He was buried at 9:00 A.M. on Thursday, December 22, in the grounds of a small chapel Vyrubova was building in the imperial park at Tsarskoye Selo. The weather was frosty and fine, the morning sky a clear, metallic blue, and the snow sparkling. Lili von Dehn attended, bringing her memories of the healing of her son Titi. She stopped her carriage on the road and walked across a frozen field toward the chapel. Planks had been put on the ground as a footpath. A police motor van was waiting near the open grave.
“I heard the sound of sleigh bells, and Anna Vyrubova came slowly across the field,” Dehn wrote. “Almost immediately afterward, a closed automobile stopped and the imperial family joined us.” They were dressed in black. The empress carried white flowers; she was pale but composed until the oak coffin was taken from the police van and she began to cry. The court archpriest read the service. The tsar and the empress threw earth on the coffin. Alexandra handed around her flowers, and they threw those in too. The imperial limousine left for the Alexander Palace, and Vyrubova got into her sledge for the drive back to her cottage. Dehn spent a moment looking back at the snowy fields and the bare walls of the unfinished chapel as her carriage sped her away.
After Rasputin’s death, as before, no witness told the same tale. In his diary, in which for decades he had accurately noted the day’s events and weather, Nicholas wrote that Rasputin was already in the ground when the family arrived. Dehn’s touching scene—the brave empress weeping only when she saw the coffin emerging from the makeshift police hearse—was invention. “At 9 the whole family went past the photography building,” the tsar wrote that evening, “and turned right towards the field, where we assisted at a sad scene: the coffin with the body of the unforgettable Grigory, murdered on the night of December 17 by monsters in the house of F. Yusupov, had already been lowered into the grave. Father Alexander Vasiliev finished the eulogy, after which we returned home. The weather was gray with 12 degrees of frost.… In the afternoon took a walk with the children.”
Technically, the murder changed nothing; psychologically it changed everything. It did not, as the killers hoped, restore the dignity of the throne; and Alexandra’s influence was untouched, for she kept her nerve while the tsar retreated into nervous collapse. Her mauve boudoir and her telephone beneath a picture of Marie Antoinette remained the focal point of government, and, when ministers came to report to the tsar in his study, she listened from his dressing room. In a broader sense, however, the death was what Russians call perelom, the great turning point. It left the rulers utterly exposed. To assault Rasputin was to assault the throne, and two of those who had done so were Romanovs by blood or marriage; the chains of loyalty that still bound those of lesser rank were snapped. Centuries of convention had protected the tsar and empress from outright defamation by all but the boldest and most reckless subject. Blame for catastrophe had been heaped on Rasputin; he had been their lightning rod, deflecting hatreds and contempt that now had no target but themselves. Rasputin had been their glue, too; he was “their mainspring, their toy, their fetish.” If he could be taken from them, so could their power. And the penalty for lèse-majesté, certain death or torture under previous tsars, was suddenly seen as little more than a slap on the wrist. Although the empress had shouted “Hang them!” the murderers were simply sent away—Yusupov to his estates in the Crimea, Dmitri to join the army staff in Persia. Purishkevich took his hospital train to the front, where the military police kept watch on him.
On New Year’s Day the tsar received the congratulations of the diplomatic corps in Tsarskoye Selo. A burst of bitter cold greeted 1917. The windows of the carriages taking the ambassadors to the palace were impenetrable with frost, and the horses were smothered in ice. A courtier asked Maurice Paléologue if he did not feel that “now we are on the very brink.” The Frenchman thought they were over it. “I am obliged to report,” he cabled the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, “that at the present moment the Russian empire is run by lunatics.”
