To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History)

by Cook, Andrew

  Reluctantly, perhaps. Officer Efimov was fifty-nine and hardly looking for trouble. A moment later he saw the beat policeman, Vlasuk, coming across the Pochamski Bridge over the canal from the Moika side. He too had heard shots but he thought they were fired somewhere near the German church on the Moika. But Efimov insisted the bangs had come from number 92. Vlasuk, ten years younger but probably no more keen than Efimov to hunt down a gunman in the middle of the night, turned back to investigate.

  Questioned by Popel, Vlasuk confirmed that there had been ‘three or four gunshots one after another’. The yardkeeper at number 92 hadn’t heard a thing, he said, but then Vlasuk looked through the fence and saw ‘two people wearing tunics and no hats’.

  When they approached us I recognised them. It was Prince Yusupov and his butler Byzhinski. I asked the latter who had fired the shots. Byzhinski replied that he had not heard any shots. However it was possible that somebody could have fired a toy pistol for fun. I think the Prince also said that he had not heard the shots.

  They left. Vlasuk claims that he stayed there, looked through the fence, and saw nothing suspicious in the yard or the street. Then he went back to his post, not bothering to report the incident ‘because I often heard similar sounds being made by burst car tyres’. Fifteen or twenty minutes later Byzhinski came, saying that Prince Yusupov would like to see him. There followed the interview in which Purishkevich allegedly said to Vlasuk:

  ‘Are you Christian Orthodox?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know me?’

  I replied that I didn’t.

  ‘Have you heard of Purishkevich?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am Purishkevich. Have you heard of Rasputin and do you know him?’

  I replied that I did not know Rasputin but had heard of him. The stranger then told me that he – Rasputin – had perished.

  ‘And if you love the Tsar and the Fatherland, you are to keep quiet about it and not tell anything to anybody.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Now you may go.’

  I turned around and went back to my post. It was very quiet in the house and I did not see anybody apart from the Prince, the stranger and Byzhinski… I checked the street and yard again, but everything was still quiet and I did not see anybody. About 20 minutes later Inspector Kalyadich approached me at my post and I told him about the incident. Then Kalyadich and I went to the front entrance of building number 94 [the Yusupov Palace]. We saw a car ready to go at the front entrance. We asked the driver who the car was waiting for. He replied that it was for the Prince. Kalyadich ordered me to stay there and watch who was going to use the car… Prince Yusupov alone came out of the front door and drove away towards the Potselyev Bridge… I waited by the door of that building for some time. I did not notice anyone else and returned to my post. It was shortly past 5.00a.m. Kalyadich returned from his rounds after ten or fifteen minutes… The car belonged to the Prince. He always used it. I know this car well. It is small and brown in colour. I had not noticed any signs of a murder and explained the conversation with the stranger in the study as some kind of test of my knowledge of my responsibilities. Meaning a test of my actions following such an announcement…10

  Popel interviewed one other person, who had somehow been left out of the interrogations at the Yusupov Palace the day before. This was a young man called Bobkov, the palace watchman. He too had heard shots – two of them, not very loud; he thought they had come from some nearby street, but then, he had been some way away at the time – outside building number 96 – and ‘I did not pay any attention to the sounds assuming they were the sounds of frost or drain pipes’. He had heard no scream. He had seen nothing suspicious. He had seen no cars coming or going. And ‘my eyesight is extremely poor due to my war injury’. Lucky to get the job as a watchman, then.

  The nineteen-year-old yard man at number 92 Moika, the three-storey Yusupov house next door in whose yard the crime appeared to have taken place, who claimed to have been sweeping the pavement outside it from two o’clock in the morning onwards, was sure that the gunshots he had faintly heard had come from a nearby street.

