Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  Twenty-one years later, on October 15th 1967, less than a month after the death of Felix Youssoupoff, Coward finishes reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. ‘It really is such an appalling story,’ he writes in his diary. ‘The Tsar amiable, kindly and stupid, and the Tsarina, a hysterical ass. The most fascinating character to emerge is, as usual, Rasputin. What an extraordinary phenomenon! His murder is brilliantly described and coincides in every detail with what Dmitri told me years ago. The only thing I query is that Youssoupoff lured Rasputin to his house to meet his wife Irina, who was in the Crimea. Rasputin would have known this perfectly well. The truth, I think, is that Rasputin had a tiny little lech on Youssoupoff himself.’

  Oddly enough, this accords with what Duff Cooper first suspected, fifty years earlier.

  PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF

  MURDERS

  GRIGORI RASPUTIN

  The Moika Palace, St Petersburg

  December 29th 1916

  If, as Noël Coward suspects, Rasputin has a tiny little lech on Prince Felix Youssoupoff, it is a lech that backfires.

  At their first meeting, in 1909, Youssoupoff draws back in horror. ‘There was something about him which disgusted me ... He had a low, common face, framed by a shaggy beard, coarse features and a long nose, with small shifty grey eyes ... He was not in the least like a holy man: on the contrary he looked like a lascivious, malicious satyr. There was something base in his unctuous countenance; something wicked, crafty and sensual.’

  But others are captivated. By 1916, Rasputin’s hold over the Tsarina is more powerful than ever, so much so that some think it threatens the very stability of the state. Youssoupoff and his aristocratic friends decide to do away with him. They plan to gain his trust, then lure him to his death.

  By chance, only a few days later, a mutual friend tells Youssoupoff that Rasputin wants to see him again. The two men meet. Even though Rasputin has spruced himself up in his smartest blue-silk blouse and velvet breeches, Youssoupoff continues to find him offputting. ‘His offensive familiarity and insolent assurance made him seem still more obnoxious.’ He feigns intense fatigue, which Rasputin, as if on cue, offers to cure. They meet for several surgeries, Rasputin attempting to cure the bogus fatigue through hypnosis.

  The day of reckoning finally arrives. Rasputin accepts Youssoupoff’s invitation to spend an evening at his home. ‘The simple way in which he consented to everything, and even went out of his way to make things easier for me, horrified and surprised me.’

  Youssoupoff plans to murder Rasputin in the cellar. To make Rasputin feel at home, he decorates it with curtains, carpets, ancient embroideries and a selection of charming knick-knacks. His fellow conspirators drop round. The doctor among them, Lazovert, puts on rubber gloves, grinds the cyanide to powder, and places poison on each cake ‘sufficient to kill several men instantly’, and into several glasses as well. Rasputin arrives, smartly dressed for the evening’s entertainment in a silk blouse embroidered in cornflowers, a thick, raspberry-coloured belt and his velvet breeches. He has even gone to the trouble of brushing his hair and combing his beard. Youssoupoff notes, too, the smell of cheap soap.

  As he helps him off with his overcoat, a feeling of great pity sweeps over Youssoupoff, who has accompanied Rasputin to the house. ‘I was ashamed of the despicable deceit, the horrible trickery to which I was obliged to resort ... I looked at my victim with dread, as he stood before me, quiet and trusting. What had become of his second sight?’

  From upstairs comes the sound of his co-conspirators chatting while ‘Yankee Doodle Went to Town’ plays on the gramophone. ‘Is there a party going on?’ asks Rasputin. Youssoupoff explains that his wife is entertaining a few friends: she will be down soon. ‘Meanwhile, let’s have a cup of tea in the dining room.’

  They go downstairs. Youssoupoff offers Rasputin wine, but he refuses. They gossip about mutual friends. Youssoupoff offers him some cake. He refuses, but then he changes his mind. He has another, but the poison does not seem to be working.

  Rasputin accepts a glass of wine, then asks for some Madeira. He holds out the same glass, but Youssoupoff contrives to drop it, allowing him to pour the Madeira into a glass containing extra cyanide. Rasputin accepts a second glass of Madeira. He complains of a tickle in his throat and puts his head in his hands. Things are looking up. He asks for another cup of tea. ‘I’m very thirsty.’

