights in the market; he might have been—he was—remembered. He also talked too much. At the beginning of December he spoke with Vasily Shulgin, a proudly whiskered and patriotic Duma deputy.
“Remember December sixteenth,” he said.
“What for?” Shulgin asked.
“I will tell you … I may tell you this.… We’ll kill him on the sixteenth.”
“Who?”
“Grischa!”
“You will kill him—nothing will change,” Shulgin said, “Everything will remain the same.… By killing him, you won’t do any good. It’s too late!”
Yusupov was also indiscreet. He wrote a coded letter to his wife and his mother, who were in the Crimea, speaking of a mighty blow he was about to deliver for Russia. “Thank you for your insane letter,” Irina replied. “I could not understand the half of it. I realize that you are about to do something wild. Please take care and do not get mixed up in any shady business.” He also discussed the plan with the Duma deputy Maklakov, who refused to join the plot because he was due to make a speech to the Moscow Society of Jurisprudence on December 16 and did not want to let the lawyers down. He suggested beating Rasputin over the head with a club and running an automobile over the body. He lent his own blackjack to Yusupov.
Alexandra remained confident that firmness would avert any crisis. “Show to all that you are Master & your will shall be obeyed—the time of great indulgence & gentleness is over—now comes your reign of will & power, & obedience they must be taught,” she wrote to Nicholas on December 4. The tsar, in fact, was so withdrawn and robotic that it was widely believed he was taking herbal concoctions supplied by Rasputin to sap his will. Yusupov claimed that Rasputin told him he was using Badmaev’s medicines to treat the tsar, lacing his tea with them so that “his heart is filled with peace, everything looks good and cheerful to him.”
In family desperation Alexandra’s sister Ella went to Tsarskoye Selo from her Moscow convent to convince the empress of the “horror” of the situation, but they parted for the last time at the railroad station in silence. Rasputin was aware of her visit. He was nervous—he knew that Ella wanted him exiled and the empress locked up in a convent—and he scribbled notes and put them under his pillow for “vengeance” before going to sleep. He put her hatred of him down to his opposition to the war. “The tsar dodges and weaves and is ready for neither peace nor war,” he complained to Simanovich. “Mama wants peace, but all she does is weep. Ella wants war, although she’s German she sets everyone against Germans.” He was greatly relieved when Alexandra sent her sister packing.
Violence was in the air. There was a run on books about the strangling of Emperor Paul and a sudden increase in the number of people visiting the room in the Michael Palace where the killing had taken place. In the Yusupovs’ Moika Palace, workmen were whitewashing the walls of a basement room, carrying oak chairs and tables down the narrow, winding staircase, and laying a great rug of white bearskin to make it a cozy and relaxed place for Felix to entertain his guests. Red vases were placed in the wall niches, and a fine Oriental armoire of inlaid ebony stood in a corner, with a silver and crystal cross upon it. Purishkevich was delighted when he saw the cellar magically transformed into “an elegant bonbonnière.” The prince had exquisite taste.
The first rumors of approaching murder reached Simanovich at the Fire Club, a gambling club he ran in Countess Ignateva’s house on the Champs de Mars. The chairman of the club board had been Tomilin, the city governor of Pskov; Simanovich paid people with prominent names “huge salaries” to act as figureheads. Tomilin had transferred himself—the pay was huger—to the nearby National Club, taking two clerks called Ivan and Alexis with him. Simanovich had not objected because they would enable him to find out what was happening at the rival club.
Ivan came to him to say that there were mysterious meetings at the National, where a lot was said about Rasputin. Alexis sometimes worked in the room where the meetings were held. Simanovich gave him 500 rubles and told him to ask Alexis to find out as much as he could. Alexis reported back that the meetings were chaired by Purishkevich and were attended by Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Prince Felix Yusupov, and some young officers. “They spoke a lot about Rasputin in these meetings,” Simanovich said; the name of the English ambassador, Buchanan, and those of the tsar and tsarina were also mentioned.
Simanovich took Alexis to see Rasputin, who confirmed—not surprisingly, after the Duma speech—that Purishkevich was his enemy. One of Simanovich’s assistants, Evsey Bukhshtab, was friendly with a doctor who had a venereal disease clinic on the Nevsky Prospect and was treating Purishkevich. Bukhshtab offered the doctor a large sum to find out Purishkevich’s plans; his patient was known to be talkative. After an injection of salvarsan, a compound of arsenic used in the treatment of syphilis, Purishkevich lay on his couch. The doctor casually mentioned that Rasputin was a great misfortune for Russia and that it would be better to annihilate him. Purishkevich assured him that Rasputin would soon be done for. “You’ll see what’ll happen in the next three days,” he told the doctor. Alarmed, Simanovich passed the information on to the empress.
On December 10 the tsar wrote to Alexandra about a planned offensive in the Danube region and his plans to prorogue the Duma on December 17 and reconvene it on January 19. Reopening the body would prove that the government and the country could work together. He had discussed the plan with Trepov, the new premier, who, he said, was “quiet and submissive and did not touch upon the name of Protopopov.… I went to pray before the icon of the Mother of God before this conversation, and felt comforted after it.”
On December 12 Rasputin had dinner with Vyrubova and the empress, who wrote to Nicholas to reassure him that he could rely on Rasputin’s “wonderful brain—ready to understand everything.” The following day Rasputin asked Simanovich to deposit several thousand rubles in a bank account in his daughter Maria’s name. He was depressed; he said his soul was in torment.
