The police investigation was swift and competent. They knew, almost immediately, the identity of the guilty; but they were prevented from interrogating them in depth or from charging them. Alexandra’s orders for Yusupov and Dmitri to be placed under house arrest were illegal—she had no such powers—and bitterly resented by the rest of the Romanov clan. “This means open revolt,” Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich exclaimed. “Here we have the war, with the enemy threatening us from all sides, and we have to deal with this sort of nonsense. How can they not be ashamed to stir up all this fuss over the murder of such a filthy good-for-nothing!” The scandal was already prodigious. The tsar did not contemplate adding to it with the arrest of men closely related to him by blood and marriage.
There was to be no trial. In its absence the accounts of the murderers have been accepted as filling in the detail missing from police evidence. They were little inhibited by guilt, for they felt their deed had served their country, but both Yusupov and Purishkevich had high opinions of themselves and were open to exaggeration. They also felt it their duty, as a prince and a gentleman, to deflect attention from others involved in or supporting their deed.
Yusupov wrote that he spent the greater part of December 16 completing the furnishings of the cellar. It was built of dark granite, with two small windows and a vaulted ceiling that gave full headroom only in the center. After dark, red plush curtains and a fire gave it warmth. A samovar bubbled cheerfully on the table. Rose cakes and wineglasses were laid out on a sideboard. He told the staff that they were to remain in the servants’ hall unless he rang for them. Lazovert worked on the automobile they were to use. He painted out the red emblem Semper Idem that identified it as belonging to Purishkevich’s medical services. Purishkevich passed the day at the Duma, writing letters and chatting on the telephone. Lazovert collected him in the car at about 11:00 P.M. Purishkevich brought a heavy Sauvage pistol with him. Dmitri came separately to the Moika Palace at the same hour.
The doctor put on rubber gloves and carefully ground crystals of potassium cyanide into powder. He sprinkled this liberally into the cakes. He also dissolved three decigrams of cyanide into a few drops of water and poured it into two of the wineglasses. Four centigrams was a lethal dose. When he had finished Lazovert tossed the gloves into the fire. That was a mistake, for the room filled with the acrid stench of burning rubber. Lazovert then put on the chauffeur’s coat Purishkevich had bought earlier and drove Yusupov to Gorokhovaya ulitsa. The prince went up the back staircase. Rasputin answered the door himself, saying, “No one is up, the children are asleep, enter, Little One.” The prince was struck by how good he looked, the preparation he had put into meeting Princess Irina, his hair and beard freshly washed and combed, the blue blouse immaculate. He felt a pang at the “despicable deceit” of inviting a guest to his own murder. “What had become of his second sight?” he thought. “What use was his facility for reading the thoughts of others if he was blind to the dreadful trap that was laid for him?” Like a lamb, then, a lamb in fur coat and beaver hat and size sixteen snow boots, Rasputin followed Yusupov down to the automobile.
At the palace Yusupov took Rasputin across the marble entrance hall and down the steps to the cellar. “You know how I am being slandered,” Rasputin said. “Remember how Christ was persecuted. He too suffered for the sake of truth.” Or so Yusupov said that he said, conveniently, for it branded his guest as a blasphemer; admirers, not Rasputin himself, compared him with Christ. Rasputin heard a gramophone upstairs playing the hit song “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” “What’s this?” he asked. “Someone giving a party?” The prince replied that his wife was entertaining a few girlfriends. She would soon be down.
He gave the starets an unpoisoned biscuit. At first Rasputin refused the offer of the poisoned cakes. When Yusupov pressed him he ate two of them. Cyanide has a bitter almond scent, but he made no comment. After a little he said he was thirsty and asked for tea. The prince offered him wine—Yusupov wine from the family estates in the Crimea—but Rasputin said he preferred Madeira. Had Yusupov studied his man, he would have known that. He persuaded him to have a glass of unspiked wine and then, by dropping the glass, gave him one with poison in it. He drank. Nothing happened; Rasputin merely complained of “a tickling in my throat.”
Rasputin amused himself by playing with the many drawers in the ebony cabinet. Yusupov, waiting for him to collapse, said he would check on when Irina was coming and excused himself from the cellar. His fellow conspirators were huddled at the top of the stairs, playing and replaying “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They had to be kept out of sight; had Rasputin seen Purishkevich, who had attacked him so savagely in his Duma speech, he would have realized instantly what was afoot. Lazovert was so unnerved by the failure of his poison—so he said—that he fainted and had to be revived in the snowy garden. The secret police chief, Vassilyev, claimed that Lazovert, overcome by conscience, had substituted soda or magnesia for the cyanide. Another explanation for the failure of the autopsy to find poison is that a corrupt drug manufacturer was selling the army medical service placebos instead of genuine pharmaceuticals. A third, and the one favored by Yusupov, was that the Dark One was protected by the forces of evil.