  He seems to rally. Spotting a guitar, he asks Youssoupoff to play a tune. By now, two hours have passed since his arrival at the palace. Youssoupoff finds an excuse to nip upstairs, where he consults with his friends. They are impatient: why can’t they just come down and strangle him? Youssoupoff urges discretion: he will return to the basement alone, with a revolver.

  On his return, Rasputin is complaining of a headache and stomach pains, and suggests that another glass of wine might do the trick. He drinks it in a single gulp; it seems to revive him. He starts to admire a crystal crucifix: how much did it cost? Enough is enough. Youssoupoff produces his revolver, tells Rasputin to say a prayer, and pulls the trigger. Rasputin lets out a wild scream and crumples to the floor.

  The conspirators rush in. They watch Rasputin’s fingers twitch as blood spreads over his silk blouse. His body goes still. The doctor declares Rasputin dead. They all go upstairs, leaving Rasputin’s body below. But before long, Youssoupoff is filled with ‘an irresistible impulse’ to go back downstairs. ‘Rasputin lay exactly where we had left him. I felt his pulse: not a beat.’

  For some reason, Youssoupoff seizes the corpse and shakes it violently. Without warning, the left eyelid quivers, and slight tremors contract the face. The left eye pops open, and a few seconds later the right eye too. ‘I then saw both eyes – the green eyes of a viper – staring at me with an expression of diabolical hatred.’

  Rasputin leaps to his feet, foaming at the mouth. With a wild roar, he makes a grab for Youssoupoff. ‘His eyes were bursting from their sockets, blood oozed from his lips ... it was the reincarnation of Satan himself who held me in his clutches.’ They struggle. Youssoupoff breaks free. Rasputin falls on his back, gasping horribly.

  Youssoupoff rushes upstairs, shouting for help. Rasputin follows him, ‘gasping and roaring like a wounded animal’. He manages to stumble out to the courtyard, and is struggling in the direction of the entrance when Youssoupoff’s co-conspirator Pourichkevitch shoots him four times at close quarters. Rasputin is dead at last.79

  Towards the end of his long life, Youssoupoff is asked if he has any regrets over the murder of Rasputin. ‘No,’ he replies, ‘I shot a dog.’

  GRIGORI RASPUTIN

  TESTS THE PATIENCE OF

  TSAR NICHOLAS II

  Tsarskoye Selo, nr St Petersburg

  June 21st 1915

  Eighteen months before he dies, Rasputin receives a rap over the knuckles from Tsar Nicholas II himself.

  As Rasputin’s influence on the Tsarina has grown, so has his reputation for drunken debauchery. In 1911, an editorial in an Orthodox periodical describes him as a ‘sex maniac and a charlatan’, and by 1915 this is pretty much the view of the country at large. The Tsar, on the other hand, tries to think of him as ‘a good, simple-minded religious Russian’, while the Tsarina goes much further, addressing him as ‘My beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor’, and adding, ‘I am asking for your Holy Blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you for ever.’

  She reveres his wisdom. ‘When he says not to do a thing and one does not listen, one sees one’s fault always afterwards.’

  Meanwhile, the secret police have been keeping close tabs on Rasputin’s daily routine:

  February 12th

  Rasputin and an unknown woman went to house 15/17 on Troitskaya Street ... at 4.30 in the morning he came back with six drunken men and a guitar. They remained till six, singing and dancing.

  March 11th

  At 10.15 a.m. Rasputin was seen on Gorokhovaya Street and followed to No. 8 Pushkin Street, hom
e of the prostitute Tregubova, from there he went to the bathhouse.

  14 May

  At 5.00 p.m. he drove to No. 15 Malaya Dvoryanskaya St. At 10.00 p.m. one of the windows in the flat was unlit, but one of the detectives could see a woman leave the lighted room to look into the dark one, she quickly ran back. Then Rasputin could be seen running out of the dark room, he grabbed his hat and coat and ran out on to the street with two men chasing him. They just ran out, called out, ‘There he goes,’ and went back inside. Rasputin jumped in to a cab at a run and went down Liteiny Prospekt looking anxiously over his shoulder.

