The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Purishkevich, who was drunk, drew his Sauvage pistol, ran downstairs and followed Rasputin into the courtyard. He took aim and fired twice, missed, fired again and hit his quarry. This bullet, penetrating his lower right back, passing through his right kidney, was not instantly fatal but it too might have killed him in twenty minutes.

  Rasputin fell in the snow, amateurishly wounded once by Yusupov and once by Purishkevich, but still just alive. Someone, possibly Purishkevich, possibly Dmitri, or someone else with a little more professional sangfroid, a British secret agent, such as Rayner, gave Rasputin the coup de grâce in the middle of this forehead, so point-blank that the skin was burned. It killed him instantly. Purishkevich kicked the body in the head, but the shots had attracted some soldiers in the street. ‘I killed Grishka Rasputin,’ he cried. ‘Enemy of Russia and the tsar.’

  ‘Glory to God!’ shouted the soldiers, kissing him and then helping him carry the body back into the palace.

  A policeman had also been alerted by the shots. Purishkevich swore him to secrecy and boasted of his patriotic deed (though the policeman immediately went to report what he had heard). Yusupov hysterically attacked the body with a dumbbell and then fainted. Someone shot a dog to explain the blood-spatter. Purishkevich, Dmitri and Lazovert wrapped Rasputin in a curtain and stowed him in the grand duke’s car. ‘Dmitri’, recalled Purishkevich, ‘was in an almost light-hearted mood.’ The grand duke drove out towards the Great Petrovsky Bridge. There around 6 a.m., as Dmitri stood guard, they swung the body into a hole in the ice of the frozen Little Neva, tossing one of his galoshes after him.3

  At his palace, the dazed Yusupov was now attended by the British secret agent Oswald Rayner, who may have been in the palace all along. Distancing himself from the crime scene, Yusupov moved to the residence of his parents-in-law, Sandro and Xenia, accompanied by Rayner: ‘He understands everything that has happened and is most anxious on my behalf.’

  Rasputin’s daughters called Anna Vyrubova and then the police. Anna hurried to the empress. Protopopov called. Rasputin was still missing. The policeman reported drunken ruffians bragging about the murder. The family waited.

  Dmitri and Yusupov both telephoned Alexandra asking for an audience, but Anna, manning the phone, refused: ‘If Felix has anything to say, let him write it to me.’ Her account continued: ‘Thoroughly aroused, the empress ordered Protopopov to investigate.’ When the police found Yusupov, escorted by Rayner, at Sandro’s palace, he claimed that the bloodstains in his courtyard belonged to a shot dog, but he added that ‘my wife is a niece of the emperor’ who alone could order an investigation. The police found the dead dog.

  That night, Protopopov phoned Alexandra: Yusupov and Rayner were boarding a train for Crimea. The empress placed the prince under house arrest.

  ‘We are sitting together – can you imagine our feelings,’ she wrote to the emperor. ‘Our Friend has disappeared’ after ‘a big scandal at Yusupov’s house, Dmitri, Purishkevich drunk, police heard shots, Purishkevich ran out screaming that Our Friend was killed. The police are searching.’ Yusupov had set ‘quite a paw’ – a trap. ‘I can’t and won’t believe He has been killed. God have mercy. Such utter anguish (am calm and can’t believe it). Kisses Sunny.’

  ‘What an awful thing!’ Nicky telegraphed back overnight.

  ‘Just took communion in home chapel,’ she telegraphed at 11.42 next morning, 18 December. ‘Searchings continue,’ but she now feared a coup. ‘There’s a danger that the two boys [Dmitri and Yusupov] are organizing something still worse . . . I need your presence terribly.’

  ‘Leaving at 4.30,’ wrote Nicky.

  ‘Ordered in your name to forbid Dmitri to leave his home. He is the main one involved,’ she reported at 3 p.m. ‘Body not found.’

  At Stavka in Mogilev, ‘We went on our afternoon stroll, talked about things,’ recalled the emperor’s aide-de-camp Anatoly Mordvinov, who was with him. But Nicky had not yet read the key telegram. ‘Only now read your letter,’ wrote Nicholas at 6.38 p.m. ‘Anguished and horrified. Arrive tomorrow at 4.’