When the prince reappeared in the cellar, Rasputin noticed a guitar case. He asked Yusupov to play to him. “Play something cheerful,” he said. “I like listening to your singing.” Yusupov sang Gypsy songs. They had been alone together for two hours; the murder was becoming a marathon. The hen party excuse was wearing thin; Felix was embarrassed and frightened. The upstairs crew had become restless and noisy, and Rasputin heard them and asked what was happening. Yusupov left the cellar to investigate. Grand Duke Dmitri said he was tired and wanted to leave. “We can’t leave him down there half dead,” Purishkevich said. He thought they should “stake their all” and descend together to shoot the starets. The prince said that Rasputin would be alarmed if he saw them all. He took Dmitri’s Browning revolver and went back to the cellar.
Rasputin sat at the table with a drooping head. His breathing was labored. “My head is heavy and I’ve a burning in my stomach,” he complained. “Give me another glass of wine. It’ll do me good.” He swallowed a glass “at a gulp” and revived. Despite his cargo of cyanide, he suggested Yusupov go to the Gypsies with him. “All our thoughts belong to God,” he said. “But our bodies belong to ourselves.” Yusupov said it was too late. Rasputin played again with the ebony cabinet. “Grigory Efimovich,” Yusupov said, “you’d far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer.” Rasputin seemed to realize what was to happen; he looked at the prince gently, resigned. Yusupov said later that he feared that the “supernatural powers” protecting Rasputin might render a bullet harmless. But when the starets started making the sign of the cross, the “dark protecting power” dissolved. “My arm grew rigid, I aimed at his heart and pulled the trigger,” Yusupov recalled. “Rasputin gave a wild scream and crumpled on the bearskin.”
The others now rushed down. They lifted the body from the bearskin to prevent the blood from staining it. Rasputin’s face twitched in spasms as the blood soaked into the blue blouse. The body then went still. It was about 3:00 A.M. Lazovert examined him and pronounced him dead. The plan was now for Captain Sukhotkin to put on Rasputin’s coat and beaver hat and to be driven by Lazovert with Dmitri in Purishkevich’s automobile, to suggest to any watching police agent that they were taking Rasputin home. In fact, they would drive to Purishkevich’s train, where Rasputin’s clothes would be burned while they returned to the Moika Palace to collect the corpse and dump it in the river.
As they set off Purishkevich and Yusupov relaxed over cigars, confident that they had saved Russia. Yusupov went back to the cellar to reexamine the results of his night’s work. The body fascinated him; he was alone with it for perhaps half an hour. Something strange may have happened during this time—the Duma deputy, Maklakov, said that he subsequently had an “unusual conversation” with Yusupov about the murder, adding cryptically, “I imagine he remembers it well, but I will say nothing about it.” Maria Rasputin claimed that Yusupov had tried to seduce her father on one of his visits during November and raped him at his death; Simanovich maintained that Yusupov had visited Rasputin to be cured of homosexuality, and that during the therapy Rasputin “made him lie down and then lashed and hypnotized him.” There is no independent evidence to support either statement. By his own admission the prince held the body’s wrist, could detect no pulse, and began to shake it with rage. The corpse stirred and opened “green viper eyes.” With a roar Rasputin rose and rushed at him. “He sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws,” Yusupov recollected. “His eyes were bursting from their sockets, blood oozed from his lips.” As he tried to strangle him Rasputin kept repeating: “Felix, Felix.” Yusupov tore himself free, leaving one of the epaulets of his cadet uniform in Rasputin’s hand, and ran up the stairs.
Purishkevich described Yusupov as “literally faceless” with terror, his “lovely large blue eyes” bulging, as, “virtually oblivious of me, seemingly out of his mind,” he fled into the main part of the palace. Then the politician, too, saw a “terrible reality.” Rasputin, who had lain dead in the cellar half an hour before, had climbed the stairs and was running across the snow-covered courtyard to an iron gate that led into the street. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Purishkevich said. “But a hard cry, which broke the silence of the night, persuaded me. ‘Felix, Felix, I will tell everything to the empress.’ ” He took out his Sauvage pistol and fired, the shot echoing in the night. He was a good shot—he practiced regularly on the Semyonovsky Guards’ pistol range—but he missed. He fired again as Rasputin closed on the gate. He missed again. “I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time,” he said. “The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head.” He ran up and kicked Rasputin as hard as he could with his boot. Rasputin fell into the snow and tried to rise but could only grind his teeth. “This time, I was certain that his swan song had been sung and that he would never rise again,” Purishkevich wrote in his diary a few hours later. For good measure Yusupov appeared with a rubber club—probably the blackjack he had borrowed from Shulgin—and beat the body.
