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

by Cook, Andrew

  Examination of the brain

  The cerebral matter exudes a strong smell of alcohol.

  Examination of stomach

  The stomach contains an amount corresponding to approximately 20 soup-spoonsful of a brownish, alcohol-smelling liquid. Examination reveals no trace of poison.

  Examination of the lungs

  The lungs contain water (which prompts the assumption that the victim was still breathing when he was thrown into the river).

  Wounds

  The left-hand side has a gaping wound inflicted by some sharp object or possibly a spur.

  The right eye has come out of its orbital cavity and fallen on to the face. At the corner of the right eye the skin is torn.

  The right ear is torn and partially detached.

  The neck has a wound caused by a blunt object.

  The victim’s face and body bear the signs of blows inflicted by some flexible but hard object.

  The genitals have been crushed due to the effect of a similar object.

  Cause of death

  The victim must rapidly have been weakened by haemorrhagia arising from a wound to the liver and a wound to the right-hand kidney. Death would then have been inevitable within 10 to 20 minutes. At the moment of death the deceased was in a drunken state. The first bullet passed through the stomach and liver. This mortal wound was inflicted by a shot from a range of 20cm. The wound to the right-hand side, inflicted almost simultaneously with the first, would also have been lethal; it passed through the right-hand kidney. At the time of the attack the victim was standing and not wearing a cloak. The body was already on the ground when the frontal wound was inflicted.

  Objects found on the body

  A heavy gold chain.

  A small gold cross on which are engraved the following words: Save and Protect. A gold and platinum bracelet with a clasp bearing the letter N and the Imperial Russian crown with the two-headed eagle.

  These two objects [presumably the bracelet and the cross] and the blue silk flowers [flowered smock] and white shirt worn by the deceased were reclaimed by the Imperial Palace on 28th December. After medical/legal examination and autopsy, the body of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin was transported to the chapel of Tchesma Hospital.13

  In one account, the Tsarina and Vyrubova arrived in a carriage early on Wednesday morning, disguised as nurses, to claim the body. In another they turned up at the almshouse in the middle of the autopsy and demanded to see it. On being told that this was impossible, they asked for the clothes. It is said that ‘a couple of days later’ a surgeon performing a routine operation on the Tsarevich’s knee (at Tsarskoye Selo) saw Rasputin’s blue silk shirt embroidered with yellow flowers under the operating table.14 Yet according to the paragraph at the end of the post mortem, it would be a week before the shirt – a gift from the Empress – was taken to Tsarskoye Selo.

  As Kossorotov began his grisly work that Tuesday, Wickham Steed, the Foreign Editor of the Times, was scratching his head over a wire dated Petrograd, 1 January. It was both alarming and puzzling. It began:

  The body of Rasputin was recovered this morning by divers from the bottom of an ice-hole in the Neva near Petrovski Bridge, which crosses one of the lesser arms of the river north of the city.

  According to this morning’s newspapers, the tragedy to which this discovery points appears to have been enacted on Saturday morning at the Yusupov Palace on the Moika canal. But none of the names of participants is mentioned.

  Meaning murder. Prince Yusupov had been a well-known figure in London society before he married. There were cuttings… This was obviously big news, too big to spike, but it was just as obviously chapter two of a story. Where on earth was chapter one? Something was missing. By the time Steed had rummaged for anything from Petrograd correspondent Wilton that might have come in earlier and slipped behind the desk, it was the middle of the night in Russia. In London, the Times must also be put to bed, so late on Tuesday under the headlines RASPUTIN DEAD – BODY RECOVERED IN THE NEVA – SUSPICION OF MURDER, Steed composed the following lead-in, to appear in italics:

  Telegrams received from Petrograd allege that the notorious monk Rasputin, whose body has just been recovered from the Neva, was murdered. The messages so far to hand from our Petrograd Correspondent make no direct reference to this and other material points. His narrative must therefore be regarded as still incomplete.15

  Wilton’s story appeared below this paragraph on Wednesday. His wire of Saturday had never arrived. He received a baffled enquiry from London that Tuesday, wrote a full report of the Rasputin affair and sent it back with the only explanation for the lost message that he could think of.

  I send you my notes of the Rasputin affair written on the day after he was killed. [Sunday 31 December.] A full message was cabled, but probably never reached you… any delay in messages sent from here is due entirely to the censorship which invariably gives preference to Agency telegrams.

  His notes show that he had been ahead of all the news agencies in that he saw the Police Report on Sunday, just as Stopford did. Wilton was well connected in Petrograd, and in a position to see what had been going on since he worked out of an office in Gorokhovaya Street.

  For a Head of the British Intelligence Mission, Hoare was comparatively ill-informed. He knew Purishkevich, and had been told well in advance by the man himself that there was to be an attempt to ‘liquidate the affair of Rasputin’. He had, however, taken no notice at all, thinking Purishkevich’s tone ‘so casual that I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying rather than an expression of a definitely thought out plan’. Now, presumably cursing his own lack of judgement, he kept quiet about Purishkevich’s warning in his despatches to London.16 Stopford did not confide in him. Nor, for reasons we shall discover later, did certain members of his own team.

