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

by Cook, Andrew

  Dmitri Pavlovich foresaw a nasty stain, so they moved Rasputin onto the tiled part of the floor, ‘with his feet towards the window facing the street and his head toward the staircase from which we had come’. There was no blood on the rug. They stood around the body, overawed by the oddity of the situation and of the influence of the man who lay before them in his cream embroidered shirt, velvet trousers and magnificent boots. Then they trooped out, ‘turning out the light and leaving the door slightly ajar’.

  Yusupov’s account, published nine years later than Purishkevich’s, is a little different. When he went upstairs for the first time, Dmitri Pavlovich, Sukhotin and Purishkevich rushed towards him with revolvers, asking what had happened. He told them that Rasputin was unharmed, and they decided to go downstairs together and strangle him. Once they had set off, Yusupov called them back to the study; he was not at all confident that Rasputin, who was no ordinary man, might not overcome them all. Instead, he persuaded them, with difficulty, that he personally should shoot him.

  He took Dmitri’s revolver and went downstairs.

  Rasputin was sitting at the table, looking a little off-colour. Yusupov sat down beside him. Rasputin asked for more wine and suggested a visit to the gypsies. Yusupov poured him some more. He was hiding the revolver behind his back. He got up and went over to the crystal crucifix, and stood admiring it.

  In due course Rasputin followed him. He said he preferred the labyrinth cupboard, and began opening its little doors and drawers.

  ‘Grigori Efimovich, you had better look at the crucifix, and say a prayer before it.’

  Rasputin looked at me in amazement, and with a trace of fear… He came right up to me, looking me full in the face, and he seemed to read in my glance something which he was not expecting. I realised the supreme moment was at hand. ‘God give me strength to end it all,’ I thought, and I slowly brought the revolver from behind my back. Rasputin was still standing motionless before me, his head turned to the right, and his eyes on the crucifix.

  ‘Where shall I shoot?’ I thought. ‘Through the temple or through the heart?’A streak of lightning seemed to run through my body. I fired. There was a roar as from a wild beast, and Rasputin fell heavily backwards on the bearskin rug.

  The others rushed downstairs, plunging everything into darkness. When the light was switched on again, there lay Rasputin, twitching, with his eyes shut. ‘There was a small red spot on his silk blouse.’ He became still. The bullet had gone through the heart; he was dead. Dmitri Pavlovich removed the body from the rug, they switched off the light, left the room and locked the door, and went upstairs.

  They now had to dispose of the victim. Lazovert as chauffeur, Dmitri Pavlovich, and Sukhotin wearing Rasputin’s coat, were to leave, as planned, in the general direction of Gorokhovaya Street to convince any pursuant Okhrana men that Rasputin had left for the night, but in fact to take some of Rasputin’s clothes for burning to the Warsaw Station. They would leave Purishkevich’s car there and proceed by cab to the Sergei Palace to pick up Dmitri Pavlovich’s car. In this they would return to the Moika to pick up the corpse.

  They left;Yusupov and Purishkevich remained behind and exchanged views about the future of Russia, ‘now forever delivered from her evil genius’.

  In the midst of our conversation I was suddenly seized by a vague feeling of alarm; I was overwhelmed by the desire to go downstairs to the dining-room. I went downstairs and unlocked the door.

  Rasputin lay motionless, but on touching him I discovered that he was still warm. I felt his pulse. There was no beat.

  From his wound drops of blood trickled, and fell on the granite floor.

  On an impulse, Yusupov seized the corpse and shook it; it dropped back lifeless. He stood over it a little longer, and was about to leave when

  my attention was arrested by a slight trembling of his left eyelid. I bent down over him, and attentively examined his face. It began to twitch convulsively. The movements became more and more pronounced. Suddenly the left eye half-opened. An instant later the right lid trembled and lifted. And both eyes – the eyes of Rasputin – fixed themselves on me with an expression of devilish hatred.

  Yusupov was rooted to the spot. Rasputin leapt to his feet, roaring, and grabbed him ‘like red-hot iron’ by the shoulder and ‘Tried to grip me by the throat’, all the time repeating the Prince’s name in ‘a hoarse whisper’. But ‘with a supreme effort I tore myself free’.