Both men’s accounts of the actual killing are confirmed by the autopsy. The wound found in the left side of the chest corresponds with Yusupov’s original shot to the heart, and those in the right side of the back and the head to Purishkevich’s shot at the shoulders and his “probable” hit in the head. Professor Kossorotov also found contusions consistent with Purishkevich’s kicks and Yusupov’s clubbing.
After dealing with Vlassiyev, the policeman who heard the shots, Lazovert and the others drove back to the palace at about 5:30 A.M. The body was wrapped in a shroud—variously linen, a blue curtain, a rug, canvas—and was driven off at high speed north, toward Petrovsky Island. All the conspirators were in the car except Yusupov, who was exhausted. It took them two efforts to hurl the body over the low parapet. They forgot to attach weights to the body, and the telltale boot was left on the ice.
“Something has to happen”—it had become an all-Russian saying. Such were the accounts of those who achieved it. There were others; persistently it was said that ladies were present in the palace at the time of the murder. In his police statement, if not in his later books, Yusupov himself said that he had given a small party, with Dmitri and Purishkevich, and some officers and society women whom he refused to name. The conspirators were at pains to clear all others of involvement in the killing. Purishkevich took great care to emphasize that the young Romanov was innocent of murder: “Thank God that the hand of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich is not stained with this dirty blood. He was only a spectator, that’s all. Pure, young, noble, regal youth, so close to the throne, cannot and must not be guilty even in such a highly patriotic deed connected with the spilling of someone’s blood, be it even Rasputin.”
Policeman Yefimov gave evidence to his superiors within a few hours of the event that he had heard a cry from the palace, “as if uttered by a woman.” The servant Nefedov said in his police statement that when he cleared up the dining room the following morning, he found “everything was just as it should be.” He confirmed that he had been told ladies would be present at the party, as they had been at previous parties; the debris of mixed company is different from that of a stag party—lipstick on cigarette ends and glasses, a smell of perfume—and it is unlikely that an experienced servant could have mistaken the signs.
Yusupov also referred to the presence of ladies in a letter he wrote to the empress on the day after the murder, which corresponds closely to his police statement recorded by Vassilyev. “Your Majesty,” he wrote. “I hasten to fulfill your command and tell you about everything that happened in my house yesterday so as to throw light upon the terrible accusation I was charged with. On the occasion of housewarming on the night of the sixteenth I invited a few friends for dinner, among them some ladies. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was also there. Around 12:00 Grigory Efimovich telephoned me and invited me to go to the Gypsies. I refused, saying that I have a party myself and asked where he called from. He answered, ‘Isn’t it a bit too much what you want to know?’ and hung up. While he spoke I could hear many voices. That’s all that I heard of Grigory Efimovich that evening.
“Returning to my guests, I told them about my conversation on the telephone, which elicited tactless remarks from them. You know, Your Majesty, that the name of Grigory Efimovich is rather unpopular in many circles. Around 3:00 A.M. people started to depart, and, having said good-bye to the grand duke and two ladies, I went to my study with the other guests. Suddenly it seemed to me like a report [gunshot] was heard. I called for the servant and ordered him to find out what it was. He came back and said, ‘A report was heard, but nobody knows where it came from.’ After that I went out into the yard myself and asked the yard keepers and policeman who had fired the shot. The yard keepers said that they had been drinking tea in the lodge, and the policeman said that he heard the report but did not know who made it. Then I went home, called for the policeman, and telephoned Dmitri Pavlovich to ask whether it was he who fired. He laughed and answered that leaving the house he fired several times at a dog, and one of the ladies fainted. When I told him that the shots had made a sensation, he answered that this could not be so because there was no one around.
“I called for the servant and went out to the yard and saw one of our dogs lying dead near the fence. Then I ordered the servant to bury it in the yard.
“At 4:00 A.M. everybody left and I came back to the palace of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, where I live. On the following day, that is, this morning, I learned about the disappearance of Grigory Efimovich, which is being connected with my party. Then they told me he was seen with me last night and that he left with me. This is a downright lie, for my guests and myself did not leave my house all through the night. Then they told me that he [Rasputin] said to someone that one of these days he was to go to meet Irina [Irina Alexandrovna, Yusupov’s wife]. There is some truth in it for, when I saw him last, he asked me to introduce him to Irina and asked whether she was here. I said to him that my wife was in the Crimea but that she could come [back] on the fifteenth or sixteenth of December. On the night of the fourteenth I received a telegram from Irina in which she wrote that she’d fallen ill and asked me to join her brothers, who leave tonight. I cannot find the words, Your Majesty, to tell you how I’ve been shocked by what happened and how outrageous are the accusations against me.