  Yusupov spent the Sunday afternoon in the Anglo-Russian Hospital upstairs from Dmitri Pavlovich’s having a fish-bone removed from his throat. He and Dmitri

  …were sought by the supporters of Rasputin on the pretext of visiting some wounded patients. Lady Sybil Grey confronted them [the Rasputinists] and refused them admission to her hospital. Like everyone else in Petrograd she was well aware that Yusupov was the murderer and wrote ‘there was an uproar of excitement and thankfulness, workers toasting him, nuns blessing him.’ Only the Tsarina dissented.11

  Dmitri’s mood was not improved by receiving a telegram of congratulation from his aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna. She had been a widow for over a decade, had become a nun, and was at present far from the city. Yusupov wrote:

  Aware of the ties of friendship between us, and not suspecting that he himself had taken an active part in the destruction of the starets, the Grand Duchess requested him to tell me that she was praying for me and blessed my patriotic action.12

  The Grand Duchess happened to be the Tsarina’s elder sister, and from her self-imposed exile exercised quite an influence on the two young men, who regarded her with awe. It is indicative of her unworldliness that she would send such a message, which compromised them both. The Okhrana were watching the suspects closely. They were so obviously heroes that they might, should they move fast and get the smart regiments behind them, be able to engineer a coup. Elizaveta Fyodorovna’s telegram was intercepted by the Okhrana and a copy sent to Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior. He was close to both Rasputin and the Tsarina and showed it to the Tsarina, ‘who immediately concluded that the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna was in the plot’.

  She may well have been. Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich were in awe of her and in her time she had learned about politically motivated violence. Her husband, Grand Duke Sergei, had been assassinated in 1905. As a Mother Superior, she could perfectly well present a beatific countenance to the world while privately fomenting anger.

  Albert Stopford ate an early lunch with a set of Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses and set off at sixteen minutes past one on foot for the embassy in ‘glorious weather: -20 Fahrenheit’.

  …brilliant sunshine, in which the red Embassy was glowing. I found the Ambassador, Lady Georgina, Miss Meriel, General Hanbury-Williams, and Colonel Burn, who had brought the bag. I told them all I had heard about Rasputin’s disappearance. I also told the General that I had written home ten days ago that the political situation would end in a tragic dénouement. Whilst we were talking, there was brought in a copy of the Police Report with the different arrivals, departures, and police calls at the Yusupov Palace that night.13

  General Hanbury-Williams was in charge of British military matters in Russia as the Ambassador was responsible for political action. The Police Report drawn up the previous day appears to have been shown to some journalists, as well as the embassy, on the Sunday afternoon. Statements came mainly from officers who had been on night duty in the police station across the canal.14 There were too many of these to ignore. Something that the suspects wanted to keep quiet had taken place in the early hours of the morning.

  The document was eagerly scanned by all who could read Russian. Another document – a ‘Memorandum, privately circulated’ – had just appeared in English and was read with just as much avidity. This summarised what was being said socially. Rasputin, the gossip said, had been shot in a basement room of the Yusupov Palace; Yusupov, Dmitri Pavlovich, Fyodor and Nikita (Yusupov’s two young brothers-in-law) were all in the palace and knew about it. ‘Conjointly with other Princes of the Blood, including the sons of the late Grand Duke Konstantin, they had decided some time previously to “remove” Rasputin, because they regarded him as the cause of a dangerous scandal affecting the Dynasty and the Empire.’15 The plot was well known, but action did n
ot become imperative until the Duma was summarily prorogued last Friday. Lots were drawn and an assassin chosen; the unlucky one – a son of Grand Duke Konstantin – withdrew, leaving Yusupov to do the deed. The conspirators often met Rasputin at the palace and on this occasion the invitees included ‘some of Rasputin’s lady friends’ to entice him. The report continued:

  A revolver was placed in [Rasputin’s] hand, but he flatly declined to commit suicide and discharged the weapon somewhere in the direction of Grand Duke Dmitri. The bullet smashed a pane of glass, and the sound attracted the attention of the police outside. Subsequently he was killed and his body removed to a place unknown, presumably Tsarskoye Selo.16

  Stopford took a look at both reports (it is even probable that he wrote the ‘Memorandum privately circulated’) and left to do some networking.