The tsar had left unfinished business at the Stavka; with General Alexeev on sick leave, nobody was in effective supreme command of Russia’s armies. Nicholas did not return to Mogilev for two months. He closeted himself in the Alexander Palace with Alexandra and the children. He abandoned his mornings to petty projects, replacing German court titles—Kanzler, Ritter—with Russian ones; he walked in the afternoon, and in the evening he played cards and watched movies, Madame du Barry, with the guillotines and blood of revolutionary France, and the spiritualist thriller Mysterious Hands. His eyes were flat, his face thin and lined. Alexandra remained defiant, but the tutor Gilliard found that “her shattered face revealed how much she suffered. The pain was tremendous.” Vyrubova was with her continuously; the empress insisted that her friend move out of her cottage to the Alexander Palace for fear she too would be murdered. Her other comfort was Rasputin’s ghost. “He is still close to us,” she wrote.
Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty played at the Mariinsky Theater with Smirnova as première danseuse. Her arabesques were no more fantastic than the stories passing from lip to lip in the stalls; Alexandra would be taken to a convent, a famous fighter pilot, Captain Kostenko, would crash his aircraft on the imperial limousine. “We are back in the time of the Borgias!” an Italian embassy counselor whispered in the intermission. Grand dukes, Romanovs, were overheard plotting to force the tsar to abdicate in favor of the tsarevich and a regent. Alexandra conducted her own plots; her sights were set on the too-liberal Trepov. The prime minister was replaced by an ill man of seventy, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, a “good-natured Russian squire and an old weakling,” who protested that he was “utterly incapable” of doing the job. For good measure he warned Nicholas that officers in Moscow regiments were openly threatening to proclaim another tsar. Nicholas ordered him to accept. “The empress and I know that we are in God’s hands,” he said. “His will be done!” The education minister, Count Pavel Ignatev, loyal to Nicholas for thirty years, begged to resign his post so as to be spared “the unbearable burden of serving against the commands of my conscience.” He had no reply for a week. Nicholas then let him go, with no word of thanks.
The dead starets had promised Nikolai Dobrovolsky the justice ministry for his help with the German sugar scandal. Simanovich said he “supposed that he would fulfill all my wishes in gratitude” when the empress steered him into the office, but he supposed wrong. Dobrovolsky refused to have the banker Rubinstein released when he was rearrested. Protopopov was brought in to help and had a furious but fruitless argument with Dobrovolsky over the telephone. The problem was that the new justice minister knew very well “how the tsar values the instructions of the deceased”—Rasputin—and felt immune. “Under such circumstances,” Simanovich said, “I decided to resort to my old and tested method—a bribe. Protopopov agreed.” The interior minister thus connived in the corruption of the justice minister. Madame Rubinstein drew 100,000 rubles in cash from her bank. Her husband was discharged from prison into a sanatorium.
None of the Rubinstein bribe money made its way to Rasputin’s dependents; Simanovich claimed but failed to aid his dead friend’s children. Maria Rasputin said that her father left no more than 3,000 rubles—some £300 or $1,400 at the exchange rate of the day—a pittance compared with the millions he had helped others make. Her dowry, which he had been keeping in his desk, was missing. It was left to the empress to send 30,000 rubles for each of the three children from her private privy purse.
The Okhrana was still functioning. It spread rumors—that Rasputin had been buried in an obscure monastery in the Urals—and it collected facts. On January 9, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, it calculated that 300,000 workers had come out on strike. In Moscow a Red banner was raised in Theater Square for the first time in the war. On January 28 it predicted that “events of extraordinary importance, fraught with exceptional consequences for the Russian statehood, are not beyond the hills.” The number of troops in the capital, 170,000, was a record, but many were shell-shock victims from the front, reservists, and agitators drafted into the army from factories for troublemaking. Even the Cossacks were draftees, not volunteers. The Okhrana found them to have “much raw, untrained material, unfit to put down disorders.”
The warnings fell on the deaf ears of Protopopov. He busied himself by day replying personally to the torrent of toadies and petitioners who had sent him Christmas and New Year’s greetings. By night he communed with the ghost of Rasputin at séances. With Prince Kurakin, a hook-nosed necromancer, he was locked “in secret conclave for hours every evening, listening to the dead man’s solemn words” and passing them on to Alexandra. He was to deny later that he had succeeded in raising Rasputin’s spirit but agreed under cross-examination that he had told the empress that he had, because it made her happy.