“I remain, deeply devoted to Your Majesty, Felix.”
The empress was unimpressed, replying in pencil, “No one has the right to indulge in killing. I know conscience gives no rest to many as not only DP [Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich] has been mixed up in it. I am surprised by your communication to me.”
Simanovich visited the Moika police station on the morning after the murder with Bishop Isidor, another Rasputin protégé. He claimed that Rasputin was killed during a real party in the palace, at which ladies were present. He was told this by Vera Koralli, a ballerina and a cousin of Yusupov, who claimed she had attended the party with two of Yusupov’s brothers-in-law. When Rasputin arrived in a reception room, a brother-in-law, who had been hiding behind the curtain in the hall, fired and hit him in the eye. Rasputin fell, and “everybody fired at him and hit him in the eye, only Vera Koralli refused to do it and she cried, ‘I don’t want to shoot.’ ” The body was then taken down to the cellar. Rasputin revived, dragged himself out to the courtyard, and was trying to escape to the street when he was betrayed by a barking guard dog. He was then caught by Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, his arms and legs were tied, and he was taken by automobile to be thrown, still living, into the icebound Neva.
Robert Wilton, the London Times man in Petrograd, also mentioned the presence of women—though demimondaines, high-class courtesans, rather than society ladies—in his account of the murder. He obtained his story from police officials and from reporters on Novoye Vremya, who had excellent police contacts. His original story was censored, but he kept the notes he had written up on the day after the murder and sent them in a letter to Wickham Steed, the Times foreign editor, on December 20.
In Wilton’s version Rasputin, his tongue loosened by drink and the prospect of an orgy, revealed government secrets at a party hosted by Yusupov at which courtesans were present. He was invited to commit suicide as a final act of patriotic redemption but turned the proffered revolver on his hosts before himself being shot. The conspirators—Wilton mentioned the sons of the late Grand Duke Constantine as well as Yusupov, Dmitri, and Purishkevich—had “decided to ‘remove’ Rasputin because they regarded him as the cause of a dangerous scandal affecting the interests of the dynasty and of the Empire. So many persons being in the plot rumours were bound to leak out, and as long ago as Monday last it was reported that Rasputin’s death might be expected hourly.” Wilton claimed that Yusupov had often invited Rasputin to the Moika Palace to pump him for information on the “doings of ‘August Personages,’ ” the use of initial capitals indicating that this meant the tsar and tsarina.
Rasputin was asked to a party at the palace on December 16, together with a number of courtesans. Under the influence of liquor he “gave away not only his own secrets but also the secrets of all the Ministerial and other political changes that have so much incensed Russian public opinion within recent months, notably the dismissal of Sazonov, the appointment of Stürmer and the successive and persistent failures to introduce a stable Ministry and internal reforms.” At about 2:30 A.M. Rasputin was told that he would have to die. “A revolver was placed in his hand,” Wilton wrote, “but he flatly refused to commit suicide and discharged the weapon some say in the direction of the Grand Duke Dmitri. The bullet smashed a pane of glass thereby attracting the attention of the police outside.” The butler told them that a distinguished guest had practiced target shooting.
“Hardly had the police officers left the palace,” Wilton continued, “when a motor car drove up along the Moika canal quay and stopped near a small footbridge almost facing the palace.” Four men were seen to alight, their faces covered “by some black substance.” As soon as the passengers had left the car, the chauffeur turned off his lights “and putting on full speed made off along the canal.” This scene was witnessed by an Okhrana agent named Tihomirov, who had been detailed by the police department to look after Rasputin. Tihomirov presumed that the “masked or disguised men” were robbers, since they had entered the palace by a side door in the back part of the garden. The agent hurried across the canal to the police station and telephoned a report to the Okhrana.
