Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

The men did not go into the palace through its main entrance. They entered through Yusupov’s private door from the courtyard of number 92.

Tikhomirov thought they were robbers, ran across the canal to the police station, and telephoned the Chief of the Okhrana. Colonel Rogov, having put in his report and gone home, got there only to be alerted to the ‘attack’ on the palace by the Okhrana (Rogov, as a senior officer, would no doubt have had a telephone at home). He sent some police officers there, and the butler came out and told them that ‘some very highly placed guests had just arrived from the environs of Petrograd’. The policemen went back and put in a report to the Governor of Petrograd, General Balk. Shortly after six o’clock in the morning, when the policemen going off duty were, as was their routine, answering questions about the events of the night, ‘The sound of several police whistles was heard from the street’. They all rushed to the police station windows and saw that from the main entrance to the palace ‘Two women were being helped out, and that they were offering resistance to their ejection and refusing to enter a motor-car, and doing their best to force a way back into the palace’.

The police had blown their whistles in response to the protestations of the women, but by the time the police rushed out to assist, ‘The motor-car was already whirling off along the quay’. Rushing out in pursuit of his men, their senior officer Colonel Borozhdin ‘hailed the motor-car belonging to the secret police, which was permanently on duty at the Home Office building, and started off in pursuit’. His men ran to the palace. They were told that the two women had been demi-mondaines who were ‘misconducting themselves’ and had been asked to leave. Borozhdin’s car was not fast enough to catch the other one, ‘which carried neither number nor lights’. He returned, and he and Rogov (who must by now have needed some sleep) put in a joint report ‘in the morning’ to General Balk, about the events of the night.

The whole affair seemed to be at an end when suddenly from the forecourt alongside the palace four shots were heard in rapid succession. Once more the alarm was sounded in both police stations, and again detachments of police appeared at the palace. This time an official wearing colonel’s uniform came out to them and announced categorically that within the Prince’s palace there was present a Grand Duke, and that HIH would make in person to the proper quarters any explanations that might be necessary.

Thus dismissed, the police retreated to base, leaving a patrol on the palace side of the canal. An hour later, a car drove up from the direction of the Blue Bridge.

The servants, assisted by the chauffeur, in the presence of an officer wearing a long fur cloak, carried out what looked like a human body and placed it in the car. The chauffeur jumped in, and putting on full speed, made off along the canal side and promptly disappeared. Almost at the same time General Grigoriev was informed from the Prefecture that Rasputin had been killed in the Yusupov Palace.

Meanwhile, another party of policemen arrived at the palace. Soon afterwards, the palace was visited by ‘The Director of the Police Department, the Chief of the Okhrana, and all the Generals of Gendarmerie’. In the course of the day, all the police patrols were questioned. At five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, a secret telegram went to every police station in the city asking about the cars that had been seen overnight; the idea was to find out where they had come from and gone to. Patrols were sent to the Islands ‘and to the suburban districts’.

While the Police Report is clearly of the view that a murder had taken place at the Yusupov Palace during the course of the previous night, and that Rasputin was the likely victim, it points no fingers in terms of culpability. The only names mentioned in the report, in the sense of circumstantial involvement, are Yusupov and an unnamed Grand Duke.

The following day, however, a privately circulated memorandum, thought to have been written by Albert Stopford, 2gained widespread circulation among the British community. Unlike the Police Report, this story was not short on names.

According to this account, Rasputin was shot in a room in the basement of the Yusupov Palace shortly after seven o’clock on the Saturday morning. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Prince Fyodor and Prince Nikita, who were Princess Irina’s brothers, and Felix Yusupov were all present. They and others, including the sons of the late Grand Duke Konstantin, had made the general decision some time earlier to remove Rasputin because his behaviour was bringing the empire and the Romanovs into disrepute. There were many rumours, as far back as the previous Monday, that one of the sons of Grand Duke Konstantin had been chosen by lot to carry out the murder, but he had ‘hesitated’ and it had been postponed.

Rasputin often met Yusupov and his brothers-in-law and other young Romanovs at the Yusupov Palace;at these meetings, when drunk, he would talk about goings-on in the imperial circle and ministerial changes. Only with the sudden prorogation of the Duma on 16 December was the decision finally made; the others thought Rasputin was partly responsible. So that he would not be suspicious, they invited ‘some of Rasputin’s lady friends’that night.

From the Police Report of 17 December and from other information gained by reporters on the staff of Novoe Vremya , it appeared that at half-past two in the morning Rasputin was told he must die, and was given the option of shooting himself or being shot. A revolver was given to him and he fired it in the general direction of Dmitri Pavlovich. It smashed a pane of glass and the police heard it. Rasputin was then killed and his body removed to a place unknown, Presumably Tsarskoye Selo.

This account seems to have drawn together the numerous rumours and tales, from a wide variety of sources, that were circulating around Petrograd during the twenty-four hours following the incident at the Yusupov Palace. By the very nature of its immediacy, the memorandum contains a number of statements that had had no opportunity for verification on the part of the writer. Furthermore, it is claimed that Rasputin of tenmet Yusupov and Princes Fyodor and Nikita Romanov at the Yusupov Palace. However, detailed Okhrana observation reports of Rasputin’s movements show conclusively that his fatal visit on the night of the murder was the first and last he made to the palace.

While we shall consider Yusupov’s detailed 1927 account of the murder in the next chapter, we should perhaps remind ourselves that this was, in fact, the third version of events he had offered up by way of explanation, the two previous versions being the interviews he gave to the authorities on 17 and 18 December 1916 and the account he gave to Albert Stopford at Yalta on 6 June 1917, which Stopford wrote down and entitled ‘The True and Authentic Story of the Murder of Grigori Rasputin’. 3

In the version he related to Stopford, Rasputin was only with great difficulty persuaded to come to the palace. Yusupov had scheduled the murder for 16 December, as he was going to the Crimea the following evening. There was no supper party upstairs at 92 Moika, just Dmitri Pavlovich and Purishkevich. (Stopford could not get Yusupov to admit that a couple of women were also present, though, having seen the Police Report, he believed they were). Neither the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich nor Purishkevich saw Rasputin while he was within the palace. In the basement dining room, Rasputin, during the course of conversation, ‘positively asserted’ that the Tsarina intended to make herself Regent on 10 January.

Rasputin apparently drank the poisoned Madeira, although Yusupov, as ‘a total abstainer’ drank nothing. The poison had been bought three weeks earlier and had lost its strength, resulting in Rasputin merely experiencing drowsiness. Yusupov then went upstairs to borrow Purishkevich’s revolver. Downstairs, he shot Rasputin through the left side below the ribs, and left him on the bearskin rug. Stopford points out that the Police Report ‘makes it evident that this was the moment when the ladies who had been entertained in the salon on the ground floor were persuaded to leave the palace’. Yusupov then went downstairs to check that Rasputin was dead, only to find that his eyes were not only wide open, but gleaming ‘with tigerlike fury’. Rasputin then leapt up ‘with amazing vitality’, seized Yusupov by the throat and tried to strangle him. He succeeded only in pulling off Yusupov’s epaulettes before making off upstairs and through the unlocked door to the courtyard, where he fell exhausted in the snow. Yusupov rushed up to call Purishkevich, who came out and fired four shots at Rasputin. Two missed, one went into the back of the head and one into the forehead.