  Stopford wrote on Tuesday morning to the Marchioness of Ripon, a society hostess of his own age.17 She was a remarkable woman; Prince Yusupov had been a great friend of hers, despite the difference in their ages, in London before the war, when she had been responsible for bringing Diaghilev and Nijinskis to London. Stopford, knowing that she could be relied upon to pass information to people in government who mattered, sent regular letters to her or her daughter Lady Juliet Duff, a Russophile and fluent Russian speaker who also knew Yusupov well.18

  I have got such awful rheumatism in both arms and both hands I can hardly hold a pen…

  All the Imperial Family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest, for even the Emperor has not the right to arrest his family. It has never been done since Peter the Great had his son Alexei Petrovich arrested, and it was for threatening to arrest the Tsarevich (Alexander I) that the Emperor Paul was killed.19

  In England people told each other that those Russians were quite mad. Things had changed in the last century or so, and it seemed unlikely that any present-day Romanovs would actually kill the Tsar. On the other hand, if Felix Yusupov, of all people, could murder that ghastly monk, who knew what was possible?

  Rasputin was buried in a quiet private ceremony at Tsarskoye Selo at half-past eight in the morning of Wednesday 21 December, less than forty-eight hours after his body was found. Eyewitness accounts of the funeral are in the files of the Extraordinary Commission set up by the Provisional Government six months later to examine the circumstances of Rasputin’s death. A grave had been dug beneath the nave of a still unfinished church, endowed by Anna Vyrubova, at Tsarskoye Selo. The mourners were Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, the four royal daughters and the Tsarevich, Vyrubova, Lili Dehn the actress, who was also a close friend of the Tsarina, and the nurse Akilina Laptinskaya. She had been close to Rasputin for a decade, and had brought the body in a car overnight from the Tchesma Infirmary. Regarding them from a respectful distance were the usual unnoticed smattering of retainers and personal maids, the architect, another priest, and the man in charge of construction. Numerous Okhrana officers lurked in the surrounding
woods. Colonel Loman, whose wife and daughter were followers of Rasputin but whose own devotion to the dead mystic was in doubt, watched from behind a bush.

  The metal casket was lowered into the grave. An icy church smelling of fresh-sawn planks and builders’ sand was a bizarre resting place for a person who might have expected to take his leave in a candle-lit cathedral amid clouds of incense, weeping women and priests intoning a doleful lament. But the tenminute service was conducted by Father Vasiliev, the imperial family’s confessor, specially brought from Petrograd, and by nine o’clock the mourners were turning away. When they had gone, Okhrana men emerged from the woods and shovelled earth over the coffin.

  News of the funeral did not immediately reach Petrograd. The following Saturday 24 December, 6 January in the British calendar, Albert Stopford wrote again to Lady Ripon:

  Here we are all expecting anything may happen. I won’t write you all the gossip, mostly founded on lies, some on antiquated truths. Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix are kept under arrest, and when the Grand Duke Paul [Dmitri’s father] asked on Monday last for his son to be allowed to come and stay in his palace at Tsarskoye Selo the Emperor replied: ‘The Empress cannot allow it for the present’!

  The Empress-Mother is still at Kiev; she ought to be here, as her son still fears her a little (not very much). The Allied Embassies would like her back in Petrograd.

  Unluckily the bag goes out this afternoon, and I shall only have all the news at dinner as it is the Russian Christmas Eve and I dine at the Grand Duchess’s [Grand Duchess Vladimir]. Tomorrow I shall go to the Emperor’s church at Tsarskoye Selo to see how they are all getting on down there.

  Until the unexpected arrest of Dmitri Pavlovich, the whole tribe of Romanovs, along with almost every other aristocrat, had believed that, with Rasputin out of the way, the Tsar would somehow regain control. They still hoped that, with the passage of time, he would. Stopford would learn that night that Grand Duke Dmitri was already under escort – in a train without a restaurant car – to Kasmin, on the Persian front, one of the hardest postings of the war. Felix Yusupov had been banished to Archangelskoye, the legendary family palace outside Moscow. A few days later Stopford wrote:

  He is so clever he will always get all he wants, whereas the other boy is always helpless and desolate; he had une crise de nerfs, and completely broke down in the train next day in his famished condition.

  The British were waiting for great developments of a different kind. Hoare was not the only one who saw in Rasputin’s murder the coming of a new dawn. Sir George Buchanan was convinced that the Duma would take advantage of the situation and push the Tsarina into the background, clearing the way for the Tsar to listen to sensible advice from a pro-Ally perspective. The very day before Rasputin’s death, the Duma’s proceedings had been summarily halted by imperial command because so many parliamentarians had spoken up against Rasputin and the politicians and churchmen he had put in place. Now that he was gone, and there was such visible public support on every side for his supposed assassins, the British expected the liberals in Parliament to rally their forces and reconstitute the Duma as an effective force firmly behind the Allies in the war, instead of the limp assembly it had become.

  Buchanan and the others miscalculated badly. The pro-Ally members of the Duma had neither influence nor ability, nor sufficient drive to take action.