The tsar’s childhood friend Sandro—Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich—visited him and Alexandra on February 10. He brought a letter he had written to them: “We are living through a most dangerous moment in Russia’s history.… Everyone senses it: some with their mind, some with their heart, some their soul.… Certain forces in Russia are leading you, and consequently Russia as well, to irrevocable ruin.… The government today is the organ preparing the revolution. The people do not want it, but the government is taking every possible measure to create as many dissatisfied people as possible and is succeeding completely at it. We are assisting at an unprecedented spectacle of revolution from above, rather than below.” The analysis was accurate. He tried to discuss it at Alexandra’s bedside—she often took to her bed now. “When you are less excited,” she said in a voice hard with anger, “you will admit that I knew better.” Nicholas said nothing; he chain-smoked.
On February 14 ninety thousand came out on strike, led by workers from the giant Putilov engineering works. The garrison was restive. “You shouldn’t be fighting here,” a group of ensigns yelled at policemen. “They ought to send you fatsos to the front.” The Duma reconvened that day. Revolution was so tangible that Vasily Shulgin, the monarchist deputy whom Alexandra so hated, felt that the debaters were drained of all emotion by futility in the face of the approaching terror. “Behind the white columns of the hall grinned Hopelessness,” he said. “And she whispered: ‘Why? What for? What difference does it make?’ ” A small helping of potatoes, fifteen kopecks prewar, was hard to find at eight times that price. There was panic buying of dry rusks for hoarding. Restaurants laid off their orchestras. The temperature dropped to twenty-two below zero.
In the morning of February 20, Nicholas told Golitsyn that he was preparing to proclaim that he would grant a ministry responsible to the Duma. In the evening the prime minister was recalled to the palace; the tsar said that he was leaving for the Stavka and that no announcement on a new ministry would be made. Nicholas had spoken with the empress during the afternoon; she had not given up on autocracy. Golitsyn sensed that Nicholas was not going to the Stavka. He was running away there.
He did not escape his wife’s twin obsessions. “Our dear Friend in another world prays for you too, now even closer to us, but I would so love to hear His consoling & heartening voice,” she wrote him on February 22, adding a lecture on autocracy: “Lovy, be firm, because the Russians need you to be—at every turn you show love & kindness—now let them feel your fist, as they themselves ask. So many of late have told, that we need the knout. It’s strange, but that is the Slav nature.… They must learn to fear you, love is not enough. Tho a child adores his father, he must fear his anger. I embrace you tight and hug your tired head.… Feel my arms hold you, my lips press tenderly to yours. Eternally together, always inseparable.”
“Be firm, lovy, don’t let them cheat you out of what is yours”—it was so close to the first note she had written to him, twenty-two years before, in his diary, at the deathbed of his father. As to his “adoring children,” his people—Ambassador Paléologue was told that if the tsar appeared in public, in Moscow at least, they would boo him. The empress they would tear into pieces.
The children came down with measles on February 23. “Well now, Olga & Alexis both have measles & Olga’s face is all covered with rash. Baby suffers more in the mouth—a bad cough and sore eyes,” the empress wrote to her husband. “They lie in the dark.” That day, a Thursday, was International Women’s Day. In midmorning women in the Neva Thread Mills heard demonstrators outside demanding bread. “Into the street! We’ve had it!” the mill girls shouted. They walked out and threw snowballs at the windows of the neighboring Nobel machinery works to bring out the men. They linked arms with them and marched off. After the lunch break workers in the giant Arsenal munitions works came out in large numbers when marchers banged on the gates and windows. The afternoon was warm and snow melted. The demonstrators boarded streetcars, forced the motormen to stop, evacuated the passengers, and overturned them. By early evening they were on the Nevsky; mounted police and Cossacks dispersed them with whips and sabers, but they re-formed when the horsemen cantered off. The Okhrana men noticed that the agitators working the crowds did not bother to hide their faces by pulling their caps down over their eyes, as they usually did. They were becoming bold.