  And so forth. It is the job of the police both to keep track of Rasputin’s behaviour and to keep it under wraps. But one day he goes too far. After praying at the tombs of the saints, he visits his favourite restaurant, the Villa Rhode, with a boisterous group of followers. They drink heavily, particularly Rasputin himself, who starts to brag about his relationship with the Tsarina. He points to his embroidered blouse and says that ‘the old woman’ sewed it for him, and goes on to make increasingly lewd comments about her.

  A fellow diner questions whether he is really Rasputin: can he prove it? In reply, Rasputin unbuttons his fly and waves his penis around.80 This, he boasts, is the way he behaves in the presence of the Tsar. He adds that he has often had his way with ‘the old girl’. He then hands out a series of notes with mottoes such as ‘Love Unselfishly’.

  By chance, the British Ambassador to Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, is present in the same restaurant that evening. ‘A violent fracas in one of the private rooms. Wild shrieks of a woman, a man’s curses, broken glass and the banging of doors. Headwaiters rushed upstairs. The manager sent for the police ... But the row and roaring continued ... The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin – drunk and lecherous ...’ Eventually, Rasputin is dragged away by the police, snarling and vowing revenge.

  The news reaches the Governor of Moscow, who makes a report to the assistant minister of internal affairs, Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, who submits a bowdlerised report to the Tsar, who in turn places it, unread, to one side. But then a new minister of internal affairs, no friend to Rasputin, commissions a re-investigation by Dzhunkovsky, incorporating it into a much more detailed report on Rasputin’s way of life. This final report is once again submitted to the Tsar, who this time reads it all the way through. What is to be done?

  On June 21st, the Tsar sends for Rasputin and demands an explanation. Rasputin says that he is only human, and as much a sinner as the next man, but he would never have exposed himself or referred in any way disrespectfully to the Imperial Family. The Tsar is far from convinced, and orders him to leave the capital. As he departs, Rasputin mutters to one of the guards, ‘Your Dzhunkovksy is finished.’ Leaving Moscow with, as it were, his tail between his legs, Rasputin nevertheless remarks to his escort that ‘life for seekers after truth and righteousness can sometimes be very hard’. On the steamer home, he gets into a fight with two fellow passengers, accuses the steward of theft, and falls into a drunken stupor.

  The Tsarina is handed Dzhunkovsky’s report and immediately bursts into tears. She calls it a pack of lies, and breathlessly urges the Tsar to sack its author. ‘I long knew Dzhunkovsky hates Grigory ... If we let our Friend be persecuted we and our country shall suffer for it ... I am so weary such heartache and pain fr. all this – the idea of dirt being spread about one we venerate is more than horrible.

  ‘If Dzhunkovsky is with you, call him, tell him you order him to tear it up and not to dare to speak of Grigory as he does and that he acts as a traitor.

  ‘Ah my love when at last will you thump with your hand upon the table and scream at Dzhunkovsky and others when they act wrongly – one does not fear you – and one must – they must be frightened of you otherwise all sit upon us.’

  Once again, the Tsar changes tack, and acts on his wife’s advice. In September, he dismisses Dzhunkovsky, allowing Rasputin to re-establish his place at court. The Tsarina pens a letter to her husband reminding him to hold Rasputin’s holy trinkets for good luck: ‘Remember to keep the Image in your hand again and several times to comb your hair with His comb before the sitting of the ministers ...’

  TSAR NICHOLAS II

  IS TRICKED BY

  HARRY HOUDINI

  Kremlin Square, Moscow

  May 23rd 1903

  The Tsar and Tsarina believe in magic. Séances and table-tappings are de rigueur among their court, and no palace is complete without its domestic ghost, ready to play a suitably eerie tune on the piano whenever a member of the family is dying.

  Over the years, Nicholas and Alexandra have allowed themselves to be guided by a succession of wolshebniks, or miracle men, the more outlandish the better. The roster includes Matronushka Bosoposhka, ‘Matrona, the barefooted one’, who, it is thought, can tell the future; Vasili Tkatchenko, an elderly soothsayer much given to grave pronouncements on foreign policy; and Philippe Vachot, a former butcher’s assistant from Lyons, who offers the full range of spiritualism, hypnotism and faith healing. M. Philippe, as he styles himself, is a dab hand at conjuring up the spirits of the Tsar’s predecessors, who encourage the Tsar to be vigorous in his suppression of dissent. But M. Philippe’s reputation for determining the sex of unborn children takes a tumble when the Tsar’s next child turns out to be not a son, as predicted, but a girl, Anastasia. Two years later, M. Philippe declares once again that the Tsarina is pregnant with a son, but this prediction too proves faulty: she isn’t pregnant after all. Vachot is paid off, and booted back to Paris.

