*5 Prime Minister Peter Stolypin also described Rasputin’s hypnotic glare, though in a less than glowing account: “He ran his pale eyes over me, mumbled mysterious and inarticulate words from Scriptures, made strange movements with his hands, and I began to feel an indescribable loathing for this vermin sitting opposite of me. Still, I did realize that the man possessed great hypnotic power, which was beginning to produce a fairly strong moral impression on me, though certainly one of revulsion. I pulled myself together.”
*6 See footnote on this page.
*7 See footnote on this page.
*8 Dowager Empress Marie had moved to Kiev in the midst of the government turmoil with the declaration that she “would not remain a witness of the shame any longer.” It was a move her daughter-in-law, the empress, eagerly welcomed: “It’s better Motherdear stays on at Kiev where the climate is milder and she can live more as she wishes and hears less gossip.”
*9 Despite the obvious dangers to his health, the tsarevitch often accompanied his father during the war, and stayed with him at headquarters. “It is very cosy to sleep by his side,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra of one father-son sojourn in October 1915. “I say prayers with him every night since the time we were on the train; he says his prayers too fast, and it is difficult to stop him. He was tremendously pleased with the review; he followed me, and stood the whole time while the troops were marching past, which was splendid. Before the evening we go out in a car … either into the wood or on the bank of a river, where we light a fire and I walk about nearby. He sleeps well, as I do, in spite of the bright light of his [icon lamp]. He wakes up early in the mornings between 7–8, sits up in bed and begins to talk quietly to me. I answer him drowsily, he settles down and is quiet until I am called.”
Nicholas II (1894–1917): A Bloody End
When I perish they will perish.
–RASPUTIN
By the end of 1916, Russia was seething with discontent. Bread lines were long, supplies scarce. The government was run by a band of rogues and incompetents, all personally selected at the whim of Empress Alexandra and her peasant cohort. Calls for violence were increasing. “To prevent a catastrophe, the Tsar himself must be removed, by terrorist methods if there is no other way,” shouted the socialist Alexander Kerensky. Indeed, Nicholas II would lose his throne in the throes of revolution, and, along with his family, face imprisonment, degradation, and eventually slaughter. But first there was the matter of Rasputin, the so-called Holy Devil, to be resolved.
On December 2, 1916, an archconservative monarchist by the name of Vladimir Purishkevich rose to speak before his colleagues in the Duma. The subject was Rasputin, and in the rousing oratory for which he was renowned, Purishkevich denounced “the evil genius of Russia”—the very devil threatening to destroy both the tsar and the nation. “It requires only the recommendation of Rasputin to raise the most abject citizen to high office,” he thundered. “The Tsar’s ministers … have been turned into marionettes, marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.” Then, in a concluding flourish greeted with wild applause, he challenged his peers:
“If you are truly loyal, if the glory of Russia, her mighty future which is closely bound up with the brightness of the name of Tsar mean anything to you, then on your feet, you Ministers. Be off to Headquarters and throw yourselves at the feet of the Tsar and beg permission to open his eyes to the dreadful reality, beg him to deliver Russia from Rasputin and the Rasputinites big and small. Have the courage to tell him that the multitude is threatening in its wrath. Revolution threatens and an obscure moujik [peasant] shall govern Russia no longer.”
While the rest of the audience stood and roared its approval, one man in the observation gallery remained seated, “pale and trembling,” as one witness noted, seething with inspired indignation. His name was Prince Felix Yussoupov, scion of one of Russia’s wealthiest families, a cross-dressing playboy,*1 and a relative of the Romanovs through marriage to the emperor’s only niece, Irina (daughter of Nicholas’s sister Xenia). The day after Purishkevich’s speech, an excited Yussoupov met with him privately to discuss the Rasputin problem.
“What can be done?” Purishkevich asked, recounting the conversation in his diary.
“Eliminate Rasputin,” Yussoupov replied with “an enigmatic smile” and unblinking, intensely focused eyes.
