To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

^ONE MANHUNT

Gorokhovaya Street was a sober sort of place – indeed, a household name for high-minded respectability because of its police station; the regulation coat worn by plainclothes men was popularly called a gorokhovayo.¹ It was only a mile from the private palaces and vast public spaces of the fashionable centre of Petrograd (Russia’s capital city St Petersburg, until the war made German-sounding names anathema). If you lived there you were prosperous enough. The residential block at number 64, a warren of high-ceilinged apartments with a huge carriage entrance, was well supplied with heat and light, which was more than could be said for a lot of dwellings in Petrograd in the freezing winter of 1916. The war at this stage had left even the middle classes short of essential supplies and most heads of household were struggling to provide their families with coal, lamp oil, food and clothing.

The head of the household at Apartment 20, 64 Gorokhovaya Street was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the tall, bearded spiritual advisor to Her Majesty the Tsarina, and he was a good provider. The flat was solidly furnished and even had a telephone. Rasputin himself had a motor car at his command. Wherever he went he was received with awe, and his supporters (though not his opponents) were convinced that he was a starets or holy man. Early on this Saturday morning, 17 December 1916, with the city still dark and blanketed with snow, the maid Katya Petyorkina was already up, had lit the lamps and was busying herself with the stove and the samovar when somebody knocked at the door.

The two visitors were officers of the Okhrana, the political police. The Okhrana was just one of nine separate forces working for the Tsar through Minister of the Interior Alexander Protopopov and Chief of Police Alexis Vasiliev, but it was the most feared. The Tsar, and the Tsarina in particular, insisted that the starets be protected, for they clung to him for emotional support as they struggled with their young son’s bouts of ill-ness. The boy had haemophilia, an incurable disease inherited through the female line by some of the descendants of Britain’s Queen Victoria. The Tsarina, who was Victoria’s granddaughter, had acted as a carrier of the disease, and now lived in superstitious dread that if anything befell Rasputin her son’s life would be at risk.

All the same, Katya Petyorkina, Rasputin’s two teenage daughters, Maria and Varvara, and his niece Anya who also lived in the apartment, knew they should mind what they said around these people. Everything got back to the Tsar in the end and there were things he was better off not knowing.

The two agents wanted to talk to Rasputin; they didn’t say why. But when Katya went to Rasputin’s bedroom to wake him up she found that he had not yet come home. This was unusual.

Maria, Varvara and Anya rose hurriedly and dressed. One of the Okhrana men went off to find whoever had been in charge of the block overnight, and got hold of the yard superintendent. He confirmed that a big car with a canvas hood had rolled up after midnight. He had spoken to its passenger, had seen this passenger being welcomed by Rasputin himself at the back door, and later he had seen both Rasputin and the visitor leave in the car towards the city centre.²

Back in the flat, the Okhrana men heard whispering and murmuring between the girls and the maid. When they questioned Katya, a woman of twenty-nine, she admitted that somebody had called at the kitchen door at the back of the flat at around half-past twelve the previous night, and Rasputin had gone out with whoever it was. She slept in a curtained-off corner of the kitchen, and she had heard voices. That was all she had to say.

The girls volunteered no more. They were worried. The two taciturn snoopers remained on the premises, and one of them muttered into the telephone. Other people would start turning up soon. People came every day to see Rasputin and hear him talk. These days he was at his best in the morning, before he’d had a drink.

Maria, at nineteen the elder daughter and already engaged to be married, knew her father had expected to go out with Prince Felix Yusupov (known to his friends as ‘the Little One’) to the Yusupov Palace in the middle of the night. He had told her so and she wouldn’t forget something like that – she knew what the inside of a palace was like, having been privately presented to the Tsarina, and she had heard that Yusupov’s houses were as splendid as the Winter Palace itself. She had even walked past the endless yellow and white frontage of the one on the Moika. She knew Yusupov only by sight; he was a tall, slender, epicene young man.

