Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

When Yusupov and Lazovert went to Rasputin’s apartment to collect him in the car, Lazovert says that ‘he (Rasputin) admitted me in person’ and also asserts that ‘I persuaded the black devil to accompany me to the home of Prince Yusupov’. 25In Yusupov’s account, Lazovert stays in the car while Yusupov himself goes into the apartment alone. 26

Back at the Yusupov Palace, in the downstairs dining room, Lazovert claims Rasputin spoke about plots he had been involved in and stated that the Germans will soon be in Petrograd. 27None of this features in either the Yusupov or Purishkevich accounts.

Lazovert gives the impression that he is in the dining room when Rasputin consumes the poisoned cakes and wine: ‘after a time [Rasputin] rose and walked to the door. We were afraid that our work had been in vain. Suddenly… someone shot at him… we left the room to let him die’. In the other accounts, Lazovert is upstairs and only comes down to examine Rasputin’s body and declare him dead. 28

Lazovert relates that, later, Purishkevich followed Rasputin ‘into the gardens’ and fired ‘Two shots swiftly into his retreating figure’. 29Purishkevich himself refers to firing four shots. 30

What Yusupov, Purishkevich and Lazovert do have in common is that their recollections fall into the general pattern of a good many post-crime accounts. After a crime is committed, the participants will often agree to tell the same story. However, while the basic narrative of their accounts will be very similar, it is in the fine detail that cracks begin to appear, for it is in the minutiae that they have not been able to collaborate or collude – it is here that the story starts to come apart at the seams.

All three accounts are equally irrational and self-serving. Apart from contradicting each other, they also contradict the evidence of witnesses and the evidence of the autopsy. Who and what should we believe? By a process of eliminating the most unlikely, implausible and impossible accounts and by applying the conclusions of new forensic evidence and testimony, we can at last begin to reconstruct the most likely solution to this nine-decade mystery.

There seems no reason to disbelieve the story that Rasputin was collected from his apartment, after midnight, by Yusupov, and that both were driven to the Yusupov Palace by someone who could have been Lazovert. The ‘canvas-topped’ car, variously described as grey or khaki, sounds like Purishkevich’s.

As to what happened next, the far-fetched stories of Yusupov and his servants and employees can be treated as suspicious, as can those of Purishkevich. That Rasputin was offered poisoned cakes and wine can again be taken as fact. However, according to Professor Kossorotov, who carried out the autopsy, ‘the examination reveals no trace of poison’. 1That is to say, if Rasputin took any poison, either he took in only the minutest trace of poison, or the cyanide was old and had lost its potency. Although Purishkevich and Yusupov contradict each other in detail, they concur in describing doses hefty enough to kill several horses. Had Rasputin ingested anything like the amount of unadulterated cyanide that they describe, he would have died at once. Maria, Rasputin’s daughter, was ‘positive that my father did not eat the poisoned cakes, for he had a horror of sweet things… Never since my childhood do I remember seeing him eat pastries’. 2Others, who believe Rasputin did eat the poisoned cakes, have argued that the cyanide had no effect as it was ‘neutralised by the sugar in the cakes’. 3In order to gain a definitive expert appraisal of this and other crucial aspects surrounding Rasputin’s death, Professor Derrick Pounder, Head of Forensic Medicine at Dundee University and a senior government pathologist, was asked to undertake a review of the original Autopsy Report and forensic evidence.

In considering the poisoning issue, Professor Pounder concluded that the sugar-as-an-antidote theory is just that – a theory, which

…has no foundation in science. It is essentially a nonsense which has no support in forensic medical literature. If the cyanide had been cooked with the sugar in the cakes then there might be some potential for such a reaction. However, if cyanide is simply added to the cakes then the cyanide is not so intimately mixed with the sugar that such a reaction could occur. On contact with the stomach acid, Potassium cyanide releases the cyanide which is absorbed into the body and kills rapidly by blocking the function of the chemical components of the body which enable us to use oxygen. In this way the victim is starved of oxygen despite an abundance of oxygen in the body. Immediately upon hitting the acid of the stomach the potassium cyanide would react with it to release cyanide before any more complex reaction with sugar could occur. The real proof that this theory has no substance in practice is the fact that we do not use glucose or fructose as an antidote to cyanide poisoning. The fact that Professor Kossorotov did not record a characteristic almond smell at autopsy does not discount the possibility of Rasputin having taken cyanide. Firstly, about 10% of people cannot detect the almond smell of cyanide and we do not know if Professor Kossorotov had inherited this inability to smell cyanide. Finally, if Professor Kossorotov was capable of detecting the smell of cyanide and had specifically sought it out but had not smelt it, this still does not exclude the possibility that Rasputin had taken a dose of cyanide insufficient to kill him.

If Rasputin was indeed poisoned by cyanide but did not die as a result, then the only logical conclusion is that he did not ingest sufficient cyanide. The renaissance founder of modern toxicology, Paracelsus, said that ‘The poison is in the dose’. If insufficient cyanide to kill but sufficient to produce symptoms had been taken, then this might be explained by an insufficient quantity of cyanide of good quality or alternatively a sufficient quantity of cyanide of poor quality.

If the poisoners thought that they had given a sufficient quantity of cyanide to kill then either they were mistaken and administered too little or alternatively, they administered what should have been sufficient but proved not to be because the quality of the poison was insufficient inasmuch as there was only a small component of active ingredient relative to the bulk. The lethal dose of cyanide is sufficiently small that the former possibility seems unlikely and the latter much more likely. If the quality of the poison was poor then that may be either because it was intrinsically of poor quality with a low content of potassium cyanide and a high content of inert material (somewhat akin to the heroin that can be purchased on the street today) or the poison was originally of high quality but deteriorated due to long term storage. 4

Poisoning was, of course, the ideal murder method. With a whole troop of policemen within sight and sound of the crime scene, it was quiet and there would be no blood. So the question arises: when it didn’t work, why didn’t Dr Lazovert drive quickly to the dispensary of the hospital train and bring back a syringe and a lethal dose of, say, diamorphine? Even Purishkevich could have laid his hands on something. An irate ‘diary’ entry for 5 December reads ‘I alone am responsible for supplying medicines, linens, boots, tobacco and books to the trenches’. 5It was the dispensary in his train that carried those medicines.

The next ‘fact’ we may be inclined to accept is that at least one or two shots were heard around half-past two or three o’clock in the morning If we accept that the original idea was to poison Rasputin, and that a shot or shots were fired in the middle of the night, then we have to examine the circumstances. The story of Rasputin facing a kind of kangaroo court and being expected to shoot himself in front of those assembled is highly unlikely to say the least. Purishkevich thought Rasputin was a scoundrel, and Yusupov thought he was superhuman. However drunk they were, it is hard to believe that any of the protagonists would have risked putting a gun in his hand.