Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

Out of the chaos, an aim was achieved: Rasputin died. Nobody was arrested for the crime and no charges were ever brought. When the Tsar realised the extent of his own family’s involvement, the investigations were effectively closed. Despite Dmitri Pavlovich’s request to be tried before a courtmartial, Nicholas decided to exile Yusupov to his Rakitnoe estate near Kursk and exile Dmitri Pavlovich to Persia. No action was taken against anyone else allegedly involved in the murder. A court-martial would have made Dmitri a hero and given him a public platform. Nicholas’s response was therefore a reluctantly practical one while at the same time typically weak and lenient.

Rasputin’s body did not lie in peace for very long. In March 1917, a group of soldiers guarding the palace apparently dug up the body, soaked it in petrol and set fire to it in a nearby forest. This story is not wholly substantiated, however, and other evidence suggests that the body was exhumed on the orders of Alexander Kerenski and taken away to be secretly cremated. 1

Many Rasputin biographers have, over the years, maintained that he foresaw his own death, alluding to a letter Rasputin apparently wrote to the Tsar, the contents of which Simanovich made public.

Russian Tsar! I have a presentiment that I shall leave this world by 1st January. If I am killed by hired assassins, then you Tsar will have no one to fear. Remain on your throne and rule. But if the murder is carried out by your own kinsmen, then not one member of your family will survive more than two years. 2

However, the original copy of this letter in Rasputin’s own handwriting has never been found (if indeed it ever existed). Those who have, in recent years, made a study of Rasputin’s writings have concluded that the construction of the prose has no similarity with Rasputin’s own uneducated but highly poetic written style and grammatical conventions. 3

The language in the passage bears all the hallmarks of Simanovich himself, who published it after the execution of the Tsar and his family, adding further to the myths surrounding Rasputin.

Authentic or not, within months of Rasputin’s murder, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over 300 years did indeed fall. On 3 March 1917, the Putilov workforce in Petrograd went on strike, and this developed into a general strike on 9 March. On the night of 11 March, units of the troops that had been mobilised by the Tsar allied themselves with the strikers. On 15 March, Nicholas, under pressure from all sides, abdicated. On the day after the abdication, the Executive Committee of the fourth Duma formed a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. It proclaimed civil rights, made a commitment to convene a constituent assembly and declared its intention to continue the war against Germany.

This was not the course of events that Dmitri Pavlovich, Yusupov, Purishkevich and the others associated with the plot had envisaged or predicted. They had hoped that the Tsar would somehow exile his wife and lead Russia to victory with a united Duma behind him. Instead, the Tsar was banished, and the Tsarina with him, and the Duma proved incapable of taking control.

The Provisional Government kept Russia in the war on the Allied side until October 1917, when the Bolshevik coup took place. In this sense, time had worked in the Allies’ favour, as the Americans had entered the war in April and were finally beginning to make their mark. Initially, their standing army was tiny and it took nearly a year for them to recruit and train a large army. By the time Lenin declared an armistice in December 1917, American soldiers were flooding onto the Western Front. By March 1918, when Russia finally signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, a million Americans were in the field.

The peace treaty Germany forced on Lenin was a much harsher one than that offered to the Tsar in the summer of 1916. By this time, however, it was too late to prevent an Allied victory in the west, although the Germans did launch a massive last-ditch offensive on 21 March 1918 in a desperate attempt to score a decisive victory. Although the offensive achieved spectacular results early on, it gradually lost momentum, finally succumbing to an Allied counter-attack in July.

In a very real sense, being exiled probably saved the lives of Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich. Dmitri’s father, like the Tsar and his family, was shot by the Bolsheviks. Those who survived headed south to Ukraine, which was still nominally in the hands of anti-Bolshevik forces now battling Lenin’s new government in a fierce civil war. By early 1919, however, the Bolsheviks were advancing on the Crimea. In London, George V, no doubt regretting his earlier refusal to grant the Tsar and his family asylum in England, resolved to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie. The battleship HMS Marlborough was therefore despatched in March 1919 to the Black Sea to take Marie and other surviving members of the Romanov family to safety. The ship’s Captain, C.D. Johnson, carried with him a letter from George’s mother, Queen Alexandra, imploring her sister to place herself under Captain Johnson’s protection. In scenes that must have resembled the departure of Noah’s Ark, Dowager Empress Marie, Grand Duchess Xenia, her sons Princes Andrew, Fyodor and Nikita, Grand Duke Nicholas, Grand Duke Peter, Felix and Irina Yusupov were among those who hastily boarded the Marlborough from a small cove on the Crimean coast at Koreiz on 7 April 1919. According to Rayner’s family, he was present at Koreiz and accompanied Yusupov, 4who was carrying as much of the family treasure as he could onto the ship.

John Scale, on the other hand, barely escaped in the clothes he was wearing following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. He eventually made his way back to London, where he reported to C at SIS Headquarters at Whitehall Court. C had decided to appoint him Head of the ST Station in Stockholm, with the task of covertly sending a new cadre of British agents into Russia to report back on Bolshevik policy and intentions. On 15 March 1918, Scale, now known as ST0, introduced C to one Sidney Reilly, who would later find fame as the ‘Ace of Spies’. Reilly became agent ST1. Scale recruited some thirty other ST agents, who included Oswald Rayner, Sir Paul Dukes, Arthur Ransome, 5and Augustus Agar. 6He stood down from intelligence work in 1922 due to ill health and finally retired from the army in May 1927. However, right up to his death in 1949 7he kept in close touch with many of his former agents. Scale’s daughters remember in particular the numerous visits Sir Paul Dukes made to their home in the inter-war years. When Felix Yusupov was in desperate financial straits in the early 1930s, it was Dukes who went out to France and saved him from ruin. 8At whose behest Dukes performed this service is unknown.

Yusupov’s finances were ultimately rescued by a stroke of good fortune. In 1932, MGM produced a big-budget epic, Rasputin and the Empress , starring John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, which was released in Britain the following year under the title Rasputin, the Mad Monk . While characters already dead were portrayed under their real names, others central to the plot who were still very much alive were given fictional names. For example, Rasputin’s assassin is named Prince Chegodiev, and the character most resembling that of Princess Irina Yusupova is called Princess Natasha. In March 1933, Irina was introduced to American lawyer Fanny Holtzman, who was convinced that MGM had committed libel against her. In Holtzman’s view, the film contained ‘pictures and words which were understood to mean that Princess Natasha had been seduced by Rasputin’. 9

In a landmark legal case at the High Court in London, which began on 28 February 1934, the Yusupovs’ contention that Princess Natasha was indeed Princess Irina, who had, by implication, been libelled by MGM, was upheld by the jury. 10Irina was awarded £25,000 and later received a further £75,000 from MGM in settlement of other actions the Yusupovs had initiated in the USA and against the film’s distributors.