At the Duma a young Socialist lawyer called Alexander Kerensky spoke of starving women “for whom hunger is becoming the only tsar.” He called for someone to do “what Brutus did in classical times”—an open call to murder the caesar, the tsar. Alexander Protopopov was driven home late at night down the deserted Nevsky, its yellowing snow lit by a brilliant searchlight on the Admiralty spire. He was in a mood of morbid euphoria; he thought the government was winning. “The day of the twenty-third was not all that bad,” he wrote in his diary. “Several policemen were injured; but there was no shooting.”
On February 24 Alexandra wrote to the tsar: “Strikes now in Petrograd—80,000 workers have struck, lines of the hungry have formed outside the bakeries. Not enough bread in the town.” She said she hoped Kedrinsky, as she called the Duma man, would be hanged. Nicholas sent Alexandra and Alexis honors from the king and queen of the Belgians. He thought of his son—“he will be so pleased with a new little cross!” During the morning a crowd of 2,000 was cornered by Cossacks. Many were women. “We have husbands, fathers, brothers at the front!” they cried. “You too have mothers, wives, sisters, children.” The horsemen were ordered to charge; they rode by the edges of the crowd, which greeted them with hurrahs. A Duma deputy asked himself what was happening when demonstrators cheered Cossacks. By later afternoon the police estimated that 200,000 were on strike.
Alexandra wrote again in the evening. “There were riots yesterday, on Vasilievsky Island and Nevsky Prospect because some poor people stoned a bakery, tearing Filippov’s bakery to pieces & the Cossacks were called in.” Filippov’s, so famous for its cream tarts and chocolate cakes—sacked. “At 10 went to see Ania [Vyrubova] (she probably has measles too).… Am going from room to room, from sick bed to sick bed.” Nicholas wrote again, too, more relaxed: “My brain is resting here—no Ministers, no troublesome questions demanding thought, I consider that this is good for me, but only for my brain. My heart is suffering from the separation.” He played dominoes in the evening.
On February 25 Mikhail Rodzianko went to see Premier Golitsyn and demanded his resignation. Golitsyn showed him a decree disbanding the Duma, which the tsar had signed before he left for the Stavka for use at any time. “I am keeping this for emergencies,” the old man said, but both men realized that the Duma would pay it no attention; it was too late for that. The Cossacks were now fraternizing with the crowds. “It’s a movement of hooligans, boys and girls running around shouting about no bread—just to stir up excitement,” Alexandra wrote, calmed by Rasputin’s spirit. “If the days were very cold, they would probably all be sitting at home, but all this will pass & calm down.” They were not boys behaving badly, but soldiers, and from regiments that had saved the dynasty in 1905. During the afternoon the officer commanding a mounted police unit near the Nikolaevsky railroad station was shot dead by a Cossack. A cavalry squadron, still loyal, transferred from Tsarskoye Selo, killed nine demonstrators on the Nevsky. Police snatch squads were still able to make arrests, but the crowds sometimes rescued those arrested. Police were frequently beaten; some changed into civilian clothes or wore army greatcoats for disguise.
On February 26 Nicholas suffered excruciating chest pain during morning service. It covered him with sweat. Later it disappeared, “vanishing suddenly when I knelt before the image of the Holy Virgin.” He was warned by the war ministry that soldiers were refusing orders to fire on the rioters. Some were going over to the revolutionaries. Nicholas sent a telegram to General Khabalov, the garrison commander. “I command the disorders in the capital end tomorrow,” it read. “They are impermissible in the difficult time of war with Germany and Austria. Nicholas.” Then he took a walk. Khabalov was not amused. The rising could not be put down by telegram. “When people said, ‘Give us bread,’ we gave them bread and that was an end to it,” he said of happier days. “But when inscriptions on banners read, ‘Down with the autocracy,’ what kind of bread will calm them?”
