When the idea of writing a revised second edition of my biography of ‘Ace of Spies’ Sidney Reilly was first suggested to me by my publisher Jonathan Reeve, I saw it as an ideal opportunity to follow up several unresolved lines of enquiry that were still outstanding at the time the first edition went to press in 2002.
One of these concerned John Scale, the man who had recruited Reilly to the Secret Intelligence Service, and whose hidden hand had guided his first mission in Russia in April 1918. I knew that Scale had died in 1949, but had so far been unable to trace his family. I was convinced that he was the key not only to Sidney Reilly’s Russian mission but to a host of other espionage conundrums that followed the Russian Revolution.
Eventually, in early 2003, after much painstaking research, his daughter Muriel Harding-Newman was located in Scotland. Meeting her persuaded me that the murder of Grigori Rasputin in 1916 was not quite as straightforward as it at first seemed. The traditional account, as told in the 1927 book Rasputin by his self-confessed assassin Prince Felix Yusupov, reads like an over-dramatised gothic horror story. Rasputin is first poisoned, then shot and finally drowned in the River Neva by five disaffected aristocrats, led by Yusupov. The conspirators’ motives are, according to this account, driven by concern about Rasputin’s influence over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. Although this account has been questioned over the years by historians, credible alternative theories had thus far been thin on the ground.
However, according to Muriel Harding-Newman, her father had been instrumental in the murder plot. She also had in her possession an Aladdin’s Cave of intelligence material that had belonged to him, including a list of all British intelligence officers who were stationed in Petrograd at the time of Rasputin’s death. Once back at home I took the time to read again my copy of Yusupov’s book. Over the next few months I managed to trace the families of a number of other British intelligence officers on Scale’s list and read the diplomatic and intelligence reports that were being exchanged between London and Petrograd in 1916. These made stark reading, and reminded me just how close Britain came to defeat at this, the darkest hour of the war, haunted by the spectre that Russia was about to conclude a separate peace with Germany and withdraw from the conflict. Time and again the name of Rasputin cropped up in the reports.
In Russia, archive records indicated that three investigations into his death had been inconclusive due to the fact that they had never been completed and, as a consequence, no one had ever been charged or faced cross-examination in a court of law. Two investigations at the time of his death were run concurrently by the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice. These had been halted when it became evident that members of the Tsar’s own family were involved in the plot. After the fall of the monarchy in March 1917, the new Provisional Government set up an ‘Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons’. Among the many issues it sought to investigate were Rasputin’s influence and the circumstances surrounding his death. This was to be the responsibility of the Commission’s Thirteenth Section. The enquiry was still ongoing when the Bolsheviks seized power and closed down the Commission.
Rasputin’s dramatic death has, to a great degree, obscured other questions about his life. Why, for example, does the story about a peasant from a distant Siberian village becoming the all-powerful favourite of the last Russian Emperor excite us more than almost any other episode in Russian history? Why are there more lies and concealment than truth in the story of his murder? What is hidden under the contradictions of his life that have been woven from the real facts, rumours, mysticism, myths and pure invention? Was Rasputin a victim or an immoral charlatan? An evil demon that brought down the royal family, or somebody who could have been its saviour?
These were some of the questions foremost in my mind when I set out to reinvestigate the circumstances behind his death. The results of that search eventually led to the commissioning of the BBC Timewatch film Who Killed Rasputin?, for which I acted as Historical Consultant, and ultimately to the publication of this book, which draws on significant new discoveries made since the film was broadcast.