Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

And if he did, what might he reveal?

But maybe Dmitri was just being careful. After all, telephones were not secure. Comforting himself with this thought, Stopford walked rapidly to the embassy rather than ring with the news.

There were lights on the Embassy staircase, so I asked if I could see Lady Georgina, and was shown up to the Ambassador’s bedroom; he was just going to undress. I told him of the Grand Duke Dmitri’s absolute denial of any share in the murder – which, after all, is only natural, though he swore it on his own icon. If all the conspirators acknowledged their complicity on the telephone to their friends and relations it might be disastrous to the actual perpetrator or to the whole lot.

I found the Ambassador very much perturbed and tired. He walked up and down the room; I sat by the fire. 21

Sir George Buchanan was not a young man. He cut a strange figure, and with his spare frame, red face, shock of white hair and droopy white moustache was a dream for caricaturists. Dmitri’s denial was clearly unexpected.

In Hoare’s flat across town, it was getting late, and he had to finish his report to get it typed up for despatch tomorrow.

The feeling in Petrograd is most remarkable. All classes speak and act as if some great weight had been taken from their shoulders. Servants, isvostchiks , working men, all freely discuss the event…

Servants and cab-drivers were the only people he would have had the opportunity to ask. Nonetheless, he felt compelled to finish on a predictive note, so he took a wild guess.

What effect it will have in Government circles is difficult to say. My own view is that it will lead to the immediate dismissal of Protopopov and of various directors of the Secret Police, whilst in the course of the next few weeks the most notorious of Rasputin’s clientele will gradually retire into private life. I would suggest for instance that careful attention should be paid to any changes that take place in the Department of the Interior and the Holy Synod, where Rasputin’s influence was always strongest. 22

He turned out to be completely wrong.

In the embassy, having wished Buchanan goodnight, Stopford went to sit with Lady Georgina. At half-past ten she got a phone call from the Reuters man, Pierre Beringer, to say that the police of the district where Rasputin lived had ‘seen an automobile go to his house at about 4a.m., fetch him and take him away’. Yet there was still no proof that he was dead. Who knew what to believe?

The scene is monochrome: the wide, snow-covered bridge, a heavy, whitish morning sky, a shuffle of black-clad onlookers, snow and ice stretching east to the gracious range of lemon-and-white Petrograd palaces, and west to dark woods with the Gulf of Finland far beyond.

Not far from the bank of the wide, frozen channel, policemen are looking for something.

Some say it was on the Sunday afternoon that somebody – a policeman? a diver? – identified a shape, the length of a man, beneath the glassy crust of the Little Neva. But the divers, who had been told to search under ice inches thick, hauled nothing from the river. They waited until the following morning, being ‘not at all anxious to work’ 1because of the bitter cold; so while excitement, and in some cases fear, mounted in the city on that Sunday evening, only one fact seemed certain. The police now believed they were about to find Rasputin.

The body was retrieved at twenty to nine on the morning of Monday 19 December, or on Monday, New Year’s Day of 1917, London time. Or slightly later than twenty to nine, if you believe the dubious source that has Constable Andreev sweeping the ice at that time, discovering a frozen sable collar, reporting it, and the body being retrieved from under ice broken with crowbars. 2

Planks were laid on the frozen surface. With the aid of grappling hooks, and watched by an unhelpful twitter of examining judges and journalists who had been herded to a vantage point on the bridge, men hauled the corpse, frozen stiff, out of the groaning, creaking ice and onto a raft of boards.

There was no mistaking the man. A fit-looking, bearded fellow in the loose blouse of a muzhik which had ridden up at the back, where his frigid flesh arched defensively away from the cold surface. A peasant with good hair and teeth in the prime of life, the legs below the thighs still tied in a sack. The face blackened and eyes and nose swollen, and the arms flung upward and bent at the elbows, the hands petrified as if clawing the air.

A police photographer shuffled gingerly along the planks and placed a ruler in shot before focusing carefully.

On the bridge, observers peered at the distant form, and glimpsed a flash of blue silk stained dark red. A sodden, frosted fur was heaped up next to it like a faithful dog.

An urgent telephone call brought out the bigwigs: the district Chief of Police, the Head of the Okhrana, an investigator from the Ministry of Justice called Zavadskis, General Popov and others.

The body would take a day to thaw out, so no immediate examination would be possible. But Petrograd could breathe again. Rasputin was well and truly dead.

The rigid form was loaded into the back of a motor lorry for despatch to the Vyborg Military Hospital. The journalists raced back to town to file their copy and the rest of the party drove to luncheon at a restaurant.

That Rasputin’s body was found by the police and pulled out of the Little Neva on that particular day is not in dispute. Most of the other ‘facts’ tend to be replaced by new ‘facts’ with each account that one reads. This is more than a problem of translation. There are different versions of almost everything that happened to Rasputin from the moment he left his apartment until his remains went up in smoke months later.

There is, for instance, the galosh. Or overshoe. Or pair of galoshes. Whether there was one or a pair, some kind of footwear was found and taken to Rasputin’s apartment where his daughters confirmed that it was his. Whether there was a sinister bloodstain on the galosh, or galoshes, varies according to who tells the story. Kyzmin the bridge guard described blood spots in the snow. There is a photograph purporting to show blood spots on the snowy struts projecting below the bridge, but since the picture is in black and white it is hard to be certain what the smudges are. There are no photographs showing footprints to and from the gap in the ice, yet there is an account of such footprints. One writer alleges that a hole had been carefully cut in the ice for disposal of the body; another (Hoare) that Makarov, the Minister of Justice, claimed to have received an anonymous phone call on the Saturday morning, telling him to search in the Islands.

The hidden agenda in all this, and of the message Hoare ‘received in strict confidence from the Chief of the Department of Military Police in the General Staff’ and would dutifully pass on to London, is the agenda of the searchers. The Okhrana, under Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior, was stressing in all public statements that ‘it was the intention of the murderers that the body should be discovered’. They had to make it clear that a group of people opposed to Rasputin, that is, opposed to the Tsar’s current policies as advised by Rasputin, wanted his death to be indisputable, so they had left clues. In other words, he had not died accidentally in some drunken brawl and been tossed into the Baltic never to be seen again, but must have been murdered and left in a place where he would be found, in a treasonable bid to clear the field for a change of policy or even a change of power. By inference, this was a political crime. So pleas of innocence from the likes of Prince Yusupov were not going to wash.