  Versions of the Police Report were already being written up for publication in tomorrow’s newspaper. Quite how the Times’s correspondent in Petrograd, Robert Wilton, got hold of it is unknown, but he had it long enough to translate it and cable a copy to his London office, where it never arrived.

  Head of British Intelligence Samuel Hoare, who did not share Stopford’s talent for being in the right place at the right time, was meanwhile compiling his own report for his boss in London, as best he could. Later that day he scribbled a telegram. In his autobiography he emphasises the significance of this.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1916, I sent to London an urgent wire, coded for greater secrecy by Lady Maud, that on the previous morning, Rasputin had been killed in Petrograd in a private house. Mine was the first news of the assassination that reached the west, and I was the first non-Russian to hear afterwards of the finding of the corpse.17

  In England this Sunday was, indeed, New Year’s Eve. But there is more to this, for Hoare’s telegram, retrieved from the archive, reads as follows:

  Decode of Telegram

  Dec. 18/31 Urgent. Private for C:-

  News correct that Rasputin was killed in Petrograd in private house early morning of Dec 30.18

  Why ‘News correct that’? His autobiography states that his was the first message ‘C’ got, yet the telegram implies that he is writing in response to a query. In his eyrie in Whitehall Court, this wintry London Sunday, the workaholic ‘C’, Mansfield Cumming, Head of MI1c, the Secret Intelligence Service, must have heard something. If so he would have wondered why Hoare – who was after all in charge of the British Intelligence Mission – had not been the first to tell him about it.

  Hoare was desperate for reliable information. Typed out on Monday before despatch, his report – corrected later in ink – alleges that Rasputin had last been seen on Thursday (not Friday) night; that Rasputin’s flat was on the English Prospekt, which it was not; that ‘several’ Grand Dukes were present at the shooting. He amended this document again, slightly, when reprinting it in his autobiography. However, it goes on to state something that does have the ring of truth.

  I am informed that the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Count Elston [Prince Yusupov was also Count Sumarokov-Elston] were together all the afternoon of December 31st and when asked, they make no secret of the fact that Rasputin has been killed.

  Hoare had not so many friends in well-informed circles that he could have got it from anywhere else. He padded his report with quotations from Sunday’s (and later Monday’s) Petrograd papers, at least one of which printed extracts from the Police Report of the previous day that Stopford had seen. It also included a passage about galoshes and the following, in Hoare’s translation:

  A freshly made hole in the ice was discovered and footsteps passing backwards and forwards from it in different directions. Divers were given the duty of examining the bed of the river.

  The divers did not necessarily understand the importance of their task. The body must absolutely be found, and identified by the imperial couple. A Rasputin who had been killed would polarise opinion in circles that mattered, but a Rasputin who might have escaped ‘thanks to the Grace of God’ would be the object of superstitious wonder. The Tsarina’s faith in his powers of precognition and healing had never wavered. In his lifetime she had almost worshipped him. Should he never be seen again, she and Vyrubova and the coven of middle-class witches who had followed Rasputin in life would believe in him as the second Messiah. Not only this, but a wave of ‘false Rasputins’ might arise, claiming his identity. At this rate any beardie with a crucifix might gain a following among the impressionable and isolated.

  While Hoare cobbled together all he knew, a young woman, with a companion and a maid, was gliding unchallenged away from the city. Her departure had been noted, the reception book of the hotel where she had stayed in Petrograd had been examined, and the staff had been questioned.

  Report, December, 1916

  To Director of the Department of Police.

  A dancer of the Moscow Imperial Theatres Vera Alexeyevna KORALLI, 27 years of age, of the Orthodox faith, arrived in the capital from Moscow, checked in at the Hotel Medved (Koniushennaya ul.) and occupied rooms 103 and 115. At the reception she produced her passport issued by the Moscow Imperial Theatres Office on 16th August, 1914, No 2071, for five years. She is accompanied by her maidservant, a peasant woman, Wilkomir Uezd, Zhmudkaya Volost, and Veronika Osipovna Kuhto, 25 years of age, Catholic, passport issued by the constable of the 2nd police station, Tverskoi district, the Moscow City Police on the 16th June, 1915 No 203, for five years.

