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

by Cook, Andrew

  At that moment all laws of God and man were set at naught. Purishkevich subsequently told me that it was such a harrowing sight that he would never be able to forget it.

  After this, he fainted, and the others went off with the body.

  When he came to, he told his servant to take a dog to one of the outbuildings and shoot it. ‘He then dragged its body over Rasputin’s trail, so as to frustrate any subsequent blood analysis, and threw it on the snow-mound where not so long before the dead starets had lain.’

  Yusupov gathered his servants together and swore them to silence, and set off at around five o’clock in the morning for Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich’s, where Fyodor, his young brother-inlaw, was waiting up for him. He said he would explain everything in the morning; and ‘I went to bed and fell into a deep sleep’.

  We therefore have two ‘first-hand’accounts of the night in question; two accounts which contain a substantial number of major and important inconsistencies, to such a degree that it is impossible to reconcile the two accounts. For example:

  Yusupov says that Dmitri Pavlovich and the other three conspirators arrived together at the palace,8 while Purishkevich says that he and Lazovert arrived together – Dmitri Pavlovich was already there.9

  Yusupov says that the chocolate cream cakes were poisoned,10 while Purishkevich says the pink ones were.11

  Yusupov says he played the guitar for Rasputin,12 but Purishkevich makes no reference to this at all.

  Yusupov says he left Rasputin only once in order to go upstairs to the study,13 while Purishkevich says he came up to three times.14

  After Rasputin had taken several glasses of wine and eaten some of the cakes, Yusupov says he had an ‘irritated throat’,15 while Purishkevich says there was ‘constant belching and hypersalivation’.16

  Purishkevich says that, while in the study, Lazovert began feeling unwell and went downstairs to go outside. When he returned to the study he looked very ill and told the others that although he had fainted outside, the cold snow had revived him.17 Yusupov makes no mention of Lazovert coming down the stairs or returning afterwards.

  Yusupov says that when he returned to his fellow conspirators in the study he was handed a gun by Dmitri Pavlovich,18 while Purishkevich says that Yusupov returned to the room and took his own ‘small Browning’ from the desk drawer in the study.19 It should also be recalled that, in his June 1917 version of the story, Yusupov states that he was given the gun by Purishkevich.

  After Yusupov had shot Rasputin and the others had gone down to see the body, Yusupov says that he turned off the electric light and locked the dining room door.20 Purishkevich says that they switched the light off but left the door open.21

  Purishkevich says that after he shot Rasputin in the courtyard he stood by the body for several minutes – Yusupov was not there.22 In Yusupov’s account he is standing there with Purishkevich.23

  Yusupov was to deviate further from his 1927 account when he gave evidence, under oath, in two libel cases he initiated in 1934 and 1965. In the 1934 trial at the High Court in London, he claimed that Rasputin was still alive when he beat him with the truncheon. In his 1927 book, this happened after Rasputin was dead. In 1965, in a similar case in New York State Supreme Court, Yusupov claimed that not only had he fired the first shot, but had also fired the second shot, which in the book he attributes to Purishkevich.24

  In addition to the conflicting written accounts of Yusupov and Purishkevich, the 1923 account of Dr Stanislaus Lazovert, ‘The Assassination of Rasputin’, adds further seeds of doubt and incongruence:

  When Yusupov and Lazovert went to Rasputin’s apartment to collect him in the car, Lazovert says that ‘he (Rasputin) admitted me in person’ and also asserts that ‘I persuaded the black devil to accompany me to the home of Prince Yusupov’.25 In Yusupov’s account, Lazovert stays in the car while Yusupov himself goes into the apartment alone.26

  Back at the Yusupov Palace, in the downstairs dining room, Lazovert claims Rasputin spoke about plots he had been involved in and stated that the Germans will soon be in Petrograd.27 None of this features in either the Yusupov or Purishkevich accounts.