  Rasputin fell back to the ground. Yusupov dashed upstairs yelling for Purishkevich. He had given his own revolver to Dmitri Pavlovich, so he was unarmed, and as Purishkevich took his revolver from its holster they were alerted by a noise on the stairs. Yusupov dashed into the study, grabbed the truncheon, and returned to the staircase. Rasputin was clambering up to them on all fours, ‘bellowing and snorting like a wounded animal’. With a superhuman effort, he rose to his feet and lunged towards the door into the courtyard.

  Yusupov was sure the door was locked and Dmitri Pavlovich and the others had the key. He was mistaken. Rasputin vanished through it into the darkness outside. Purishkevich raced after him and fired twice.

  Yusupov thought: Rasputin will escape through the gate. So:

  I rushed to the main entrance…

  That is, he rushed through his study, out of his bachelor apartments, through the apartment that was being refurbished for himself and Irina and the baby; past Irina’s silver boudoir, with its exquisite silver alcove with a marble Diana on a plinth and vaulted ceiling painted with birds of Paradise; past his own sunken marble bathing pool and private sitting room with silk-upholstered art nouveau chairs and canapé; past his drawing room with its ornate plaster door-cases, white marble fireplace and Carelian birch parquet floor; past the Winter Garden with its ferns and tall, green marble pilasters; past the small ballroom with its pillars and an inlaid design on the parquet, and into the main house. Breathlessly, he raced along hundreds of feet of mahogany beneath gilded ceilings above which ran the great enfilade of drawing rooms on the first floor – the Red, the Green, the Blue, the large Rotunda, the small Rotunda – towards the picture galleries with their Canovas shrouded in dust sheets and their Rubens and Rembrandts mutely staring; past the Moorish room with its fretwork lanterns and glowing lacquerwork; past the unseeing eyes of a hundred onyx nymphs and naiads, towards the banqueting hall, the ballroom, the antique room, the Roman room and the theatre; on and on he ran, and through the colossal baroque marble foyer, and out of the great oak doors, and

  …ran along the Moika quayside, towards the courtyard, hoping, in case Purishkevich had missed him, to stop Rasputin at the gates.

  He heard two more shots. Rasputin fell near a snow-heap. Purishkevich stood over him for a minute and then turned and went back into the house.

  Yusupov, ‘after looking around, and finding that the streets were empty, and that the shots had not attracted attention’, crossed to the snow-heap and saw that Rasputin was dead. ‘On his left temple gaped a large wound which, as I afterwards learned, was caused by Purishkevich’s heel’.

  But people were approaching from two sides.

  Purishkevich tells a less flattering story. Having seen the corpse and gone upstairs with the others, leaving the door ajar, he noted that it was now after three o’clock in the morning and they must hurry. Sukhotin put on Rasputin’s fur coat and galoshes, and carried his gloves. Lazovert once again dressed as the chauffeur. They left in Purishkevich’s car, with Dmitri Pavlovich, bound for the Warsaw Station, as planned, to burn Rasputin’s clothes in his train’s passenger coach, ‘where by then the stove should have been hot’.

  Yusupov left Purishkevich in the study and went out of his own apartments, into the lobby, and into his parents’ apartments, empty at the time because they were out of town. In his absence, Purishkevich smoked a cigar and paced about. Then, compelled by an ‘inner force’, he picked up his Savage and put it into his trouser pocket, and

  …under pressure of that same mysterious forc
e, I left the study, whose hall door had been closed, and found myself in the corridor for no particular purpose.

  I had hardly entered the hallway when I heard footsteps below near the staircase, then the sound of the door – which opened into the dining room where Rasputin lay – which the person entering evidently had not closed.

  A moment later, he heard Yusupov’s wild cry below – ‘Purishkevich, shoot! Shoot! He’s alive! He’s escaping!’ – and Yusupov ‘rushed headlong, screaming’ upstairs, white as a sheet with bulging eyes, past Purishkevich and through the door to the main lobby and through to his parents’ apartments (where Purishkevich had thought he was all along). Purishkevich, momentarily dumbfounded, now heard

  …rapid, heavy footsteps making their way to the door leading to the courtyard… There was not a moment to lose so, without losing my head, I pulled my Savage from my pocket, set it at feu, and ran down the stairs.