“That’s easy to say,” countered the Duma member. “But who will carry out such a deed when there are no decisive or resolute men left in Russia?”
“One cannot count upon the government,” Yussoupov answered. “But it is possible to find such people in Russia nevertheless.”
“You think so?
“I am confident of it,” was the reply, delivered with an icy calm, “and one of them stands before you.”
Soon enough, the two men made a murderous pact. To help carry out the deed, Yussoupov recruited his friend (and reputed lover) Grand Duke Dmitri, who after the exile of his father Paul*2 had been semi-adopted by his older cousin, the emperor. A young officer named Ivan Sukhotin and an army doctor, Stanislav Lazovert, completed the assassins circle. The plot was simple—though in execution it turned out to be anything but. The victim would be lured to one of Yussoupov’s palaces with the promise of meeting his beautiful wife, Irina, who was actually visiting the Crimea, and there the hated staretz would be slain.
Rasputin long had intimations of his own violent demise, which were often accompanied by warnings to the imperial family that if anything happened to him they would share his fate. “When I perish they will perish,” he once predicted. Shortly before his death he wrote to the tsar, “I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family.”
Despite this gloomy forecast, Rasputin happily went off to his assassin’s palace on the night of December 29, 1916—freshly bathed and dressed in his finest attire to meet the lovely Irina. A lethal reception awaited him, though certainly not the one his killers planned.
Yussoupov had spent weeks cultivating his victim. “My intimacy with Rasputin—so indispensable to our plan—increased each day,” he later wrote. And by the time of the murder the two appeared to be old pals. Rasputin was delighted, in fact, to add to his list of prominent acquaintances a man of such position and wealth, a powerful friend who was even willing to personally pick him up and drive him to his fateful date.
Killer and prey arrived shortly before midnight to a cellar room in the palace specially prepared for the murder. There was a cozy fire already burning in the hearth, and a tray full of Rasputin’s favorite cakes—each previously laced by Lazovert with what he assured the conspirators was enough cyanide to kill several men. Just in case, though, the wine was spiked as well. Irina was giving a party, Yussoupov told Rasputin, and she would meet them just as soon as she saw off the last of her guests. Meanwhile, the other assassins were waiting upstairs, playing “Yankee-Doodle” on the phonograph to provide a soundtrack for the grand duchess’s imaginary soirée.
Alone with the target, Yussoupov nervously offered him some of the cakes, which Rasputin proceeded to gobble down with slurping gulps of tainted wine. Instead of dropping dead, though, the staretz became mirthful and, spotting a guitar in the corner of the room, asked the prince to play some of the Gypsy music he favored so much. While Yussoupov all but sputtered out one song after another, Rasputin merrily tapped along, showing no ill effects from the poison whatsoever. After two and a half hours of this, Yussoupov wrote, “my head swam.”
In desperation, he excused himself under the pretext of checking on Irina and ran upstairs to consult with the other killers. Lazovert was useless, having already fainted twice from the tension, while Grand Duke Dmitri suggested they give up and go home. Purishkevich objected, however. They couldn’t just let Rasputin leave with all that cyanide surging in his system. What if he inconveniently expired somewhere else? “You wouldn’t have any objections if I just shot him, would
you?” the agitated Yussoupov finally asked the group. “It would be quicker and simpler.”
With Purishkevich’s revolver hidden behind his back, Yussoupov went back downstairs to find Rasputin clearly intoxicated from the poisoned wine—but most assuredly not dead. He suggested a visit to the Gypsies: “With God in thought, but mankind in the flesh,” the lecherous mystic said with a wink. The prince replied that it was too late to go out for such a romp and instead directed Rasputin’s attention to a crystal and silver crucifix standing in a richly ornate cabinet. The holy man declared that he actually preferred the cabinet to the cross, to which Yussoupov answered, “Gregory Efimovich, you’d far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer.” With that, the assassin fired at Rasputin’s chest; he dropped “like a broken marionette” on the white bearskin rug. The deed was done, or so it seemed.