Alexandra remained confident. “They say it’s not like 1905 because everyone adores you & only wants bread,” she wrote to Nicholas. She went to pray at Rasputin’s grave in the early afternoon and wrote later, “It seems to me that it will all be all right. The sun is shining brightly—I feel such peace at His dear grave. He died to save us.” As she wrote, at 3:30 P.M., ambulances were racing down the Nevsky to the Catherine Bridge to collect the dead and wounded shot by the training unit of the Pavlovsky Guards; through the center of the city, gunfire sounded like “the dry and regular fall of hail.” At six in the evening other Pavlovsky Guardsmen set off to persuade their comrades to stop killing demonstrators. They shot dead a policeman who tried to stop them; when their commanding officer, Colonel Eksten, caught up with them and ordered them back to barracks, they slashed off his head with sabers. A detachment of Preobrazhensky Guardsmen disarmed and arrested the mutineers; nineteen of them were sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress to await court-martial and execution.
Princess Leon Radziwill held a glittering party in the evening—her house ablaze with lights, lackeys in powdered wigs. The city governor thought the crisis was over; loyal troops had produced “brilliant results.” Others were not so sure. The premiere of Lermontov’s Masquerade, with its mournful requiem to the poisoned heroine in the last act, was playing to a small audience at the Alexandrevsky Theater. “Are we witnessing the last night of the regime?” Maurice Paléologue’s companion asked him as the ambassador drove home. An Okhrana agent, Limonin, thought everything hung on shaky military units; “if the troops turn on the government, then nothing can save the country,” he reported.
On February 27 Volynsky Guardsmen formed in full battle order for morning parade. During the night they had held a meeting and decided not to act as “executioners” anymore; they determined to “join the people.” They greeted their commander, Captain Lashkevich, with a “Hurrah!” in place of the normal and docile “At your service.” They told him that they would not fire on the people and asked him to leave. As he crossed the parade ground a shot rang out, and they watched the captain “suddenly fling his arms wide and crash to the ground facedown into a snowdrift.”
To avoid the firing squad, the men needed to spread mutiny far and fast. They moved to the parade ground of the Preobrazhensky Guards and brought out the battalions drilling there. Officers and NCOs were seen “stooping close to the ground, crouching in ditches, past heaps of garbage and behind stacks of wood, running and crawling.” They were fleeing from their own men.
A stenographer at Okhrana headquarters, taking down a report of the mutiny, was so amazed that she logged it in the wrong century, as 9:00 A.M. on February 27, 1817. By 10:00 A.M. there were ten thousand mutineers on the streets. At 11:30 the U.S. ambassador, David Francis, called the foreign ministry to ask for a guard to be put on the embassy to protect officers who had fled inside it. An official said he would ring back. He did not do so; this was the last American communication with the imperial foreign ministry. Alexandra ordered an icon to be paraded around the palace corridors during the morning, with prayers chanted for the sick children. Her valet heard a soldier mutter, “You trample on the people and you carry idols about.”
At 1:03 P.M. her nerve cracked. All her adult life she had propped up the autocracy; her political philosophy enshrined in the three words, pas de concessions. “Concessions essential,” she cabled Nicholas at the Stavka. “Uprising continues. Many troops have gone to the side of the revolution.” Nicholas did not reply. He took his normal postlunch walk on the highway running along the Dnieper toward Orsha.
The law courts burned; the crowd cut the firemen’s hoses. Alexander Kerensky—unhanged despite the empress’s wishes—hurried to the Duma. Troops broke into the Kresty and Litovsky prisons and freed the inmates; three dozen women convicts in prison gowns came out of the Litovsky and shuffled off through the snow in their carpet slippers. Policemen were routed out and murdered. “I saw on our street a man white as a sheet, being pulled away,” a schoolboy wrote. “He wore a shinel, a police greatcoat, and a papaha, a gray fur hat.… He was taken away and shot just around the corner.” The secret police chief, Alexis Vassilyev, who had gotten on so well with Rasputin, telephoned his own headquarters from his apartment and ordered the staff to leave. He and his wife escaped on passports made out in false names. Alexander Protopopov fled from the interior ministry. He took with him a briefcase with memorabilia—letters to and from the empress, police photographs of Rasputin’s corpse.