  The police found the galosh on the ice, but the cold delayed the divers. In the morning on 19 December, ‘They found the body in the water,’ she telegraphed Stavka. ‘Thoughts, prayers together.’ The children were shocked, but only the eldest Olga understood, asking, ‘I know he did much harm, but why did they treat him so cruelly?’

  Rasputin was frozen solid. First the body was taken to hospital to thaw. Then Dr Dmitri Kosorotov identified the three bullet wounds, but found no evidence that Rasputin had still been alive and breathing in the river. On the contrary, the shot in the forehead caused instant death.

  That afternoon, the autocrat, accompanied by Uncle Pitz, arrived back at Tsarskoe. ‘I am filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant,’ he said, while the dynasty, public and society celebrated Rasputin’s murder.

  ‘No! No!’ cried the dowager empress. Her view was ‘Lord be praised for taking away Rasputin but we’re in much greater trouble.’ Ella telegraphed Zinaida Yusupova: ‘God bless your dear son for his patriotic act.’ Her note was perlustrated by the secret police who copied it to Nicky and Alix. They must also have reported British involvement because one of the first things the emperor did was summon the ambassador Sir George Buchanan and demand to know the role of ‘British officers’.

  ‘Not a word of truth,’ replied Buchanan, apart from Yusupov’s friendship with Rayner. But a week later, Captain Alley reported to Scale: ‘Dear Scale . . . Although matters here have not proceeded entirely to plan, our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of ‘Dark Forces’ has been well received, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement. Rayner is attending to loose ends.’

  The murder of Rasputin had been an amateurish operation, ‘carried out’, wrote Trotsky, ‘in the manner of a scenario designed for people of bad taste’. But Yusupov’s and Purishkevich’s accounts, quoted above, are incomplete and melodramatic. The post-mortem found no evidence of cyanide poisoning – perhaps it had deteriorated, perhaps it had been neutralized by the wine – but none of the memoirs mentions the pointblank shot in Rasputin’s forehead. Were they ashamed to have executed an unconscious peasant in cold blood – or did someone else deliver the coup de grâce? There is no proof that British agents were present at the murder nor that they participated, while Alley’s letter, if genuine, as it seems to be, is ambiguous and proves only that the British were informed afterwards. But Rayner, whether officially or in his capacity as friend, was very close at hand; it seems the British were somehow involved.

  At 8 a.m. on 21 December 1916, a police van delivered Rasputin’s zinc coffin to Tsarskoe Selo’s almost completed St Seraphim of Sarov Church. The emperor and empress, together with their daughters (but not Alexei, who was poorly), arrived by limousine and the crippled Anna by sleigh – but Alexandra did not invite Rasputin’s own daughters, who resented their callous exclusion. The empress gripped a white bouquet and sobbed when she saw the coffin. ‘My family and I witnessed a sad scene,’ wrote Nicholas. ‘The burial of the unforgettable Grigory, assassinated by monsters at the home of Yusupov.’ Afterwards Alexandra invited Anna to move into the Alexander Palace for her own safety, while Rasputin’s daughters were brought to Tsarskoe. There Nicholas II ‘was very emotional and tender with us’, promising ‘I’ll try to replace your father.’ Alexandra gave the Rasputins 100,000 roubles and often visited Rasputin’s grave. The tsar’s children were unsurprisingly gloomy and fearful, asking their father’s ADC, Mordvinov, to join them in their room, where they clung together on the sofa.

  The killing changed little because Nicholas and Alexandra, not Rasputin, were the true authors of their own political plight. Rasputin usually just confirmed and blessed their prejudices. Far from saving the monarchy, the murder emasculated it. On 21 December, a Romanov cabal, including Uncle Pitz (Dmitri’s father), Sandro (Yusupov’s father-in
-law) and Miechen, met to protect the killers. They sent Sandro to ask the tsar not to prosecute.

  ‘A very nice speech, Sandro,’ Nicky replied to Sandro’s plea. ‘Are you aware nobody has the right to kill, be it grand duke or peasant?’ Sandro became less reasonable. ‘In a voice that could easily be heard in the corridor outside,’ wrote Anna, ‘he shouted that should the emperor refuse, the throne itself would fall.’

