Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

I send you my notes of the Rasputin affair written on the day after he was killed. [Sunday 31 December.] A full message was cabled, but probably never reached you… any delay in messages sent from here is due entirely to the censorship which invariably gives preference to Agency telegrams.

His notes show that he had been ahead of all the news agencies in that he saw the Police Report on Sunday, just as Stopford did. Wilton was well connected in Petrograd, and in a position to see what had been going on since he worked out of an office in Gorokhovaya Street.

For a Head of the British Intelligence Mission, Hoare was comparatively ill-informed. He knew Purishkevich, and had been told well in advance by the man himself that there was to be an attempt to ‘liquidate the affair of Rasputin’. He had, however, taken no notice at all, thinking Purishkevich’s tone ‘so casual that I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying rather than an expression of a definitely thought out plan’. Now, presumably cursing his own lack of judgement, he kept quiet about Purishkevich’s warning in his despatches to London. 16Stopford did not confide in him. Nor, for reasons we shall discover later, did certain members of his own team.

Stopford wrote on Tuesday morning to the Marchioness of Ripon, a society hostess of his own age. 17She was a remarkable woman; Prince Yusupov had been a great friend of hers, despite the difference in their ages, in London before the war, when she had been responsible for bringing Diaghilev and Nijinskis to London. Stopford, knowing that she could be relied upon to pass information to people in government who mattered, sent regular letters to her or her daughter Lady Juliet Duff, a Russophile and fluent Russian speaker who also knew Yusupov well. 18

I have got such awful rheumatism in both arms and both hands I can hardly hold a pen…

All the Imperial Family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest, for even the Emperor has not the right to arrest his family. It has never been done since Peter the Great had his son Alexei Petrovich arrested, and it was for threatening to arrest the Tsarevich (Alexander I) that the Emperor Paul was killed. 19

In England people told each other that those Russians were quite mad. Things had changed in the last century or so, and it seemed unlikely that any present-day Romanovs would actually kill the Tsar. On the other hand, if Felix Yusupov, of all people, could murder that ghastly monk, who knew what was possible?

Rasputin was buried in a quiet private ceremony at Tsarskoye Selo at half-past eight in the morning of Wednesday 21 December, less than forty-eight hours after his body was found. Eyewitness accounts of the funeral are in the files of the Extraordinary Commission set up by the Provisional Government six months later to examine the circumstances of Rasputin’s death. A grave had been dug beneath the nave of a still unfinished church, endowed by Anna Vyrubova, at Tsarskoye Selo. The mourners were Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, the four royal daughters and the Tsarevich, Vyrubova, Lili Dehn the actress, who was also a close friend of the Tsarina, and the nurse Akilina Laptinskaya. She had been close to Rasputin for a decade, and had brought the body in a car overnight from the Tchesma Infirmary. Regarding them from a respectful distance were the usual unnoticed smattering of retainers and personal maids, the architect, another priest, and the man in charge of construction. Numerous Okhrana officers lurked in the surrounding woods. Colonel Loman, whose wife and daughter were followers of Rasputin but whose own devotion to the dead mystic was in doubt, watched from behind a bush.

The metal casket was lowered into the grave. An icy church smelling of fresh-sawn planks and builders’ sand was a bizarre resting place for a person who might have expected to take his leave in a candle-lit cathedral amid clouds of incense, weeping women and priests intoning a doleful lament. But the tenminute service was conducted by Father Vasiliev, the imperial family’s confessor, specially brought from Petrograd, and by nine o’clock the mourners were turning away. When they had gone, Okhrana men emerged from the woods and shovelled earth over the coffin.

News of the funeral did not immediately reach Petrograd. The following Saturday 24 December, 6 January in the British calendar, Albert Stopford wrote again to Lady Ripon:

Here we are all expecting anything may happen. I won’t write you all the gossip, mostly founded on lies, some on antiquated truths. Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix are kept under arrest, and when the Grand Duke Paul [Dmitri’s father] asked on Monday last for his son to be allowed to come and stay in his palace at Tsarskoye Selo the Emperor replied: ‘The Empress cannot allow it for the present’!

The Empress-Mother is still at Kiev; she ought to be here, as her son still fears her a little (not very much). The Allied Embassies would like her back in Petrograd.

Unluckily the bag goes out this afternoon, and I shall only have all the news at dinner as it is the Russian Christmas Eve and I dine at the Grand Duchess’s [Grand Duchess Vladimir]. Tomorrow I shall go to the Emperor’s church at Tsarskoye Selo to see how they are all getting on down there.

Until the unexpected arrest of Dmitri Pavlovich, the whole tribe of Romanovs, along with almost every other aristocrat, had believed that, with Rasputin out of the way, the Tsar would somehow regain control. They still hoped that, with the passage of time, he would. Stopford would learn that night that Grand Duke Dmitri was already under escort – in a train without a restaurant car – to Kasmin, on the Persian front, one of the hardest postings of the war. Felix Yusupov had been banished to Archangelskoye, the legendary family palace outside Moscow. A few days later Stopford wrote:

He is so clever he will always get all he wants, whereas the other boy is always helpless and desolate; he had une crise de nerfs , and completely broke down in the train next day in his famished condition.

The British were waiting for great developments of a different kind. Hoare was not the only one who saw in Rasputin’s murder the coming of a new dawn. Sir George Buchanan was convinced that the Duma would take advantage of the situation and push the Tsarina into the background, clearing the way for the Tsar to listen to sensible advice from a pro-Ally perspective. The very day before Rasputin’s death, the Duma’s proceedings had been summarily halted by imperial command because so many parliamentarians had spoken up against Rasputin and the politicians and churchmen he had put in place. Now that he was gone, and there was such visible public support on every side for his supposed assassins, the British expected the liberals in Parliament to rally their forces and reconstitute the Duma as an effective force firmly behind the Allies in the war, instead of the limp assembly it had become.

Buchanan and the others miscalculated badly. The pro-Ally members of the Duma had neither influence nor ability, nor sufficient drive to take action.

On the morning of Friday 31 December/12 January, Sir George Buchanan had an audience with the Tsar. He was realistic about the desperately precarious state of political order in Russia and knew he must speak frankly; no one else would. He asked the Foreign Office for permission to say his piece on behalf of the King, but London replied that the King was out of town. Sir George would have to make it clear to the Tsar that his views were purely personal.

On all previous occasions His Majesty had received me informally in his study, and after asking me to sit down, had produced his cigarette case and asked me to smoke. I was, therefore, disagreeably surprised at being ushered this time into the audience chamber and at finding His Majesty awaiting me there, standing in the middle of the room. I at once realized that he had divined the object of my audience… My heart, I confess, sank within me… The Emperor of all the Russias was then an autocrat, whose slightest wish was law; and I was about not only to disregard the hint which he had so plainly given me but to put myself in the wrong by overstepping the bounds of an Ambassador’s sphere of action. 20