  In May of the same year, Harry Houdini, the greatest magician the world has ever seen, sets off from Berlin for Russia on the next stage of his European tour. ‘We leave for Moscow this evening, and I hope they will not send me to Siberia,’ he writes in his American newspaper column.

  His welcome is decidedly lukewarm. At the border town of Alexandrowo, patrolmen ransack his luggage. When they find a selection of burglary tools, they cut up rough until Houdini produces the necessary permit.

  Houdini does not like travelling in Russia. ‘I think that a butcher in America would hesitate before he would ship his cattle in one of these third-class trains. There is nothing that I have ever witnessed that has equalled it,’ he tells his readers.

  But the Russians are soon captivated by him. In Moscow, he manages to escape from a Siberian Transport Cell in the old Butirskaya prison, even after a full body-search that is supervised by the head of the secret police. The newspapers say it can only be explained by Houdini’s extraordinary ability to dematerialise. In fact, he wears a false finger, in which he stores a miniature metal-cutting tool and a coil of wire with sawed teeth, of the type used by surgeons for cutting through skulls. The wonders never cease. After a private performance, a Moscow newspaper gasps, ‘Mr Houdini, in front of a serious committee, was able to turn into a woman, then turn into a baby, then come back to his regular appearance.’ People believe what they want to believe.

  Small wonder, then, that Houdini is soon summoned to entertain the royal household. On the evening of May 23rd, the Tsar and Tsarina attend a performance at the home of the Tsar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, which overlooks Kremlin Square. After a few mind-reading tricks, Houdini asks each guest to jot down on a piece of paper an impossible task. The papers are gathered and placed into a hat. Houdini then asks the Grand Duke to fish one out and read it to him. The Grand Duke looks at the piece of paper he has picked, and shakes his head.

  ‘I am afraid that this task will be impossible for even such a wonder-worker as you,’ he says.

  ‘To make the impossible possible is my job,’ replies Houdini.

  The Tsar is impatient to know what the task is.

  ‘Can you ring the bells of the Kremlin?’ reads the Grand Duke. The women in the room start to giggle. They all know that the bells of the Kremlin have not pealed for over a century, and the ropes have all rotted to dust.

  But Houdini remains unabashed. He walks over to the large window over
looking Kremlin Square and beckons his audience to gather around him. He pulls a handkerchief from one pocket and a container full of purple powder from another and proceeds to sprinkle the powder onto the handkerchief. Then he waves his handkerchief in solemn arcs, and recites this mysterious incantation:

  Powder travel through the night,

  Your assignation before dawn’s light,

  From Seventh Heaven to deepest Hell,

  Do your bidding and ring the bell!

  With that, he throws open one of the great windows. There is a pause, and suddenly the bells of the Kremlin begin to ring. Everyone is amazed. It is, they declare, a miracle.

  Oh no it isn’t. Unbeknownst to them, Houdini’s new assistant, Franz Kukol, was standing on a balcony of the hotel across the square. At the sight of the prearranged signal of the handkerchief being waved, he aimed an air rifle at the bells and fired a volley of shots, causing them to ring.

  After it is all over, the Tsar is particularly impressed by the way Houdini refuses any sort of payment. What he does not know is that the magician has been tipped off by Grand Duke Sergei’s wife that the royal family regards anyone who accepts payment as a menial. Instead, Houdini accepts a variety of gifts for these private shows: an antique champagne ladle, expensive rings, a fluffy white Pomeranian called Charlie.

  Houdini performs again for the Tsar. On his return to America, he boasts that the Tsar wanted him to become an official adviser, but that he refused, saying his art was not for one family, or even one country, but for the world. Grigori Rasputin soon steps in to fill this void. Before very long, the Tsarina grows convinced that he has been sent by God. In 1912 Houdini is contacted by suspicious Russian court officials, who want him to come and expose Rasputin. Houdini, who enjoys unmasking charlatans, considers making the trip, but decides to stay put.