Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

‘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. 14There 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.’ 15The plot was well known, but action did not 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.