  19th December, on a train departing at 7.20p.m., the above left for Moscow. The tickets were delivered to them by a lackey in court uniform. During the time of her residence in the capital, KORALLI was visited by: His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke DMITRI PAVLOVICH, escorted by unknown officer, and adjutant of His Imperial Highness MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH.

  KORALLI also met with another occupant of the hotel, assistant attorney Alexandre Afanasyevich KAZANTSEV, 27 years of age, Orthodox, passport issued by the constable of the 1st police station, Prechistenka district, the Moscow City Police on the 16th July, 1915 No 2038, for five years.

  Over the time of her stay in the capital, KORALLI spent every night at the hotel and was not seen leaving the hotel on the night of 16/17 December this year.

  Nothing is known to the prejudice of any the above by the department I am in charge of.

  Signed: the Chief of Department, Maj.-General Globachev.19

  The Okhrana had been told to back off. Vera Koralli, Dmitri Pavlovich’s mistress, was believed to have been at the Yusupov Palace on Friday night but she was allowed to leave town unhindered. This could only be because her lover was a Romanov.

  Had he known this, the Hon. Albert Stopford would have drawn comfort from the intelligence. As it was, that Sunday he was out picking up the gen as best he could. He had heard at the embassy that Prince Yusupov had been at the Anglo-Russian Hospital that afternoon, having a fish-bone removed. Stopford, who knew both Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix Yusupov well, had until now assumed that the wanted Prince was serenely en route to the Crimea. The Yusupov Palace had been assuring callers that Prince Felix had gone there. The second, and much more worrying, piece of news came from his friend the Grand Duchess Vladimir, to whom, with Sir George’s permission, he had shown the Police Report. The Grand Duchess told him that Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had been placed under house arrest.:

  …an unheard-of thing, for since the murder of the Emperor Paul (1801) no grand Duke has ever been put under arrest on a grave charge, and on that occasion the Emperor Paul lost his life for only threatening it.20

  This was bad enough. But later that evening she had heard from Dmitri Pavlovich himself that it was the Empress who had ordered him to be detained. In other words, the Tsarina had not acted within her rights, yet her orders had been carried out. What the British most feared was a palace coup engineered by the Tsarina; and here, de facto, was the first sign of it.

  Over dinner with the Grand Duchess, Stopford discovered that Dmitri Pavlovich had spoken to the Grand Duchess Vladimir
and sworn that he had left Yusupov’s party at four o’clock on Saturday morning and was innocent.

  We were all petrified by the Grand Duke Dmitri’s denying all knowledge of the affair, and saying that, although he had been to supper there, he had left before four.

  He was ‘petrified’. The implication is that Dmitri had been expected to take the rap. Nobody else would do, because nobody else was fully a Romanov, with a cast-iron excuse to get away with murder. If Dmitri refused to take blame, then Yusupov might be accused and put on trial for his life. Yusupov’s position was by no means as secure as Dmitri’s and he knew it; with the prospect of a firing squad in sight, he would crack.

  And if he did, what might he reveal?

  But maybe Dmitri was just being careful. After all, telephones were not secure. Comforting himself with this thought, Stopford walked rapidly to the embassy rather than ring with the news.

  There were lights on the Embassy staircase, so I asked if I could see Lady Georgina, and was shown up to the Ambassador’s bedroom; he was just going to undress. I told him of the Grand Duke Dmitri’s absolute denial of any share in the murder – which, after all, is only natural, though he swore it on his own icon. If all the conspirators acknowledged their complicity on the telephone to their friends and relations it might be disastrous to the actual perpetrator or to the whole lot.