Hearing the shot, the others rushed downstairs. Lazovert felt for a pulse and found none. Rasputin was then lifted off the carpet to avoid staining it with his blood, after which the other conspirators left the room to make preparations for the disposal of the body. Yussoupov was alone with what he thought was the corpse when one of Rasputin’s eyes flickered open, quickly followed by the second. “I saw both eyes,” recounted the prince—“the green eyes of a viper—staring at me with an expression of diabolical hatred.”
As Yussoupov stood there in frozen terror, Rasputin suddenly bolted up and seized his would-be murderer by the throat, tearing at his clothes. Horrified, the prince broke away and fled up the stairs, the staretz in pursuit like an enraged wounded beast. Purishkevich recalled hearing a “savage, inhuman, cry,” followed by his accomplice’s frightened command, “Purishkevich, fire, fire! He’s alive! He’s getting away!” Then, near the stairway, he saw Yussoupov, his eyes “bulging out of their sockets,” as he “hurled himself towards the door … [and into] his parents’ apartment.”
Now it was left to Purishkevich to finish the assassination that had descended into something of a farce. The staretz had staggered outside. “What I saw would have been a dream if it hadn’t been a terrible reality,” Purishkevich wrote. “Rasputin, who half an hour before lay dying in the cellar, was running quickly across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate which led to the street.… I couldn’t believe my eyes. But a harsh cry, which broke the silence of the night persuaded me. ‘Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!’ It was him, all right, Rasputin. In a few seconds, he would reach the iron gate.… I fired. The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate. I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head. I ran up and kicked him as hard as I could with my boot in the temple. He fell into the snow, tried to rise, but could only grind his teeth.”
By this time Yussoupov had reappeared and began viciously clubbing the fallen staretz as blood splattered the snow. The killers then rolled up the body in a curtain, tied it securely, proceeded to the frozen Neva River, and shoved the corpse through a hole in the ice. Now the Holy Devil really was dead. Or was he? According to some accounts, the autopsy performed on Rasputin after his body was eventually recovered from the river indicated there was water in his lungs. If true, it meant that after being poisoned, shot, and beaten, the staretz ultimately died by drowning.
News of his demise was greeted with jubilation in the capital, as if a dragon had at last been slain. The assassins were hailed as heroes, the national anthem was played and sung in churches, and people crowded into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan to give thanks. “The very cabmen in the street are rejoicing over the removal of Rasputin,” reported one British officer in the capital at the time, “and they and many others think that by this the German influence has received a check.”*3
Even the empress’s saintly sister Ella—the grand duchess turned nun—was exultant. “Prayed for you all darlings,” she telegraphed Grand Duke Dmitri, who was soon banished to the Persian front for his role in the murder. And to Yussoupov’s mother, Ella wired: “All my deepest and most tender prayers surround you all because of the patriotic act of your dear son. May God protect you all.”
Of course not all the royals were quite so ecstatic. “There is nothing heroic about Rasputin’s murder,” wrote the tsar’s sister Olga, still bristling fifty years after the fact. “It was … premeditated most vilely. Just think of the two names most closely associated with it even to this day—a Grand Duke [Dmitri], one of the grandsons of the Tsar-Liberator [Alexander II], and then a scion of one of our great houses [Yussoupov] whose wife was a Grand Duke’s [Sandro’s] daughter. That proved how low we had fallen.”
And though he was conveniently rid of a pesky interloper whom he indulged mostly for his wife (and son’s) sake, Nicholas II was nevertheless “filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant.” The emperor was merciless toward his cousin Dmitri, declaring, “Murder is murder,” and even a joint letter from a number of members of his extended family pleading for leniency left him unmoved. In fact, he was furious. “I allow no one to give me advice,” he wrote on the margin. “In any case, I know that the consciences of several who signed that letter are not clean.”