  Lazovert gives the impression that he is in the dining room when Rasputin consumes the poisoned cakes and wine: ‘after a time [Rasputin] rose and walked to the door. We were afraid that our work had been in vain. Suddenly… someone shot at him… we left the room to let him die’. In the other accounts, Lazovert is upstairs and only comes down to examine Rasputin’s body and declare him dead.28

  Lazovert relates that, later, Purishkevich followed Rasputin ‘into the gardens’ and fired ‘Two shots swiftly into his retreating figure’.29 Purishkevich himself refers to firing four shots.30

  What Yusupov, Purishkevich and Lazovert do have in common is that their recollections fall into the general pattern of a good many post-crime accounts. After a crime is committed, the participants will often agree to tell the same story. However, while the basic narrative of their accounts will be very similar, it is in the fine detail that cracks begin to appear, for it is in the minutiae that they have not been able to collaborate or collude – it is here that the story starts to come apart at the seams.

  All three accounts are equally irrational and self-serving. Apart from contradicting each other, they also contradict the evidence of witnesses and the evidence of the autopsy. Who and what should we believe? By a process of eliminating the most unlikely, implausible and impossible accounts and by applying the conclusions of new forensic evidence and testimony, we can at last begin to reconstruct the most likely solution to this nine-decade mystery.

  ELEVEN

  END OF THE ROAD

  There seems no reason to disbelieve the story that Rasputin was collected from his apartment, after midnight, by Yusupov, and that both were driven to the Yusupov Palace by someone who could have been Lazovert. The ‘canvas-topped’ car, variously described as grey or khaki, sounds like Purishkevich’s.

  As to what happened next, the far-fetched stories of Yusupov and his servants and employees can be treated as suspicious, as can those of Purishkevich. That Rasputin was offered poisoned cakes and wine can again be taken as fact. However, according to Professor Kossorotov, who carried out the autopsy, ‘the examination reveals no trace of poison’.1 That is to say, if Rasputin took any poison, either he took in only the minutest trace of poison, or the cyanide was old and had lost its potency. Although Purishkevich and Yusupov contradict each other in detail, they concur in describing doses hefty enough to kill several horses. Had Rasputin ingested anything like the amount of unadulterated cyanide that they describe, he would have died at once. Maria, Rasputin’s daughter, was ‘positive that my father did not eat the poisoned cakes, for he had a horror of sweet things… Never since my childhood do I remember seeing him eat pastries’.2 Others, who believe Rasputin did eat the poisoned cakes, have argued that the cyanide had no effect as it was ‘neutralised by the sugar in the cakes’.3 In order to gain a definitive expert appraisal of this and other crucial aspects surrounding Rasputin’s death, Professor Derrick Pounder, Head of Forensic Medicine at Dundee University and a senior government pathologist, was asked to undertake a review of the original Autopsy Report and forensic evidence.

  In considering the poisoning issue, Professor Pounder concluded that the sugar-as-an-antidote theory is just that – a theory, which

  …has no foundation in science. It is essentially a nonsense which has no support in forensic medical literature. If the cyanide had been cooked with the sugar in the cakes then there might be some potential for such a reaction. However, if cyanide is simply added to the cakes then the cyanide is not so intimately mixed with the sugar that such a reaction could occur. On contact with the stomach acid, Potassium cyanide releases the cyanide which is absorbed into the body and kills rapidly by blocking the function of the chemical components of the body which enable us to use oxygen. In this way the victim is starved of oxygen despite an abundance of oxygen in the body.
Immediately upon hitting the acid of the stomach the potassium cyanide would react with it to release cyanide before any more complex reaction with sugar could occur. The real proof that this theory has no substance in practice is the fact that we do not use glucose or fructose as an antidote to cyanide poisoning. The fact that Professor Kossorotov did not record a characteristic almond smell at autopsy does not discount the possibility of Rasputin having taken cyanide. Firstly, about 10% of people cannot detect the almond smell of cyanide and we do not know if Professor Kossorotov had inherited this inability to smell cyanide. Finally, if Professor Kossorotov was capable of detecting the smell of cyanide and had specifically sought it out but had not smelt it, this still does not exclude the possibility that Rasputin had taken a dose of cyanide insufficient to kill him.