A further commotion followed. Two women were carried out of the palace; “they were offering resistance and were refusing to enter a motor car and were doing their best to force their way back into the palace.” The car whirled off down the quay with them. An inspector drove off in pursuit. “It was impossible to overtake the fugitive car on account of its enormous speed; it carried neither number nor lights,” Wilton wrote. “The policemen who came to the palace were informed that two ladies belonging to the half-world had been misconducting themselves and had been asked to leave.” The affair seemed to be at an end when four shots were heard from the little garden fronting the wing of the palace. “Once more the alarm was sounded in both police stations and again detachments of police appeared at the palace,” Wilton wrote. “This time an official wearing a colonel’s uniform came out to them (his identity is not yet established) and announced in categorical fashion that within the palace was a Grand Duke and that H.I.H. [His Imperial Highness] would explain everything that was necessary in person to the proper quarters. After such a declaration the police inspector … returned to his official duties, leaving a patrol on the opposite side of the Moika as a measure of precaution. The servants assisted by the chauffeur, in the presence of an officer who was wearing a long fur cloak, carried out what looked like a human body and placed it in the car. The chauffeur jumped in and putting on full speed made off along the canal side and also promptly disappeared.”
When the police returned to the palace, they were met by Yusupov. He told them that they should “draw up a report as to the killing of Rasputin. At first this announcement was not accepted seriously in view of all the strange occurrences of the night, but the police officials were invited to come into a chamber of the basement and were there shown the spot where the body had been lying. They saw a pool of congealed blood, and traces of blood were also visible on the snow in the garden. In answer to the question as to where the body was, the prince replied that the body was ‘where it should be.’ He declined to give any further explanation.”
Wilton added to his story a day later, this time accounting for the dead dog. During the carousal at the Yusupov palace, he wrote, Rasputin was asked if he would get three new ministers appointed. For this he would receive half a million rubles. He replied, “Why not?” Purishkevich said, “But we want three scoundrels to enter the ministry!” “What of that?” Rasputin replied. “Have I not appointed others?” Then the starets was told, “So you confess that it was your work and that you betrayed Russia. We sentence you to death. Take this revolver and shoot yourself.” Rasputin “took the weapon and fired it at the company but missed them and hit a large dog that was in the room. Then Purishkevich and the others shot Rasputin.”
The lack of a formal investigation, and the absence of a trial with evidence, witnesses, and cross-examination, made it inevitable that the Rasputin rumor mills would grind as furiously after his death as before it. The official statement issued to newspapers after the discovery of the corpse was so brief—sixteen words plus a dateline—that it incited speculation. Wilton cabled it to London, adding thirteen days to the Russian date of December 19 to fit the Western calendar of his British readers: QUOTE PETROGRAD MORNING 1 JANUARY NEAR PETROVSKI BRIDGE WAS FOUND BODY GRIGORY RASPUTIN CLOSE TO BANK STOP JUDICIAL AUTHORITIES CARRYING OUT INVESTIGATION UNQUOTE.
The official background briefing, which the censor passed for transmission, was bizarre. “Body which bore mark [of] several bullet wounds in head [and] chest was very much disfigured,” Wilton was allowed to cable. “Feet tied [and] hands had evidently been similarly pinioned but when flung [into] river rope broke and arms outspreading remained frozen [in] that position.” The myth was thus encouraged that Rasputin’s body had frozen as if it had been crucified. Wilton was also told that “immediately after being extracted from under the ice … the body was taken to the mortuary in the Peter and Paul fortress where it remained all day. It is expected that the body will be taken to his native village in Siberia for burial.”
These falsifications—the body was taken to the veterans’ home outside the city and it was to be buried at Tsarskoye Selo—were probably deliberate. The interior ministry did not want the body to be the focus of any demonstration; hence the canard that it was in the fortress, the best-guarded site in the city. It was also easiest to distance the royal family from the affair by suggesting that the burial would take place in distant Pokrovskoye.
There is a symmetry, a pleasantness, to the idea that Rasputin amused himself with ladies at his last party; as he had lived, so he died. In his death, as in life, Rasputin offers choice and little certainty. Simanovich no doubt felt that this was the way his friend would have chosen. No Okhrana agent reported Rasputin attending any evening or nighttime engagement without women being present. Uniformed policemen, palace staff, and Yusupov all mentioned women. Wilton, who had become a near neighbor of Rasputin after The Times moved its offices from Potchtamtykaya to 4 Gorokhovaya ulitsa, had collaborated with experienced Russian journalists.
But certainly the murderers tally over the character of their victim. There, in the accounts of Yusupov and Purishkevich, is the energy, the refusal to submit, the force of a soul that unnerved armed men, the love of good times and Gypsy music, the flash of lust and its philosophy—“our bodies belong to ourselves …” There is the knowledge, sober and perceptive in his agony, that the peasant-colossus he had made of himself, in whose presence Russia quivered with awe and malice, depended on another. It was Alexandra who gave his power its flesh and sinew—those last in extremis words, “Felix, Felix, I will tell all to the empress …” And there, too, is the rage for life—even as it was being poisoned, shot, and beaten out of him.