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

by Cook, Andrew

  The small door, the basement dining room, the upper-groundfloor study, the windows and the courtyard figure crucially in the events of the night of the murder.

  The Ministry of the Interior and its adjoining police station stood no more than fifty metres from the façade of number 94, across the frozen Moika Canal. On the east side of number 92, at right angles to the Moika, is Prachesni Lane. The temperature on the night of 16 December was well below freezing; snow was falling at least some of the time, certainly between the time of any activity in the courtyard and the time when the three police scene of crime photographs were taken at around midday on Saturday 17 December.

  What happened in the basement room of number 92 Moika in the early hours of 17 December 1916, and who was ultimately responsible for the death of Grigori Rasputin, has been the subject of many theories over the years. With the wealth of original investigation documents and testimonies, the 1916 autopsy evidence, the subsequent forensic reviews and the new evidence, which has only recently come to light, we can now begin to eliminate some of the more fanciful and intangible accounts that have muddied the waters over the past nine decades.

  The Police Department Report, written on 17 December, was compiled from police interviews the morning after the affair. It states1 that at half-past two on the Saturday morning, the policeman on guard at the Interior Ministry across the canal from the Yusupov Palace heard ‘a detonation’ from the palace. The terms of his duty did not allow him to leave his post, so he went into the Ministry and phoned the Duty Sergeant at the police station next door. The police station notified the District Office, and the Chief Police Officer, Colonel Rogov, went to the palace with a detachment of men. They made enquiries of the janitor at the palace and were told that ‘The shot’ had been fired from the Prince’s wing. Rogov’s assistant, Krylov, entered the building (presumably the main palace) and was told by the butler that there was a party going on, and one of the guests had aimed at a target but hit a window. He was shown ‘The broken window on the ground floor overlooking the forecourt of the adjoining house’. Rogov reported back to his senior officer, Grigoriev, and to an official on duty at the Prefecture.

  Scarcely had the police officers left the palace when a motor-car drove up along the Moika Canal quay and stopped near a small foot-bridge almost facing the palace. Four men were seen to alight from the car. The moment they had left it the chauffeur extinguished the lights, and putting on full speed, made off along the canal. This scene was witnessed by a detective belonging to the Okhrana, named Tihomirov, who had been detailed by the Police Department to look after Rasputin.

  The men did not go into the palace through its main entrance. They entered through Yusupov’s private door from the courtyard of number 92.

  Tikhomirov thought they were robbers, ran across the canal to the police station, and telephoned the Chief of the Okhrana. Colonel Rogov, having put in his report and gone home, got there only to be alerted to the ‘attack’ on the palace by the Okhrana (Rogov, as a senior officer, would no doubt have had a telephone at home). He sent some police officers there, and the butler came out and told them that ‘some very highly placed guests had just arrived from the environs of Petrograd’. The policemen went back and put in a report to the Governor of Petrograd, General Balk. Shortly after six o’clock in the morning, when the policemen going off duty were, as was their routine, answering questions about the events of the night, ‘The sound of several police whistles was heard from the street’. They all rushed to the police station windows and saw that from the main entrance to the palace ‘Two women were being helped out, and that they were offering resistance to their ejection and refusing to enter a motor-car, and doing their best to force a way back into the palace’.

  The police had blown their whistles in response to the protestations of the women, but by the time the police rushed out to assist, ‘The motor-car was already whirling off along the quay’. Rushing out in pursuit of his men, their senior officer Colonel Borozhdin ‘hailed the motor-car belonging to the secret police, which was permanently on duty at the Home Office building, and started off in pursuit’. His men ran to the palace. They were told that the two women had been demi-mondaines who were ‘misconducting themselves’ and had been asked to leave. Borozhdin’s car was not fast enough to catch the other one, ‘which carried neither number nor lights’. He returned, and he and Rogov (who must by now have needed some sleep) put in a joint report ‘in the morning’ to General Balk, about the events of the night.