  If Rasputin was indeed poisoned by cyanide but did not die as a result, then the only logical conclusion is that he did not ingest sufficient cyanide. The renaissance founder of modern toxicology, Paracelsus, said that ‘The poison is in the dose’. If insufficient cyanide to kill but sufficient to produce symptoms had been taken, then this might be explained by an insufficient quantity of cyanide of good quality or alternatively a sufficient quantity of cyanide of poor quality.

  If the poisoners thought that they had given a sufficient quantity of cyanide to kill then either they were mistaken and administered too little or alternatively, they administered what should have been sufficient but proved not to be because the quality of the poison was insufficient inasmuch as there was only a small component of active ingredient relative to the bulk. The lethal dose of cyanide is sufficiently small that the former possibility seems unlikely and the latter much more likely. If the quality of the poison was poor then that may be either because it was intrinsically of poor quality with a low content of potassium cyanide and a high content of inert material (somewhat akin to the heroin that can be purchased on the street today) or the poison was originally of high quality but deteriorated due to long term storage.4

  Poisoning was, of course, the ideal murder method. With a whole troop of policemen within sight and sound of the crime scene, it was quiet and there would be no blood. So the question arises: when it didn’t work, why didn’t Dr Lazovert drive quickly to the dispensary of the hospital train and bring back a syringe and a lethal dose of, say, diamorphine? Even Purishkevich could have laid his hands on something. An irate ‘diary’ entry for 5 December reads ‘I alone am responsible for supplying medicines, linens, boots, tobacco and books to the trenches’.5 It was the dispensary in his train that carried those medicines.

  The next ‘fact’ we may be inclined to accept is that at least one or two shots were heard around half-past two or three o’clock in the morning If we accept that the original idea was to poison Rasputin, and that a shot or shots were fired in the middle of the night, then we have to examine the circumstances. The story of Rasputin facing a kind of kangaroo court and being expected to shoot himself in front of those assembled is highly unlikely to say the least. Purishkevich thought Rasputin was a scoundrel, and Yusupov thought he was superhuman. However drunk they were, it is hard to believe that any of the protagonists would have risked putting a gun in his hand.

  Questioned by police almost immediately, Byzhinski the butler was able to indicate ‘The broken window on the ground floor overlooking the forecourt of the adjoining house’.Nobody reported finding any glass outside or hearing it shatter, but in the photographs taken next day, the study window on the courtyard side does look different from the rest; it seems to have some sort of frame, possibly masking tape, around it, and a square of paper on the inside over a hole about 10cm across. The hole is neat, as if broken from the inside at close range. Had there been a man standing in the courtyard, the hole in the window would have been about half a metre above his head.

  It is unlikely that either of the two fatal shots hit Rasputin in the middle of the night. According to the Autopsy Report, ‘The victim must rapidly have been weakened by haemorrhaging arising from a wound to the liver (bullet wound 1) and a wound to the kidney (bullet wound 2). Death would have been inevitable within 10 to 20 minutes.'6

  There was more firing hours later, recorded by a whole bevy of police about an hour after their change of shift at six o’clock – firing for which there would have been no need at all had Rasputin received both wounds by three o’clock in the morning.

  Shortly after the shot or shots had been heard, Four men allegedly turned up in a car that sped off. Tikhomirov, the Okhrana man ‘detailed to watch Rasputin’, saw them and alerted the head of the Okhrana by telephone. This begs the question of what Tikhomirov was doing there in the first place. Nowhere are we told that he followed Rasputin from Gorokhovaya Street. He does not appear to have a car at his disposal – although there was one on standby at the Ministry of the Interior opposite. We do not know where he was watching from.