In the early evening the American naval attaché, Captain McCully, reported that he had seen a cavalry regiment riding quietly away and “abandoning the city to the mutineers.” In the Catherine Hall of the Tauride Palace, a soviet—the first since 1905—had been formed. Dirty and disheveled mutineers announced themselves before it to cheers: “We’re from the Pavlovsky … the Litovsky … the Sappers … the Chasseurs … the Finnish.” The regiments had gone.
Nicholas dined at Mogilev with his chief of staff. Grand Duke Mikhail telephoned; the tsar refused his brother’s call. The chief of staff, Gen. Mikhail Alexeev, took it instead. The grand duke begged for the cabinet to be dismissed. Nicholas refused. He said he would leave for Tsarskoye Selo on the imperial train at 2:30 A.M. The suite train did not get under way until 5:00 A.M. on Tuesday, February 28; the first train, which steamed out an hour earlier, was a decoy. An hour later the diarist Nikolai Sukhanov, sleeping in the Tauride, was woken by soldiers noisily cutting Ilya Repin’s famous portrait of Nicholas out of its frame with their bayonets.
A unit of loyal bicycle troops held out against the mutineers until midmorning on February 28. When its commanding officer ordered a cease-fire and walked over to the crowds pleading for his men, saying that they had fought only at his orders, he was shot through the heart. Thieves with army trucks looted tons of coal from the mansion of the tsar’s ex-mistress, the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinskaya. The Astoria Hotel was sacked. No cabs or streetcars ran. Fashionable ladies who had to travel went in low peasant sledges sitting on straw in the bottom. Alexander Protopopov was rounded up and brought to the Tauride, his face “hopelessly harassed and sunken,” his mustaches trembling; though the crowd froze with hatred when it spotted him, he was protected.
Youths climbed the fronts of drugstores and shops that supplied the Romanovs and threw the double-headed wooden imperial eagles and monograms onto bonfires. Maurice Paléologue came across one of the famous “Ethiopians”—one, in fact, was an American black called Jim Hercules who spent his holidays in the States and returned with jars of guava jelly as presents for the children—who had guarded the doors to the tsar’s study and the empress’s boudoir, in scarlet trousers, curved shoes, and white turbans, shuffling and crying in civilian clothes. A count muttered to the ambassador of the mutineers: “They’ve seen many things they ought not to have seen. They know too much about Rasputin.”
Nicholas woke late aboard his train and breakfasted at 10:00 A.M. In each successive province the governor turned out at the main railroad station to pay his respects as the train passed through. From Vyazma at 3:00 P.M. the tsar sent a telegram to the empress saying that he was “sending many troops from the front” and that the weather was marvelous.
Trucks filled with mutineers reached Tsarskoye Selo during the afternoon. Alexandra had been busying herself with the measled children and Vyrubova. “I kept seeing her beside my bed,” Vyrubova recalled, “now preparing a drink, now smoothing the cushions, now talking to the doctor.” In the evening the local garrison mutinied and threw open the local prison. There was a skirmish with a palace patrol in the park. Alexandra went out with Maria, cheered the defenders, and brought groups of them in to have tea and get warm. The noise of songs, music, and shots drifted across the park from the town.
After midnight, the tsar’s train was halted at the small station of Malaya Vishera, ninety miles from the capital. An officer who had fled on a railroad trolley warned that the next station up the line was in the hands of mutineers. Nicholas was woken and agreed to backtrack to Pskov. He reached there at 7:00 P.M. on March 1.
In the early hours of Thursday, March 2, Alexander Guchkov burst into the Duma committee room. A young landowner had just been shot dead next to him in his automobile, for no better reason than that he was wearing an officer’s uniform. It could not continue, Guchkov said. Nicholas must abdicate. Vasily Shulgin agreed to accompany him to Pskov to persuade the tsar to step down. The two got into Guchkov’s bloodstained car and drove to his house, where they scribbled out a draft act of abdication. They drove on to the railroad station and ordered the stationmaster to make up a train—a locomotive and a single carriage—for their journey to Pskov.
Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on March 2; she did not know where he was, but she had two Cossacks sew the letter under their trouser stripes and try to find him. She was still fighting a constitution. “I wanted to send an aeroplan [sic],” she wrote, “but all have vanished.… My heart breaks from the thought of you living through all these tortures & upsets totally alone—& we know nothing of you, & you know nothing of us.… Clearly they don’t want to let you see me so above all you must not sign any paper, constitution or other such horror—but you are alone, without your army, caught like a mouse in a trap, what can you do? If you make any concessions, under no circumstances are you obliged to honour them since they were obtained in ignoble fashion.” That was what Rasputin had so often said, that the tsar could give his word and take it back, like a little boy who crosses his fingers when he makes a promise. She told him that the children were sleeping peacefully in the darkness, though the elevator no longer worked. She felt that “God will do something.… The two movements—the Duma and the revolutionaries—are two snakes & I hope they bite each other’s heads off, which would save the situation.” They did so, too late.
Then she came back to Rasputin. “PS,” she wrote, “wear His cross, even if it is uncomfortable, for my peace of mind.”
Nicholas took soundings from his army commanders. Unanimously they recommended that he abdicate. During the late afternoon he had a heart-to-heart talk with Dr. Sergei Fedorov, his personal physician. He said that he would retire to the Crimea and devote himself to educating his son. The doctor doubted that a man who had abdicated would be allowed to bring up his son. The tsar was startled. He raised his son’s health. Rasputin had assured him that, if Alexis lived to seventeen, he would be healthy thereafter. Fedorov told him gently that—Rasputin’s miracles apart—Alexis could die at any time. “Then I cannot be separated from Alexis,” the tsar said. “It is beyond my strength.” He began to cry; then he took afternoon tea. Guchkov and Shulgin’s train arrived at Pskov at 10:00 P.M. The platform was lit by blue lanterns. They walked over to the drawing room car of the suite train, hung in green silk. They explained why the monarch must abdicate. “Literally no one supported the tsar,” Guchkov wrote. “Total emptiness surrounded the throne.” A fresh copy of the act of abdication was typed out. Nicholas signed it in pencil, indifferent to it all, “as others are when they scribble notes in pencil to a friend or make a list of dirty laundry.” Varnish was coated over the signature.
After the empress was brought the text of the abdication message; after she had said, “No, I do not believe it, these are all rumours, newspaper slander”; after she realized that her pride, her majesty, her life was as murdered as her Friend—then at length she collapsed, and whispered in French: “Abdique! Abdique!”
It was over. It took only a week for the revolution to obliterate the mortal remains of Grigory Rasputin. His body was exhumed on March 9 by members of an antiaircraft battery stationed in the imperial park at Tsarskoye Selo. The task was overseen by an artillery officer, Klimov. Rasputin’s face was found to have turned black, and an icon was found on his chest. It bore the signatures of Vyrubova, Alexandra, and her four daughters. The body was put into a packing case that had once held a piano and was driven in secret to the imperial stables in Petrograd. The next day it was loaded onto a truck and taken out of Petrograd on the Lesnoe Road.
Eight men were aboard the truck. Koupchinsky, a representative of the Duma provisional committee, which was emerging as the revolutionary government; V. Kolotsiev, a captain in the Sixteenth Lancer Regiment; and six student militiamen from the Petrograd Polytechnic. They signed an affidavit saying that they burned the body at the roadside near the forest of Pargolovo, “in the absolute absence of persons other than the signatories.”
It was, perhaps, inevitable that even this final accounting for Rasputin was untrue. Koupchinsky later admitted that he had been ordered by Alexander Kerensky, soon to be head of the new provisional government, to rebury the corpse at an unmarked spot in the countryside. But the truck broke down on the Lesnoe Road. A crowd gathered. They forced open the packing case, looking for gold, and discovered the corpse. Koupchinsky decided to burn it on the spot. His men cut down trees for a pyre, doused the corpse in gasoline, and set fire to it by the roadside.
The ashes were lost to the wind and the mud.