  Outside, he spotted Rasputin, running swiftly on snow alongside the fence. Rasputin yelled ‘Felix, Felix, I will tell the Tsarina everything’ and, sure now that ‘he might, given his phenomenal vitality, get away… I rushed after him and fired’.

  He missed. His second shot missed as well. Purishkevich was mad at himself, because he had allegedly done quite a lot of target practice at the Semionovski parade ground, ‘but today I was not able to lay out a man at twenty paces’. Rasputin was by the gate now. It was all a matter of concentration. Purishkevich bit his left hand as hard as he could, to focus his mind, and his third shot hit Rasputin in the back. He stopped,

  …and this time, taking careful aim from the same spot, I fired for the fourth time. I apparently hit him in the head, for he keeled over face first in the snow, his head twitching. I ran up to him and kicked him in the temple with all my might. He lay there, his arms stretched far out in front of him, clawing at the snow as if he were trying to crawl forward on his belly. But he could no longer move and only gnashed and gritted his teeth.7

  Purishkevich went back into the house the way he had come. Between his shots, he had noticed two men walking along the pavement outside; ‘the second of them’ had run away when he heard the shot.

  Now he wondered what to do. ‘I am alone, Yusupov is out of his mind, and the servants don’t know what is going on’. And a corpse was in the yard. A passer-by might see it. And in particular –

  Perhaps the servants had not heard Yusupov’s shots in this room, but it was impossible to imagine that two soldiers sitting in the main entrance hall could not have heard four loud shots from my Savage in the courtyard. I walked through the lobby to the main entrance.

  ‘Boys,’ I addressed them, ‘I killed…’ At these words they advanced on me in real earnest as if they wanted to seize me. ‘I killed,’ I repeated ‘Grishka Rasputin, the enemy of Russia and the Tsar.’At these last words, one of the soldiers became greatly agitated and rushed up to kiss me. The other said ‘Thank God, about time!’

  He made them promise to say nothing. They said ‘we are Russians… we won’t betray you’.

  Purishkevich found Yusupov throwing up in a bathroom of his parents’ apartments. He took him back to the study, while Yusupov mumbled ‘Felix, Felix’ over and over again. However, within moments of entering the study, the Prince broke free of Purishkevich, dashed to his desk, got the rubber truncheon Maklakov had given him, raced downstairs, berserk, and began to beat the corpse about the head with it.

  It took two servants to drag Yusupov away, and there was blood everywhere. They ‘carried him upstairs in their arms’ all covered in blood, and sat him in the sofa, where he continued to roll his eyes, twitch, and repeat his own first name. Purishkevich told the servants to ‘find some cloth from somewhere’ and wrap the corpse and ‘bind the swaddled thing securely with the cord’. One of them went off to do this while the other one told him that the point-duty policeman had been enquiring about the shooting, and was insisting that he’d have to put in a report about it.

  Ten minutes later, when Vlasuk came in, Purishkevich realised that he had made a mistake in calling him in because the policeman was ‘a veteran of the old school’. Perhaps he had hoped to bribe him. Anyway, he recognised Purishkevich at once, and, having had the case for murdering Rasputin put to him by the silver-tongued Duma deputy, was only too pleased to find out that the death had occurred. He promised not to say anything unless they made him swear an oath, in which case he would have to tell the truth. Purishkevich let him go, because ‘his district chief was Lt Grigoriev (who was, as far as I knew, a very decent fellow of good family)’. He decided ‘To leave the future to fate’.

  Downstairs, the servant had wrapped the corpse, head and all, in what looked like a blue curtain and tied it with cord. Purishkevich told the servants to tidy Yusupov up and do the best they could with him.

  The others returned. He told them what had happened. Hurriedly they dragged the corpse into the car ‘Together with the chains and the 2-pood weights I had brought to Yusupov’s apartment that night’. (Maybe Lazovert had loaded them into his car, and out of it at the Yusupov Palace later. Purishkevich didn’t take them with him on the tram to the Duma, or hang around in the snow before midnight with them.) Purishkevich deputed one of the soldiers to look after Yusupov.