  It seems likely that Tikhomirov was a late arrival, sent by Protopopov. When the Extraordinary Commission sat in 1917, Protopopov admitted that he had visited Rasputin just after midnight for about ten minutes.7 Yusupov wrote that Rasputin had told him Protopopov had been there that night, and had warned him against visiting the Yusupov Palace. There was allegedly an arrangement whereby, if Rasputin failed to telephone Simanovich by two o’clock in the morning, Simanovich would be concerned and inform the authorities. This is, on balance, quite probable. If Protopopov received a phone call from Simanovich, whom he knew well, he would have sent Tikhomirov to Yusupov’s palace.

  If four men did turn up in a car, who were they and why were they there? According to Tikhomirov, they entered by the side door of number 92, which leads us to assume they were arriving by invitation. Princess Irina’s brothers, Princes Andrew, Fyodor and Nikolai are three possibilities whose names had been linked with the murder almost from the beginning.

  Assuming that Rasputin had survived an attempt to poison him, the next resort may well have been something just as quiet and bloodless as poisoning, but also fatal: a severe beating.

  Given that the protagonists included Dmitri Pavlovich, Yusupov (who would certainly have shrunk from physical violence of that kind, despite the claims he was to make later),8 and Lazovert (who was already physically ill as a result of the tension),9 one might imagine that a tough peasant with a reputation for getting fighting drunk might well have seemed a daunting prospect. Whether, in light of Tikhomirov’s observations, Yusupov subsequently called in extra hands must therefore be considered as a possibility. In any eventuality, the Autopsy Report certainly indicates a range of severe wounds indicative of a major physical assault:

  The right eye has come out of its orbital cavity and fallen onto 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.

  The left hand side of the back has a gaping wound, inflicted by some sharp object.

  In 1993, a team led by Russia’s leading forensic expert, Dr Vladimir Zharov, carried out a thorough review of the autopsy materials. In their report, which was never made public (but was made available to this author), they concur with this view:

  The mechanical injuries (the ones not caused by gunshots) in the region of the head were caused by a succession of blows inflicted by heavy, blunt objects. These injuries could not have been caused by the body hitting the pylon of the bridge from which it was thrown off.10

  Furthermore, Zharov’s team listed other wounds not referred to in the Autopsy Report, such as a ‘squashed and deformed’ nose and numerous ‘scratches of irregular shape’. One such irregular shape was the Russian letter G, the fourth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was scratched on the right jaw, possibly by a sword or knife. The most probable explanation is that Rasputin was beaten up by a number of assailants
before he was shot, and that one was armed with a truncheon. Zharov and his colleagues further speculate that ‘The gaping wound’ on the left hand side of the back may have been made by a sword or a knife. Had a sword or knife been plunged into his left side, Rasputin might have been left for dead in the basement dining room.

  Following the beating, the participants no doubt retired upstairs to the study to relieve the night’s tension and to toast their success with a bout of drinking.

  In their books, Purishkevich and Yusupov have Rasputin climbing the stairs unaided and escaping into the yard, whereupon he sprints for the gate (i. E. a thirty-metre dash through snow, part of it in the shadow of the building). Purishkevich allegedly fires four times and hits him twice. The courtyard is unlit. Purishkevich is short-sighted.

  According to the Autopsy Report, two bullets were fired from a distance of 20cm and one with the gun pressed to his forehead. We can discount Purishkevich’s entire confection; Rasputin was not hit by bullets when he was on the run. But he could have staggered out, drunk and wounded. And another drunken person, who knew he had escaped, could have shot wildly from the study into the courtyard – the hole in the window is quite neat, as if fired at close range, and it is on the side of the window that a person would fire from if they were aiming towards the snow-heap and the fence. A bullet or two overhead would have made Rasputin fall to the ground, and he would not have been clearly visible from beyond the fence because of the snow-heaps.