  Nicholas’s mother asked him to close the case against Dmitri. ‘Prosecution immediately stopped. Embrace you. Nicky.’ Instead the tsar banished Yusupov to a Kursk estate and Dmitri to join the army in Persia. The murder divided the killers for ever. ‘That will always be a dark stain on my conscience . . . Murder will always be murder, I never speak about it,’ Dmitri later wrote to Yusupov. ‘You talk about it. You practically brag that you did it with your own hands,’ although ‘there’s no nobility whatsoever in that deed’. But even Alexei was appalled that his father had not really punished the murderers: ‘Papa, is it possible that you won’t punish them? The assassins of Stolypin were hanged.’

  On 29 December, sixteen Romanovs, led by Miechen and Bimbo, met at the Vladimir Palace on Millionaya Street to sign a letter appealing for Dmitri not to be sent to disease-riddled Persia, which would be ‘the same as outright death’. The tsar regarded this as a family revolt.

  ‘No one has the right to commit murder,’ the tsar wrote on the letter. ‘I know that many are troubled by their conscience and Dmitri is not the only one implicated in this. I’m surprised by your request.’ He banished Bimbo and Miechen’s sons to their estates.

  The sovereigns must have recalled Rasputin’s warning: ‘If I die or you desert me, you’ll lose your son and your crown in six months.’4

  The day of the Romanov ‘revolt’, the tsar sacked Trepov, premier for forty-seven days, and replaced him with Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, an old mediocrity who had served on Alexandra’s charity committee – he was ‘soft’, wrote Sandro, ‘he understood nothing.’ Protopopov, who held séances to consult Rasputin, remained the strongman. Sandro warned Nicky that ‘Strange as it may seem the government today is the organ that is preparing revolution.’ But the other Romanovs were less restrained.

  Miechen summoned Rodzianko to the Vladimir Palace: ‘Things must be changed, removed, destroyed . . .’

  ‘Removed?’ asked Rodzianko.

  ‘She must be annihilated.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The empress.’

  ‘Your Highness, allow me to treat this conversation as if it had never happened.’ Even the tsar’s mother now wanted Alexandra ‘banished. Otherwise she might go completely mad. Let her enter a convent or just disappear.’

  Sir George Buchanan advised the tsar that the army was now unreliable and he must regain the people’s confidence.

  ‘You tell me I must regain the confidence of the people. Isn’t it rather for my people to regain my confidence?’ Buchanan started to brief in favour of Nicholas’s abdication. Rodzianko gave Nicholas the same advice. ‘Is it possible that for twenty-two years I tried to act for the best and for twenty-two years it was all a mistake?’ asked the tsar.

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty, for twenty-two years, you followed the wrong course.’

  Rasputin’s killing gave Nicholas the political cover to remove Alexandra from politics and choose a unifying prime minister. The past could be blamed on the starets. But he did not take that course. His courtier Mosolov tried to warn him. ‘How can even you, Mosolov, talk to me about danger to the dynasty which right now everyone is trying to din into me? Can you too who have been with me during my inspections of troops also get frightened?’

  Sandro made a last appeal to the couple at the Alexander Palace as Alexandra lay in bed and Nicky, wearing a cherkesska coat, smoked. ‘Please Alix, leave the cares of state to your husband,’ he said.

  Alix ‘blushed. She looked at Nicky. He said nothing and continued to smoke.’ Sandro turned to her.

  ‘I never said a word to you about the disgraceful goings-on in our government, better to say your government. I realize you’re willing to perish and your husband feels the same way. But what about us? Must we suffer your blind stubbornness?’

  ‘I refuse to continue this dispute,’ she said coldly. ‘You’re exaggerating the danger. Some day when you’re less excited, you’ll admit I knew better.’

  The next day, Sandro returned with Misha to see the tsar, who once again smoked dreamily as his brother beseeched him to reform before it was too late. Misha and his wife, Natasha, both wanted a constitutional government. Misha, now inspector-general of cavalry, had been redeemed by the war, commanding the Savage Division of Caucasian troops with courage, serving under General Brusilov who praised this ‘absolutely honourable and upright man, taking no sides and lending himself to no intrigues; as a soldier he was an excellent leader’. Before Misha left for Petrograd, Brusilov had asked him to ‘explain to the tsar the need for immediate drastic reforms’.

  ‘I am of no consequence,’ replied Misha. But he was about to find out that he was of consequence.

