Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

…ran along the Moika quayside, towards the courtyard, hoping, in case Purishkevich had missed him, to stop Rasputin at the gates.

He heard two more shots. Rasputin fell near a snow-heap. Purishkevich stood over him for a minute and then turned and went back into the house.

Yusupov, ‘after looking around, and finding that the streets were empty, and that the shots had not attracted attention’, crossed to the snow-heap and saw that Rasputin was dead. ‘On his left temple gaped a large wound which, as I afterwards learned, was caused by Purishkevich’s heel’.

But people were approaching from two sides.

Purishkevich tells a less flattering story. Having seen the corpse and gone upstairs with the others, leaving the door ajar, he noted that it was now after three o’clock in the morning and they must hurry. Sukhotin put on Rasputin’s fur coat and galoshes, and carried his gloves. Lazovert once again dressed as the chauffeur. They left in Purishkevich’s car, with Dmitri Pavlovich, bound for the Warsaw Station, as planned, to burn Rasputin’s clothes in his train’s passenger coach, ‘where by then the stove should have been hot’.

Yusupov left Purishkevich in the study and went out of his own apartments, into the lobby, and into his parents’ apartments, empty at the time because they were out of town. In his absence, Purishkevich smoked a cigar and paced about. Then, compelled by an ‘inner force’, he picked up his Savage and put it into his trouser pocket, and

…under pressure of that same mysterious force, I left the study, whose hall door had been closed, and found myself in the corridor for no particular purpose.

I had hardly entered the hallway when I heard footsteps below near the staircase, then the sound of the door – which opened into the dining room where Rasputin lay – which the person entering evidently had not closed.

A moment later, he heard Yusupov’s wild cry below – ‘Purishkevich, shoot! Shoot! He’s alive! He’s escaping!’ – and Yusupov ‘rushed headlong, screaming’ upstairs, white as a sheet with bulging eyes, past Purishkevich and through the door to the main lobby and through to his parents’ apartments (where Purishkevich had thought he was all along). Purishkevich, momentarily dumbfounded, now heard

…rapid, heavy footsteps making their way to the door leading to the courtyard… There was not a moment to lose so, without losing my head, I pulled my Savage from my pocket, set it at feu, and ran down the stairs.

Outside, he spotted Rasputin, running swiftly on snow alongside the fence. Rasputin yelled ‘Felix, Felix, I will tell the Tsarina everything’ and, sure now that ‘he might, given his phenomenal vitality, get away… I rushed after him and fired’.

He missed. His second shot missed as well. Purishkevich was mad at himself, because he had allegedly done quite a lot of target practice at the Semionovski parade ground, ‘but today I was not able to lay out a man at twenty paces’. Rasputin was by the gate now. It was all a matter of concentration. Purishkevich bit his left hand as hard as he could, to focus his mind, and his third shot hit Rasputin in the back. He stopped,

…and this time, taking careful aim from the same spot, I fired for the fourth time. I apparently hit him in the head, for he keeled over face first in the snow, his head twitching. I ran up to him and kicked him in the temple with all my might. He lay there, his arms stretched far out in front of him, clawing at the snow as if he were trying to crawl forward on his belly. But he could no longer move and only gnashed and gritted his teeth. 7

Purishkevich went back into the house the way he had come. Between his shots, he had noticed two men walking along the pavement outside; ‘the second of them’ had run away when he heard the shot.

Now he wondered what to do. ‘I am alone, Yusupov is out of his mind, and the servants don’t know what is going on’. And a corpse was in the yard. A passer-by might see it. And in particular –

Perhaps the servants had not heard Yusupov’s shots in this room, but it was impossible to imagine that two soldiers sitting in the main entrance hall could not have heard four loud shots from my Savage in the courtyard. I walked through the lobby to the main entrance.

‘Boys,’ I addressed them, ‘I killed…’ At these words they advanced on me in real earnest as if they wanted to seize me. ‘I killed,’ I repeated ‘Grishka Rasputin, the enemy of Russia and the Tsar.’At these last words, one of the soldiers became greatly agitated and rushed up to kiss me. The other said ‘Thank God, about time!’

He made them promise to say nothing. They said ‘we are Russians… we won’t betray you’.

Purishkevich found Yusupov throwing up in a bathroom of his parents’ apartments. He took him back to the study, while Yusupov mumbled ‘Felix, Felix’ over and over again. However, within moments of entering the study, the Prince broke free of Purishkevich, dashed to his desk, got the rubber truncheon Maklakov had given him, raced downstairs, berserk, and began to beat the corpse about the head with it.

It took two servants to drag Yusupov away, and there was blood everywhere. They ‘carried him upstairs in their arms’ all covered in blood, and sat him in the sofa, where he continued to roll his eyes, twitch, and repeat his own first name. Purishkevich told the servants to ‘find some cloth from somewhere’ and wrap the corpse and ‘bind the swaddled thing securely with the cord’. One of them went off to do this while the other one told him that the point-duty policeman had been enquiring about the shooting, and was insisting that he’d have to put in a report about it.

Ten minutes later, when Vlasuk came in, Purishkevich realised that he had made a mistake in calling him in because the policeman was ‘a veteran of the old school’. Perhaps he had hoped to bribe him. Anyway, he recognised Purishkevich at once, and, having had the case for murdering Rasputin put to him by the silver-tongued Duma deputy, was only too pleased to find out that the death had occurred. He promised not to say anything unless they made him swear an oath, in which case he would have to tell the truth. Purishkevich let him go, because ‘his district chief was Lt Grigoriev (who was, as far as I knew, a very decent fellow of good family)’. He decided ‘To leave the future to fate’.

Downstairs, the servant had wrapped the corpse, head and all, in what looked like a blue curtain and tied it with cord. Purishkevich told the servants to tidy Yusupov up and do the best they could with him.

The others returned. He told them what had happened. Hurriedly they dragged the corpse into the car ‘Together with the chains and the 2-pood weights I had brought to Yusupov’s apartment that night’. (Maybe Lazovert had loaded them into his car, and out of it at the Yusupov Palace later. Purishkevich didn’t take them with him on the tram to the Duma, or hang around in the snow before midnight with them.) Purishkevich deputed one of the soldiers to look after Yusupov.

Dmitri Pavlovich drove (he had several cars and was a keen motorist). Sukhotin sat next to him. Dr Lazovert sat in the back on the right and Purishkevich on the left ‘and squeezed in with the corpse was one of the soldiers, whom we had decided to take with us to help us throw the heavy body into the hole in the ice’.

They had already set off when Purishkevich saw Rasputin’s galoshes and fur coat in the back of the car. The redoubtable Mrs Purishkevich had refused to cut it up for burning, and when Dmitri Pavlovich protested, she had not been one bit intimidated. They had burned his ‘sleeveless coat’ and his gloves, but the rest would have to be drowned with him. They had made their phone call to the Villa Rhode.