  Dmitri Pavlovich drove (he had several cars and was a keen motorist). Sukhotin sat next to him. Dr Lazovert sat in the back on the right and Purishkevich on the left ‘and squeezed in with the corpse was one of the soldiers, whom we had decided to take with us to help us throw the heavy body into the hole in the ice’.

  They had already set off when Purishkevich saw Rasputin’s galoshes and fur coat in the back of the car. The redoubtable Mrs Purishkevich had refused to cut it up for burning, and when Dmitri Pavlovich protested, she had not been one bit intimidated. They had burned his ‘sleeveless coat’ and his gloves, but the rest would have to be drowned with him. They had made their phone call to the Villa Rhode.

  After this they continued the journey in silence, enjoying the icy air blowing through the open windows, with Purishkevich silently daydreaming about the time when Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich had summoned him to hear about his, the Grand Duke’s, anxiety about Rasputin and how it had been expressed to the Tsar.

  This unlikely digression over, Purishkevich found himself still in the car, the corpse soft ‘at my feet’, and outside the city on a bumpy road. At last, Dmitri Pavlovich drove onto the bridge and coasted to a halt. They saw a sentry-box on the far side before the headlamps were extinguished. (The photograph taken on Monday 19 December shows that there were gas-lights at intervals on either side of the Petrovski Bridge.) Purishkevich was first out of the car and the soldier and Dr Lazovert and Captain Sukhotin helped him swing the corpse and fling it into the ice-hole (a drop of about five metres, to judge from photographs). Dmitri Pavlovich stood guard by the car.

  Then they remembered they’d forgotten the weights, and dropped them after it; and weighted the coat with chains and hoisted that over as well. Dr Lazovert found one of the galoshes and threw it off the bridge. Then they drove across the bridge, and saw the sentry asleep, and returned by a route that would take them past the St Peter and St Paul Fortress. It wasn’t an easy journey; the car kept stopping, the engine misfiring, and ‘each time… Dr Lazovert jumped out, fiddled with the spark plugs, cleaned them, and somehow or other got us going again’. Despite all this, on the way back Purishkevich found time belatedly to express his doubts about the method of disposal to Dmitri Pavlovich. He hoped the body would be found, he pointed out, because otherwise ‘false Rasputins’ would appear; they should have left it somewhere conspicuous.

  The last repair stop was almost opposite the St Peter and St Paul Fortress itself. After this, they bowled along without mishap to the Sergei Palace. On alighting from the motor, they found the other galosh and some bloodstains on the car’s carpet. Dmitri Pavlovich’s servant, ‘who had met us on the steps and who struck me as having been initiated into the whole affair’, was ordered to
burn the carpet and the galosh. Then Lazovert, Sukhotin and Purishkevich took their leave. They took two cabs to the Warsaw Station where their womenfolk awaited – including Mrs Sukhotin, who had also spent the night on the hospital train. It was after five o’clock in the morning when they got back, and all aboard the train were asleep, except for Mrs Purishkevich.

  We return to the story from Yusupov’s point of view. We left him in the courtyard with Rasputin’s body, aware that people were approaching. They were his two servants from the house, and a policeman. He stood to block the policeman’s view of Rasputin as the officer asked what was going on. He explained that the noise had been mere drunken revelry, and led him to the gates. When he returned, his servants ‘stood there. Purishkevich had told them to carry the body into the house’. Rasputin was lying differently in the snow and Yusupov was terrified; thinking the man was still alive, he went indoors, calling for Purishkevich, and then into his dressing-room for water. Purishkevich came in and saved him from swooning, and took him to the study.

  While they were there, Yusupov’s servant came in and said the policeman was back; shots had been heard at the district police station, and he was being asked to tell his superior officer what he knew on the phone.

  It was up to Yusupov and Purishkevich to persuade the man to keep his mouth shut. They had him brought in. Out of the blue, Purishkevich excitedly declared that Rasputin had been murdered. ‘I was horror-stricken at this conversation, but it was quite impossible to intervene and put an end to it.’Afterwards, Feeling ill, Yusupov left the study with his truncheon and saw the body below on the landing, pouring with blood. Like Purishkevich, Yusupov was overtaken by an irresistible, inexplicable impulse: this time, to batter the corpse to smithereens.