  The whole affair seemed to be at an end when suddenly from the forecourt alongside the palace four shots were heard in rapid succession. Once more the alarm was sounded in both police stations, and again detachments of police appeared at the palace. This time an official wearing colonel’s uniform came out to them and announced categorically that within the Prince’s palace there was present a Grand Duke, and that HIH would make in person to the proper quarters any explanations that might be necessary.

  Thus dismissed, the police retreated to base, leaving a patrol on the palace side of the canal. An hour later, a car drove up from the direction of the Blue Bridge.

  The servants, assisted by the chauffeur, in the presence of an officer wearing a long fur cloak, carried out what looked like a human body and placed it in the car. The chauffeur jumped in, and putting on full speed, made off along the canal side and promptly disappeared. Almost at the same time General Grigoriev was informed from the Prefecture that Rasputin had been killed in the Yusupov Palace.

  Meanwhile, another party of policemen arrived at the palace. Soon afterwards, the palace was visited by ‘The Director of the Police Department, the Chief of the Okhrana, and all the Generals of Gendarmerie’. In the course of the day, all the police patrols were questioned. At five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, a secret telegram went to every police station in the city asking about the cars that had been seen overnight; the idea was to find out where they had come from and gone to. Patrols were sent to the Islands ‘and to the suburban districts’.

  While the Police Report is clearly of the view that a murder had taken place at the Yusupov Palace during the course of the previous night, and that Rasputin was the likely victim, it points no fingers in terms of culpability. The only names mentioned in the report, in the sense of circumstantial involvement, are Yusupov and an unnamed Grand Duke.

  The following day, however, a privately circulated memorandum, thought to have been written by Albert Stopford,2 gained widespread circulation among the British community. Unlike the Police Report, this story was not short on names.

  According to this account, Rasputin was shot in a room in the basement of the Yusupov Palace shortly after seven o’clock on the Saturday morning. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Prince Fyodor and Prince Nikita, who were Princess Irina’s brothers, and Felix Yusupov were all present. They and others, including the sons of the late Grand Duke Konstantin, had made the general decision some time earlier to remove Rasputin because his behaviour was bringing the empire and the Romanovs into disrepute. There were many rumours, as far back as the previous Monday, that one of the sons of Grand Duke Konstantin had been chosen by lot to carry out the murder, but he had ‘hesitated’ and it had been postponed.

  Rasputin often met Yusupov and his brothers-in-law and other young Romanovs at the Yusupov Palace;at these meetings, when drunk, he would talk about goings-on in the imperial circle and ministerial changes. Only with the sudden prorogation of the Duma on 16 December was the decision finally made; the others thought Rasputin was partly responsible. So that he would not be suspicious, they invited ‘some of Rasputin’s lady friends’that night.

  From the Police Report of 17 December and from other information gained by reporters on the staff of Novoe Vremya, it appeared that at half-past two in the morning Rasputin was told he must die, and was given the option of shooting himself or being shot. A revolver was given to him and he fired it in the general direction of Dmitri Pavlovich. It smashed a pane of glass and the
police heard it. Rasputin was then killed and his body removed to a place unknown, Presumably Tsarskoye Selo.

  This account seems to have drawn together the numerous rumours and tales, from a wide variety of sources, that were circulating around Petrograd during the twenty-four hours following the incident at the Yusupov Palace. By the very nature of its immediacy, the memorandum contains a number of statements that had had no opportunity for verification on the part of the writer. Furthermore, it is claimed that Rasputin of tenmet Yusupov and Princes Fyodor and Nikita Romanov at the Yusupov Palace. However, detailed Okhrana observation reports of Rasputin’s movements show conclusively that his fatal visit on the night of the murder was the first and last he made to the palace.

  While we shall consider Yusupov’s detailed 1927 account of the murder in the next chapter, we should perhaps remind ourselves that this was, in fact, the third version of events he had offered up by way of explanation, the two previous versions being the interviews he gave to the authorities on 17 and 18 December 1916 and the account he gave to Albert Stopford at Yalta on 6 June 1917, which Stopford wrote down and entitled ‘The True and Authentic Story of the Murder of Grigori Rasputin’.3

  In the version he related to Stopford, Rasputin was only with great difficulty persuaded to come to the palace. Yusupov had scheduled the murder for 16 December, as he was going to the Crimea the following evening. There was no supper party upstairs at 92 Moika, just Dmitri Pavlovich and Purishkevich. (Stopford could not get Yusupov to admit that a couple of women were also present, though, having seen the Police Report, he believed they were). Neither the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich nor Purishkevich saw Rasputin while he was within the palace. In the basement dining room, Rasputin, during the course of conversation, ‘positively asserted’ that the Tsarina intended to make herself Regent on 10 January.