  Nicholas called in Prime Minister Golitsyn and announced that he would appoint a new ministry. But the next day he changed his mind – though he allowed the Duma to reopen.

  On 21 February 1917, Anna observed that ‘all his instincts warned him against leaving Tsarskoe Selo at that time’. The following day, as Alexandra ‘prayed and Our dear Friend does so in yonder world’, and as she urged him to ‘let them feel your fist at all times’, the emperor, accompanied by old Frederiks and his trusty black American Jim Hercules, returned to the deceptive calm of Stavka.5

  ‘My brain feels rested here, no ministers and no fidgety questions,’ he noted. But ‘it’s so quiet in this house, no rumbling about, no excited shouts! If I’m free here I think I will turn to dominoes again,’ he replied, weary of his wife’s nagging. ‘What you write about being firm – the master – is perfectly true . . . but I need not bellow at people right and left. A quiet sharp remark is enough very often to put one or the other in their place.’ Snowstorms had halted supplies for the troops. ‘Quite horribly anguishing.’

  The next day, 24 February, as Olga and Alexei then Anna came down with measles, ‘there were rows because the poor people stormed the breadshops’ in Petrograd, Alexandra reported to Nicholas. ‘The Cossacks were called out against them . . . but it’s in [Petrograd Military Governor Sergei] Khabalov’s hands.’ The tsar’s calm was not complete madness: Protopopov had arrested all socialist leaders. While there were only 6,000 police in Petrograd, ‘reliable’ Naval Guards strengthened the 160,000-strong garrison. Plans were made to suppress any uprising. On International Women’s Day, female textile workers demonstrated shouting ‘Give us bread.’ Surely Khabalov could cope with a few women? Back in Mogilev, ‘I know the situation is very alarming,’ Nicholas told Mogilev’s governor, but militarily ‘we are stronger than ever before. Soon in the spring will come the offensive and I believe God will give us victory and then moods will change.’

  On 25 February, Misha, who now featured as regent in many conspiracies, noticed ‘disorders on Nevsky Prospect today. Workmen were going about with red flags and throwing grenades and bottles at the police so the troops had to open fire.’ On Znamenskaya Square, a Cossack, traditional guardian of the Romanovs, killed a Gendarme. Protopopov reported to Alexandra that the disorders were spreading as virtually all the factories went on strike. ‘It’s a hooligan movement, young boys and girls running about and screaming they have no bread, only to excite and then the workmen preventing others from work,’ she told Nicholas. If only the cold would return – the temperature had risen above freezing – the crowds would stay at home. ‘But this will all pass and quieten down . . . No shooting required, only order and not let them cross the bridges. That food question is maddening.’

  At nine o’clock that evening, Nicholas telegraphed Khabalov: ‘I command you tomorrow to stop the disorders in the capital.’

  Though coping
with a house full of sick children, Alexandra had received a number of foreigners on the 25th, but lay low the next day. As many as 200,000 people were now on Petrograd’s streets with cab and tram drivers on strike. Overnight, Protopopov and the ministers met with generals and Duma members at the Mariinsky Palace ‘to take severe measures’. ‘I hope Khabalov will know how to stop those street rows quickly,’ Nicky wrote back to Alix on 26 February. ‘Protopopov ought to give clear instructions. Only that old Golitsyn [prime minister] doesn’t lose his head!’ But he was feeling the strain: ‘I felt an excruciating pain in the middle of my chest . . . and my forehead was covered with beads of sweat’ as he prayed.

  Khabalov’s troops fired on the demonstrators. The protests flickered then flared again. Misha, observing the streets, noticed that ‘the disorders have gathered momentum. 200 killed.’

  At Tsarskoe, on that fine sunny day, Alexandra, wearing her Red Cross nurse’s uniform, and Maria prayed at Rasputin’s grave – ‘he died to save us’ – but she reassured Nicky that ‘It’s not like 1905. All adore you and only want bread.’

  Yet in Petrograd the streets were out of control and the president of the Duma, Rodzianko, was drafting a bombshell telegram informing the emperor that ‘Popular uprisings are taking on uncontrollable and threatening dimensions . . . Your Majesty, save Russia . . . Urgently summon a person in whom the whole country can have faith and entrust him with the formation of a government . . . Any procrastination is tantamount to death.’