Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

Purishkevich’s car would be loaded onto the train. Lazovert, Sukhotin and Dmitri Pavlovich would go ‘by taxi or by foot’ to the Sergei Palace on Nevski Prospekt (which is quite a distance from the Warsaw Station). There they would pick up Dmitri’s car, again drive it into the courtyard and park it close to the wall, and go up to the study to collect Yusupov and Purishkevich.

Together they would descend to the basement dining room, truss Rasputin up like a mummy in ‘some suitable material’, heave him upstairs and drive with the body in Dmitri’s car to a spot yet to be arranged, where they would drop it in the water. It would be bound with chains and ‘Two-pood weights’ 17to prevent it from resurfacing through a hole in the ice – although by now, the winter was so far advanced that finding some un-iced water in the first place was going to be the hard part.

They parted, Purishkevich having agreed to buy chains and weights at the Alexandrov market. On 28 November, Yusupov invited him to view the room where the dark deed was to be carried out. Purishkevich entered through the main entrance of 94 Moika, a baroque foyer designed on an appropriately palatial scale and illuminated by a blazing chandelier, the better to display a rich carpet laid on a pale marble floor which led up a wide marble staircase which divided and soared up out of sight under an exquisite moulded ceiling. It was the foyer through which glittering throngs of princes with medals and princesses afire with jewels customarily passed before making a grand entrance to the enfilade of reception rooms and galleries on the first floor.

But Purishkevich noticed none of it. Instead, he was horrified by the number of servants, and especially by the faithful Tesphé, an Ethiopian manservant Felix and Irina had picked up in Jerusalem.

‘Listen, Prince,’ I said, ‘Surely this whole gang sitting in your hallway, headed by that liveried blackamoor, won’t be around on the night of our reception for Rasputin?’

He was reassured that there would be only two men on duty, and they would be in the main palace, not in Felix’s wing. The rest of the servants would have the night off ‘including the blackamoor’. As for the basement dining room, currently a chaos of builders’ gubbins and workmen installing electricity, he could see its thick walls and scant windows would make it perfect for their purposes because ‘even if shots had to be fired from there, the sound of their report would not be heard in the street’.

He asked Maklakov to participate. Maklakov said he would be in Moscow on and around the projected date but he would act in their defence if required. He asked Purishkevich to send a telegram when the assassination had been carried out successfully; the message would be ‘When are you arriving?’

On 29 November, Purishkevich took his wife with him to Alexandrov market to help carry the weights and the chains back. They carried them carefully onto the train so that the crew would not get curious. (It is hard to imagine a well-born, well-dressed St Petersburg lady lifting so much as a Fabergé egg, far less staggering, red-faced, across the goods yard with a 16-kilo weight – but she was a nurse. And she had put up with Purishkevich for many years, indicative in itself of considerable grit.) They hid their booty in the pharmacy and behind books in the library coach. Purishkevich spent the afternoon being driven around by Lazovert ‘examining every ice-hole in the Neva and in the little streams and bogs around Petrograd’. They found just two that were suitable. One was on a canal that ran from the Fontanka to the Tsarskoye Selo station; it was badly lit at night. The other was outside the city limits, on ‘The old Neva’ by the bridge across to the Islands.

The following day,

I saw the costume Dr Lazovert acquired today on my orders for 600 roubles: a chauffeur’s fur coat, a sort of Astrakhan cap with ear flaps, and chauffeur’s gloves. Lazovert modelled all of these for me, looking like a typical chauffeur – foppish and impudent. For the time being he took all these purchases to the Astoria Hotel, where he stays during our visits to Petrograd.

The next decision was serious. They had to fit the murder into their busy schedules. Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich wanted to have it over with by 12 December, but Dmitri’s diary was full until Friday 16 December. In passing, Yusupov told them (as his own account confirms) that Rasputin had offered to get him a job in government.

‘And what did you say to that?’ the Grand Duke asked, throwing him a meaningful look while taking a drag on his cigarette.

‘I?’ replied Yusupov, who lowered his gaze and, fluttering his eyelashes, assumed an ironically languid look, ‘I modestly informed him that I consider myself too young, inexperienced and unprepared for service in the administrative field, but that I was gratified beyond belief that one so well known for his perspicacity as Grigori Efimovich should have such a flattering opinion of me.’

We all burst out laughing.

They were concerned that Rasputin might tell his Okhrana minders where he was going. To deflect suspicion, they decided that after the clothes had been taken for burning to the hospital train, Sukhotin would telephone the Villa Rhode from a phone booth in the Warsaw Station. He would ask whether Rasputin was there, and on being told that he wasn’t, would be overheard saying ‘He’s not there yet. That means he’ll be arriving any minute.’ So that if they were later asked whether Rasputin had been at the Yusupov Palace they would say yes, he came and later left for the Villa Rhode.

They were swept along on a tide of bravado. Plan A could go wrong at any juncture; but there was no Plan B.

On Tuesday 13 December they met for the last time. ‘Vanya has arrived’, the telephone signal, summoned them to the Yusupov Palace. Friday 16 December was to be the night. Another refinement was bolted onto the plan: a gramophone was to be put in the lobby outside the study, on the floor above the basement dining room. It would drown the voices of the men and make Rasputin understand that he must wait for the Princess Irina who, he would be told, was entertaining some ladies upstairs. And Yusupov showed them the sort of Indian club, or ‘twopound rubber dumb-bell like those used for indoor gymnastics’ he had got from Maklakov and was keeping ‘just in case’.

On the day before the murder, a Thursday, with Purishkevich and his family no longer living in their town apartment but having moved into the hospital train,

Dr Lazovert having bought a brush, khaki paint, and dressed in a leather apron, spent all day today on the car which will serve us tomorrow night to fetch our exalted guest. All the cars in my detachment have inscribed on them, in large red letters, semper idem, my motto. This inscription… could be that clue that could immediately lead the authorities to the Yusupov Palace and to my train.

Quite. Temperatures well below freezing are not generally the best for allowing paint to dry; but no matter. And Dr Lazovert, busily daubing icy coachwork in the freight area of the Warsaw Station, did look a little conspicuous. ‘The train crew crowded round him’, asking questions. He told them he was off on a spree to the Islands tomorrow night, and didn’t want the car to be spotted – the motto could be painted on again later, en route for Romania.

Purishkevich gave his staff Friday night off, to get them out of the way. He was perfectly satisfied there was no circumstantial evidence to link him with Rasputin’s murder.

Purishkevich’s Diary was published in Russia in 1918 and in Paris in 1923, when, its author having died, Maklakov was asked for his comments before publication.

Maklakov was now living in Paris. He had served as Ambassador to France under the Provisional Government in 1917. His letter makes certain points which are worth bearing in mind. One thing he very much doubted was the dates. As for the bits he was certain of, because he was there, they are all wrong in essential aspects.