  Rasputin apparently drank the poisoned Madeira, although Yusupov, as ‘a total abstainer’ drank nothing. The poison had been bought three weeks earlier and had lost its strength, resulting in Rasputin merely experiencing drowsiness. Yusupov then went upstairs to borrow Purishkevich’s revolver. Downstairs, he shot Rasputin through the left side below the ribs, and left him on the bearskin rug. Stopford points out that the Police Report ‘makes it evident that this was the moment when the ladies who had been entertained in the salon on the ground floor were persuaded to leave the palace’. Yusupov then went downstairs to check that Rasputin was dead, only to find that his eyes were not only wide open, but gleaming ‘with tigerlike fury’. Rasputin then leapt up ‘with amazing vitality’, seized Yusupov by the throat and tried to strangle him. He succeeded only in pulling off Yusupov’s epaulettes before making off upstairs and through the unlocked door to the courtyard, where he fell exhausted in the snow. Yusupov rushed up to call Purishkevich, who came out and fired four shots at Rasputin. Two missed, one went into the back of the head and one into the forehead.

  The body was then carried back into the house to await the return of the car (presumably after removing the women). It was put into the car and driven out to Kristovski Island and thrown into a hole in the ice of the Little Neva. Yusupov went to the Sergei Palace with Dmitri Pavlovich and stayed there, while it was given out that he had left for the Crimea.

  Stopford is careful not to examine the obvious anomalies in this account, such as the inquest’s finding or common-sense ballistics, which make nonsense of Yusupov’s claim that the two wounds caused by Purishkevich’s shots were in the back of the head and in the forehead. The Autopsy Report and the autopsy photographs make it clear that there were three bullet wounds; one to the left-hand side of the chest, a second to the right-hand side of the back, and the third to the forehead.4

  By contrast, Rasputin’s family tell a very different version of events.5 According to Rasputin’s daughter Maria, Yusupov asked Rasputin to accompany him back to his palace as his wife Irina had a severe headache. When they arrive at the palace, Yusupov tells Rasputin that Irina ‘is having a party… she somehow manages to get through even though her headaches are so painful’.6 Yusupov suggests that they wait in the downstairs room, where he offers Rasputin the poisoned wine, cakes, bonbons and sweat-meats. Rasputin, who ‘had never cared for sweets’,7 declines the food but accepts the Madeira. When Rasputin becomes impatient of waiting any longer for Irina, Yusupov says he will go upstairs and get her. Instead he returns, with a pistol given to him by Dmitri Pavlovich, Followed by Dr Lazovert, Dmitri Pavlovich, ‘Two other men’,8 Sukhotin and Purishkevich. Rasputin is then attacked en masse by the seven men. As he struggles to get up off the floor, Yusupov fires a single shot into his head and Rasputin falls backwards onto a white bearskin fur rug. There follows an even more severe beating, after which they leave him for dead and return to the study above. While there, they hear noises on the stairs and rush out to find that Rasputin is not only still alive but has managed to crawl up the stairs and through the side door into the yard outside.

  Purishkevich then runs out into the yard in pursuit and fires four shots, although the account does not say how many hit Rasputin or where. The body is then taken away by car to Petrovski Island and thrown into the river. Despite his serious wounds, Rasputin is apparently still alive when he hits the water and dies from drowning. Of all the rival accounts, this one is most at odds with the forensic facts. The Autopsy Report not only concludes that the shot to the forehead was the third shot, not the first, but affirms that, although there was a small amount of water in the lungs, he did not die from drowning.9 One of the two ‘other men’ is named as Paul Stepanov, although no one by this name was known to be an associate of Yusupov or indeed anyone else even vaguely connected with the story. The claim that Rasputin did not eat the food is, however, supported by the Autopsy Report, and was one of the issues taken up by Russian historian and playwright Edvard Radzinski eighty-four years after the murder in his biography Rasputin – The Last Word.10 While Radzinski’s account is very much in line with the facts of the case, he offers a very different ending to the traditionally accepted story.