Alexandra was furious when the tsar’s letter about the Duma arrived on December 14. She wanted the Duma prorogued, period. To recall them in January, she replied, meant “nobody goes home & all will remain, fomenting, boiling in Petrograd.… Love, our Friend begged you to shut it … & you see, they have time to make trouble.… Be Peter the Great, John [Ivan] the Terrible, Emperor Paul—crush them all under you—now don’t laugh, naughty one—but I long to see you with all those men.” Nicholas wrote back—he signed himself “Your poor, weak-willed little hubby”—that the date for reassembling the Duma had been proclaimed and thus could not be altered.
The same day, December 14, Rasputin took a walk through Petrograd with Munya Golovina and visited St. Isaac’s and Kazan cathedrals. He went on to Tsarskoye Selo, where he met the empress at Vyrubova’s cottage. The empress thought it odd that he had taken a walk. “He never goes out since ages, except to come here,” she wrote to Nicholas, but she was pleased to report that on his stroll the starets had received “not one disagreeable look, people all quiet.” He seemed to have recovered his spirits. “Says in 3 or 4 days things will go better in Roumania & all will go better,” she said. In the evening he wrote a long letter, sealed it in an envelope, and put in Maria’s desk. “Don’t open it until after I am dead,” he told his daughter. Simanovich was not alone in urging Rasputin to leave the capital. Trepov offered him 200,000 rubles and a monthly remittance to return to Siberia. Rasputin reported this colossal bribery attempt to the empress, neatly claiming incorruptibility for himself and undermining the premier in her eyes.
Simanovich told Rasputin on Thursday, December 15, that the situation was so grave—conspirators were about to kill him, and “then it will be the turn of the tsar and tsarina”—that drastic steps had to be taken. The tsar “must give you up,” he said. “Only with this offering can the impending revolution be stopped. When you are not there anymore, everybody will calm down. You set the nobility and all the people against you.” He made a suggestion to soften the blow: “Tell Papa and Mama to give you one million English pounds. Then we can both leave Russia and move to Palestine.” Simanovich said that they would be able to live peacefully there. “Also, I’m afraid that something may happen to me,” he went on. “I now have many enemies because of you. But I want to live.”
Rasputin paced the room. He called for wine; it appeared that he wanted to drink himself into a state of clairvoyance. He drank two bottles of Madeira. “What you say I’ll keep to myself,” he said, speaking quickly, his eyes shining. “I won’t tell the tsar of your talk. It’s too early.” He thought further. “Noblemen are against me,” he said suddenly. “But noblemen don’t have Russian blood. Their blood is mixed. Noblemen want to kill me because they don’t like a Russian muzhik standing near the Russian throne. I’ll show them who’s stronger.… I’ll send my muzhiks home from the front. Noblemen can bite as much as they like.”
“Grigory, you may be killed today or tomorrow,” Simanovich said. “Better listen to my advice and make yourself scarce. Otherwise there’s no salvation for you.” The telephone rang. Rasputin took the call. An unknown woman’s voice asked, “Can you tell me when the funeral service for Rasputin will take place?” He had complained of anonymous calls. “You’ll be buried first,” he answered viciously, and hung up.
“See, they’re burying you already,” Simanovich told him. “Listen to me. Forget your fantasies. I don’t want to argue with you anymore. I’ll tell the tsar, tsarina, and Vyrubova everything. Maybe they’ll teach you what to do.”
“Listen,” Rasputin said. “I’ll drink twenty bottles of Madeira tonight. Then I’ll go to a bathhouse, and then I’ll go to bed. When I fall asleep, divine instructions will come down on me. God will teach me what to do, and then nobody’ll be dangerous to me. And you go to hell.” After he had drunk a “pretty portion” of a case of wine, he went to the bathhouse; he came back later and went to sleep without saying a word.
The following morning, Friday, December 16, Simanovich found Rasputin in the “strange condition” that “marked crucial moments in his life”; others might have thought it a hangover. A large kitchen basin with Madeira stood in front of him, and he polished it off in a single go. Simanovich asked him whether he felt his “strength” coming on. “My strength will win, not yours,” he snarled.
Simanovich visited Protopopov to confide his fears. The interior minister thought them groundless. “I’ll take care of the affair myself,” he said. “The tsarina ordered me to see to it that Rasputin doesn’t leave home today. All the measures have been taken. Rasputin has promised me on his word of honor not to leave his apartment tonight. There’s nothing to worry about.” Simanovich was reassured and returned to Rasputin’s apartment. Vyrubova was there, with Nikitina and others, limping about on her stick, remonstrating with him about the strains of late nights and heavy drinking. “I’m like a horse,” Rasputin told her.
The guests began to leave. Simanovich locked Rasputin’s boots, fur coat, and hat in a cupboard. Osipenko, Pitirim’s secretary, promised to stay in the apartment. The Okhrana agents outside the house were under orders not to let Rasputin into the street, Simanovich said, but the starets “outwitted us all.” He gave the agents money and persuaded them that he was going to sleep. They believed him and went to a restaurant. He dined on fish and black bread with honey. After dinner he took Maria into his bedroom and showed her a bundle of banknotes, about three thousand rubles, which he had set aside as her dowry. Before the girls went to bed, Maria read aloud from the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Protopopov visited the apartment at 10:00 P.M. to make sure his orders had been carried out. Rasputin was already in bed. He asked the minister to tell Osipenko to go because his presence was unnecessary; the minister did so. When he said good-bye to Protopopov, Rasputin said, “Listen, dear. I am master of my word. I gave it, but I can take it back.”
At midnight Rasputin telephoned Simanovich and said: “The ‘Little One’ has come, I’ll go with him.” He liked giving people pet names; he would not tell Simanovich to whom this one referred.
“For God’s sake,” Simanovich exclaimed. “Stay at home, or they’ll kill you.”
“Don’t worry,” Rasputin replied. “We’ll be drinking tea, and at two o’clock I’ll telephone you.” He hung up.