Through the swirl of family drama that resulted from the tsar’s harsh response, one essential truth remained: Nicholas was not wrong about some of his relatives’ clouded consciences. Indeed, quite a few of them had long been plotting against him and, especially, his wife. This was particularly true of the tsar’s domineering uncle Vladimir, once described by a visiting American as having a “fat and rather meaningless face,” which was accompanied by dangerous ambition. The grand duke was entirely contemptuous of his softhearted nephew and never quite accepted that it was Nicholas, not he, who sat on Russia’s throne. There were even genuine fears upon Alexander III’s death that Vladimir would try to seize the throne—just as there were six years later when Nicholas II nearly succumbed to typhoid fever in the fall of 1900.
After the grand duke’s death in 1909, his widow, Miechen, pursued her late husband’s grandiose schemes and barely hidden grudges with equal vigor. She had long despised the Empress Alexandra, who occupied a position Miechen deemed rightly hers (see Chapter 13), but by the time of Rasputin’s murder, simmering resentment had turned to rage as the grand duchess and other Romanovs felt the world upon which they rested so comfortably begin to crumble beneath them. They blamed this all on the empress and the disastrous policies she dictated to her husband. “She must be annihilated!” Miechen declared.
Amid all the jubilation and recriminations that surrounded Rasputin’s murder, Empress Alexandra quietly grieved for the holy man she once addressed as her “beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer and mentor.” Pierre Gilliard, the loyal tutor who would remain with the Romanovs almost to the very end, later wrote “how terribly she was suffering. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son had been slain. Now that he had gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe was possible.”
Before he was buried on the grounds of the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra placed in Rasputin’s coffin an icon signed by her whole family, as well as a written plea for his protection from above. As it turned out, the Holy Devil would not rest in peace for long. And given what was in store for the Romanovs, the efficacy of his heavenly intercessions on their behalf would have to be deemed negligible.
Emerging from the grave site, the empress dusted the dirt off her hands, raised her head high, and with defiance flashing through her gray-blue eyes, went forward with the work that still had to be done. God had given the Russian crown to her husband, and with faith in Gregori’s holy intercession from above, she would do everything she could to preserve it for her son. “From that point,” wrote biographer Robert K. Massie, “through the months left to her to live, Alexandra never wavered.”
S
uch fortitude in the face of personal tragedy might have been admirable, had it not been accompanied by the empress’s fatal determination to proceed along the same perilous path as before, the one that would eventually lead her and the rest of her family down the shaft of an abandoned mine pit. It was she who still ruled Russia while her husband passively stood by—a dynamic perfectly illustrated when Alexandra carved out a secret nook adjacent to Nicholas’s office, from where she could conveniently monitor all his conversations. She eventually installed a couch in the hidden space to lounge more comfortably as she eavesdropped.
The ministerial shuffle continued. Prime Minister Alexander Trepov was out, replaced by the aged and extremely reluctant Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, who ineffectively begged the tsar to reconsider the appointment. “If someone else had used the language I used to describe myself,” Golitsyn wrote, “I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel.” The only minister to consistently maintain his position was the half-mad Protopopov, who now believed he could channel the spirit of Rasputin. Yet still he was unable to get food supplies to the starving populace. Russia was hurtling toward revolution.
“It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall,” reported General Sir Henry Wilson, an old acquaintance of Alexandra, visiting Russia with an Allied mission. “Everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.”
The Dowager Empress Marie also noted the increasingly sinister mood and openly worried about her son and daughter-in-law’s apparent blindness to it. “All the bad passions seem to have taken possession of the capital,” she wrote to her daughter Xenia. “The hatred augments daily for her [Alexandra] that is disastrous, but doesn’t open eyes yet. One continues quietly to play with fire.… What my poor Nicky must suffer makes me mad to think! Just everything might have been so excellent after the man’s [Rasputin’s] disappearance and now it is all spoiled by her rage and fury, hatred and feeling of revenge!… so sad!” Then Marie’s letter took on a more ominous tone, one that seemed to echo her sister-in-law Miechen’s call for the empress’s annihilation: “Alexandra Feodorovna must be banished. I don’t know how but it must be done. Otherwise she might go completely mad. Let her enter a convent or just disappear.”
Secret Lives of the Tsars Page 28