  According to Radzinski, Yusupov shot Rasputin in the chest with Dmitri Pavlovich’s Browning pistol. Having left him for dead in the basement dining room, the conspirators returned to the study upstairs to celebrate with the two women whose presence was referred to in the initial Police Report. It was then decided that the two ladies should be taken home, and they were taken down the staircase to the small doorway and out to the car by Dmitri Pavlovich. While all this was going on, Yusupov had gone down to the basement and discovered Rasputin was not dead. Rushing back up the stairs he shouted, ‘Shoot! He’s getting away!’ By this time, Rasputin had regained consciousness, crawled up the staircase and made a last-ditch attempt to flee across the courtyard. Purishkevich ran out behind him and fired two shots, both of which missed. Fortunately, Dmitri Pavlovich was already in the courtyard and fired two shots with the Browning pistol that had been returned to him by Yusupov – ‘The first shot brought Rasputin to a halt; the second one, in the back of the head, laid him out on the wet snow’.11

  According to Radzinski, it was Dmitri Pavlovich who had the most convincing personal motives for killing Rasputin – it was Rasputin who had ruined the prospects of him marrying the Grand Duchess Olga, the Tsar’s daughter, by telling Nicholas of his homosexuality. It was also Rasputin who had caused a rift in the Romanov family in which he had grown up and also in his father’s immediate family.12 As impeccable as the motives sited by Radzinski are, the theory again falls flat when confronted by the forensic evidence.

  If Dmitri Pavlovich had indeed fired the second and third shots with the same Browning pistol that he had initially lent to Yusupov to fire the first shot, then one would expect all three bullet wounds to have been caused by bullets of the same calibre. However, the Autopsy Report, as we have already noted, states quite clearly that ‘The bullets came from revolvers of various calibre’.13 Furthermore, the Autopsy Report and accompanying photographs show that the bullet wound to the head �
�hit the victim on the forehead’,14 and not ‘in the back of the head’15 as maintained by Radzinski. Most persuasive of all, in terms of eliminating this theory, are the conclusions of subsequent forensic reviews of the 1916 autopsy evidence, the most recent of which16 indicates that the fatal forehead wound could not have been inflicted by the Browning pistol Dmitri Pavlovich had in his possession that night.

  In the same year that Radzinski published his Last Word biography, another Russian playwright, Oleg Shishkin, also published a book,17 setting out his views on Rasputin’s murder. Shishkin began by examining the rumours abounding at the time of the murder that there had been British involvement. Drawing on Sir George Buchanan’s account of his audience with the Tsar during which Nicholas’s suspicions regarding the involvement of a British subject were aired, he began the search for the unnamed individual. He eventually concluded that Lt-Col. Sir Samuel Hoare, the Head of the British Intelligence Mission, was the mysterious college friend of Yusupov, and that he had fired the fatal shot into Rasputin’s forehead. Shishkin correctly deduced that Purishkevich’s account of firing the fatal shot from behind was not compatible with the autopsy evidence. Shishkin further hypothesised that, having been told by Purishkevich of the intention to ‘liquidate’ Rasputin, Hoare turned up at the Yusupov Palace on the night of the murder and entered by the side door of number 92. 18 Having been shown Rasputin’s corpse by Yusupov, Hoare then supposedly left by the unlocked side door through which he had entered. This, in Shishkin’s view, gave Rasputin a last-ditch opportunity for escape. When Hoare was almost at the gate, Rasputin came running out of the unlocked door into the courtyard, pursued at a distance by Purishkevich. His failed attempts to hit Rasputin from behind left Hoare with no alternative. In order to prevent Rasputin’s escape, he fired at the figure looming towards him out of the shadows, fatally hitting him in the forehead.