Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

While Raivid’s diary represents only one small fragment of documentary evidence to support the notion of such a plot, it was anecdotally well supported in the summer of 1916. It was taken equally seriously by David Lloyd George, on whose desk intelligence reports warning of future catastrophe were beginning to pile up.

In August 1916 there was good news and bad. The good news was that Romania had at last declared war against Germany. The bad news was that Romania was so ill-prepared that the country would inevitably be overrun, south of the Carpathians at least, and Russian and Allied military assistance must be given. This expert intervention would destroy the resources that would otherwise allow the Germans to pour across Romania to the Black Sea and stay there. The British Intelligence officer whose team would follow the retreat, burning grain stores and destroying factories, oil fields and oil refineries, was Captain John Dymoke Scale.

Scale was six feet four, a thirty-four-year-old Indian Army officer with a wife and young children in England. He was from a genuine British background, the son of a Merthyr solicitor, 1educated at Repton and trained as an army officer at Sandhurst. He had learned Russian before the war, during a previous posting in Russia. He fought on the Western Front in 1914, sustaining a serious shrapnel wound to the leg. He was posted to France in the summer of 1916 and, also that summer, was assigned to accompany a party of Russian parliamentarians visiting England, which included Protopopov, the spokesman of the delegation, Milyukov and Shingarev, who were opposition leaders, and many others representing different shades of opinion.

With the entry of Romania into the war in August 1916, Scale was attached to the Petrograd SIS station. He was already well connected in Petrograd society, not only through his parliamentary contacts but because of his acquaintance with Robert Wilton, the Times’ s Petrograd correspondent, who had accompanied a party of Russian journalists in England a few weeks before his own trip with the Duma members. Among Wilton’s party had been Vladimir D. Nabokov, the Kadet leader. Scale knew his brother, the diplomat Konstantin D. Nabokov, who had from 1912 been Russian Consul-General in Calcutta; he was now at the imperial Russian embassy in England. 2Konstantin Nabokov corresponded with Scale and undoubtedly primed him with current opinion, such as ‘rumours… of Rasputin’s evil orgies and of the loss of prestige which the monarchy was suffering owing to the disastrous influence of this hysterical and vicious scoundrel blindly believed to be a saint and a miraclemaker’. 3

Scale arrived in Russia on 31 August, via Finland, and headed directly for the Astoria Hotel in Petrograd, where most of the British Intelligence Mission was billeted.

The Astoria was a fine five-storied building, built round a large dining hall, down onto the coloured glass roof of which the windows of the inner rooms looked… German-owned… it had been taken over by the Government… and was now the ‘official’ hotel, open only to diplomats, officers and officials… Many people lived there indefinitely, in spite of a regulation that no one save the diplomats and officials of allied powers could stay there longer than a certain number of days. From lunch time till late at night its salons were kaleidoscopes of movement and colour. Cossacks, Guardsmen, naval officers, in fact men in every Russian uniform imaginable (most civilians in Russia wear uniform) sat at tables or stood in groups chatting to their womenfolk. Often very beautiful women they were too, in wonderful clothes and jewellery. Here and there among the throng, officers in the uniform of one or other of the Allied powers were conspicuous. A Romanian military mission had just arrived, and was the centre of new interest. No taciturnity or absence of smiles was noticeable here. In fact one could hardly recognise the airs played by the military band so loud was the buzz of talk and laughter. A cheery, careless place was the Astoria (a happy hunting ground for enemy agents too!). 4

He set to work for the British Intelligence Mission. His immediate duties were to exchange news of German troop movements between Russian and British staff officers. Cypher telegrams would arrive from London, explaining which German units were operational in France; they would have to be deciphered and compared with Russian intelligence about the Russian and Romanian fronts. There were endless misunderstandings, queries and frustrations (‘…thus the 21st Reserve Regiment has now been established as belonging to the new 216th Division but it is always down as of 36th Reserve Division…’ 5) caused by a combination of German cunning, Russian carelessness, and sometimes, in Scale’s view, London’s willingness to believe French intelligence from Moscow rather than British.

It is pretty certain that Scale placed himself firmly on Alley’s side of the ‘show’ rather than Hoare’s. Hoare, bright and personable as he was, was essentially a desk wallah. Alley and Scale already knew each other from the time in 1913 when Scale qualified, in Russia, as an interpreter, first class. He would have heard all the Rasputin-related gossip relayed by Alley, Rayner and Felix Yusupov, 6who he had also made the acquaintance of, through Alley, on his previous Russian posting. Quite what this Indian Army man and veteran of the trenches made of Yusupov and his louche social connections can only be imagined. Perhaps by this time nothing surprised him. Yusupov and Pavlovich were fabulously exotic; the Yusupovs were descended from the Tartar hordes who once overran southern Russia, and were said to be the second richest family in Russia. Yusupov wrote of his childhood:

We seldom went abroad, but my parents sometimes took my brother and myself on a tour of their various estates which were scattered all over Russia; some were so far away that we never went there at all. One of our estates in the Caucasus stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the soil seemed soaked with it, and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.

For these long trips, our private coach was attached to the train… [it] was entered by a vestibule which in summer was turned into a sort of verandah containing an aviary; the songs of the birds drowned the train’s monotonous rumble. The dining-drawing room… was panelled in mahogany, the chairs were upholstered in green leather and the windows curtained in yellow silk. Next came my parents’ bedroom, then my brother’s and mine, both very cheerful with chintzes and light wood panelling, and then the bathroom. Several compartments reserved for friends followed our private apartments. Our staff of servants, always very numerous, occupied compartments next the kitchen at the far end of the coach. Another coach fitted up in much the same way was stationed at the Russo-German border for our journeys abroad, but we never used it.

On all our journeys we were accompanied by a host of people without whom my father could not exist… 7

Felix Yusupov would in due course inherit palaces and estates in seventeen Russian provinces. There were several in St Petersburg, several more in Moscow and its environs, a few in the Crimea. His account of his family’s many mansions is littered with throwaway lines such as (about the palace at 94 Moika) ‘the house was a present from Catherine the Great to my great-greatgrandmother, Princess Tatiana’. All the palaces were resplendent with the work of the most accomplished sculptors and painters and furniture makers of Russia and Europe, collected over hundreds of years. Several, like the Yusupov Palace, had more than one ballroom, a picture gallery, and a series of opulent reception rooms; there were billiard rooms and libraries, nurseries and boudoirs, bathing pools and hot-houses, music rooms and secret rooms. At least two of the palaces contained full-size private theatres; the one in the Yusupov Palace was exquisite. Chaliapin, Chopin and Liszt had given concerts there and Alexander Blok had given poetry readings. At the country mansions were acres of conservatories, marble fountains, rivers, lakes. ‘At Moscow, as at St Petersburg, my parents kept open house.’ As a decorative touch, Yusupov’s mother, the exquisite Princess Zenaïde, littered her state room with bowls of precious stones. Her husband, his imagination exhausted, had once presented her, as a birthday gift, with a mountain.