  On the morning of Friday 31 December/12 January, Sir George Buchanan had an audience with the Tsar. He was realistic about the desperately precarious state of political order in Russia and knew he must speak frankly; no one else would. He asked the Foreign Office for permission to say his piece on behalf of the King, but London replied that the King was out of town. Sir George would have to make it clear to the Tsar that his views were purely personal.

  On all previous occasions His Majesty had received me informally in his study, and after asking me to sit down, had produced his cigarette case and asked me to smoke. I was, therefore, disagreeably surprised at being ushered this time into the audience chamber and at finding His Majesty awaiting me there, standing in the middle of the room. I at once realized that he had divined the object of my audience… My heart, I confess, sank within me… The Emperor of all the Russias was then an autocrat, whose slightest wish was law; and I was about not only to disregard the hint which he had so plainly given me but to put myself in the wrong by overstepping the bounds of an Ambassador’s sphere of action.20

  The forthcoming Allied Mission – a deputation from England and France, due to arrive in less than three weeks – was to see people of influence and set up links to enable Russia to get in step with the other two Allied powers. Buchanan explained that it was difficult for the English and French visitors to have any faith in this process when one hardly knew which Minister would be in power from one week to the next. It was important to allow good people to make their own decisions about the team they wanted to work with. And on this topic, he felt he must warn His Majesty (again) that the Tsarina must not be used as a tool of the German propaganda machine by those around her. He tried to tell him (again) how important it was to work with the people of Russia. Warming to his theme, Sir George suggested that the Tsar had come to the parting of the ways.

  If I were to see a friend walking through a wood on a dark night along a path which I knew ended in a precipice, would it not be my duty, sir, to warn him of his danger? And is it not equally my duty to warn Your Majesty of the abyss that lies ahead of you?21

  The Tsar thanked him but told him not to exaggerate Russia’s problems. If they were in any way as severe as he implied, he could in any case rely on his army to defend him from an uprising.

  According to Stopford, who met him bounding up the embassy stairs, Sir George came back from the audience looking rather chipper. However, at some point the following day, his mood was to change to one of concern and trepidation. Quite how or when it reached him is not clear, but his own diary leaves us in little doubt that Buchanan received news of the most unwelcome kind – news that could have catastrophic diplomatic consequences for Britain. Rather than wait to see if he would be summoned, Buchanan decided to take the bull by the horns and raise the matter directly with the Tsar himself at the Russian New Year’s Reception.

  The stunning news Buchanan had heard on the grapevine was to the effect that evidence had recently come into the possession of the Tsar that led him to suspect ‘a certain British subject’ of being Rasputin’s killer. According to Buchanan:

  I took the opportunity of assuring him that the suspicion was absolutely groundless. His Majesty thanked me and said that he was very glad to hear this.22

  Whether or not the Tsar believed Buchanan’s assurance and indeed how assured Buchanan himself actually was that no British subject was in anyway involved is equally unclear. It would seem that Buchanan had contacted Hoare for his reaction, but then again, Hoare was not necessarily aware of what his own men were up to a good deal of the time.

  Who then was this nameless mystery man who had come to the Tsar’s attention and who had caused Buchanan at least one night’s troubled sleep? The Tsar had supported the Allies in the first place in order to get foreign debt written off and access to Constantinople as a reward when they won, so he did not want to offend them. But he, the Okhrana and Rasputin’s friends had been asking themselves exactly who had had an interest in murdering Rasputin, and had drawn certain conclusions.

  FOUR

  THE SPIES WHO CAME INTO THE COLD

  Robert H. Bruce Lockhart was a handsome rugger player with a weakness for dangerous love affairs. He was also a British consular officer with a better understanding of Russia’s troubles than most. He had been in Russia since 1912 and had learned to be wary of the political judgement of his compatriots. In particular, he wrote in 1932,

  …my experiences of the war and of the Russian revolution have left me with a very poor opinion of secret service work. Doubtless it has its uses and its functions, but political work is not its strong point
. The buying of information puts a premium on manufactured news. But even manufactured news is less dangerous than the honest reports of men who, however brave and however gifted as linguists, are frequently incapable of forming a reliable political judgement.1

  The extreme revolutionary surge in Russia by the end of 1916 was unstoppable, but very few of the British had yet recognised that Russia’s imperial system was too far gone to save. Part of the problem was the company they kept. Bruce Lockhart was pretty well alone among the British in taking the progressive intelligentsia seriously as a political force, and he was stationed in Moscow. He was also a Foreign Office employee. In Petrograd, the capital, the Ambassador and Consul worked for the Foreign Office; the Military Attaché worked for the War Office; and the British Intelligence Mission was ostensibly part of the War Office, paid for out of Foreign Office funds. While the functions of all three were different, all must keep a close eye on their particular spheres of interest.

  In Petrograd, both diplomats and Secret Service men felt it necessary to cultivate contacts in the Duma but also, importantly, among the aristocracy. As newcomers, Sir Samuel Hoare and his wife were completely out of the social loop, and had a dull time of it in consequence. The Hon. Albert Stopford knew the conspirators and brought Dmitri Pavlovich and Buchanan together. But Stopford and Buchanan were older men, on a different wavelength to Dmitri and Yusupov.