At about eight o’clock, Rasputin’s niece Anya, a smart and resourceful girl, telephoned to Maria (Mounya) Golovina – most likely out of the hearing of the Okhrana men. Mounya was the friend who had originally introduced Rasputin to Yusupov, but Rasputin had specifically instructed his daughters not to tell Mounya where he was going the previous night because Yusupov didn’t want her tagging along uninvited.³ Mounya was older, about thirty like Yusupov, and an educated woman who drank in everything Rasputin said. She had a pale, tight little face and was forever at the flat. A good many of Rasputin’s hangers-on were well-off women like her, who wore furs and smart hats with aigrettes and well-cut, tailored suits, even in wartime. But Mounya was a good sort.

Anya asked Mounya to call the Little One and find out what was going on; she thought he might have been going out with her uncle last night. Mounya confirmed that Rasputin had said that he was going somewhere special, but she said that if he had gone out with Felix Yusupov they’d probably have gone to the gypsies. That meant going out to the Islands and dancing and drinking all night, so they would still be asleep, and there was nothing to worry about. He would be home soon. She would be over later.⁴

Rasputin’s close friends, Aron Simanovich and Father Isodor, arrived a little later. They were already concerned because Rasputin had told them where he was going and promised to telephone to say he was safe, but he had not done so. Out of consideration for the girls’ feelings, they did not add that they had already made enquiries at the police station at 61 Moika and had heard rumours of trouble at the Yusupov Palace opposite.⁵ Ivan Manasevich Manuilov, another man whom the girls knew, came in, and then some ladies – it was normal for a crowd to gather at Rasputin’s home. The samovar was kept steaming and conversation wandered, while anxiety increasingly nagged at Rasputin’s two daughters; Simanovich was obviously on edge, and nobody would tell them why. The sisters knew their father had become important in this city. It wasn’t everyone who got phone calls from the Tsarina herself. He was the peasant who consorted with royalty. Often he was called to the royal residence at Tsarskoye Selo several times in a week. At school there were girls who sneered at them behind their back for having come from Siberia and being the daughters of an unlettered muzhik (peasant), but their father had influence, and those girls were somehow wary of the Rasputina sisters.

They wished he would turn up; it was mortifying. All these women – they only hoped he would be sober when he did. The Okhrana men asked a lot of questions but nobody could tell them anything. Having made their first communication back to headquarters the two officers remained on the premises, waiting.

Fifteen miles from the city centre Her Majesty the Tsarina Alexandra was at home with her four daughters at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo. It was one of many mansions on the royal estate, one of which belonged to her great friend, Anna Vyrubova, a portly woman who looked older than her thirty years.

It was Vyrubova who got a call from Mounya Golovina that Saturday morning. She learned that Rasputin, ‘Our Friend’ as he was known to the imperial couple, had gone out the night before and failed to return home. It is possible that something was also said about Yusupov.

Vyrubova herself had received death threats in the past. Rasputin’s enemies thought that he, Vyrubova and the Tsarina made up a malevolent triumvirate of power behind the Tsar. At this time she was spending her days in her own home but sleeping at the Alexander Palace, to which the Tsarina had invited her for her own protection.⁶ Vyrubova made the Tsarina aware that Rasputin’s absence was giving cause for concern.

Back in the city, the Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, had received an early-morning tip-off from the Governor of Petrograd, Alexander Balk, that Rasputin was rumoured to have been shot at the Yusupov Palace in the early hours. As a result, Protopopov made an incognito visit to Rasputin’s apartment and discovered that he had not returned home.

Later that morning Protopopov signed Decree No.573 initiating an immediate and secret investigation into the ‘disappearance of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin’. As chief investigator, Protopopov appointed General P.K. Popov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes. Popov was an energetic and dedicated investigator who specialised in political enquiry. Prior to 1914 he had been head of the city’s Okhrana Department. His first move was to descend on the policemen who had been called out to the Yusupov Palace and the officers stationed on the opposite side of the canal and take statements. Viewed from the police station, all arrivals and departures at the tall central doors of the palace across the canal were illuminated as on a distant stage. And how sound carries across water. Last night something had been going on all right, specifically in the courtyard in front of a house that adjoined the palace. That house was less imposing than the main building and set back from the road, but it too belonged to the Yusupovs.

Soon, a carefully worded telegram was sent to the Tsar at the Stavka, the wartime Army Command Headquarters at Moghilev several hundred miles south of Petrograd, stating that, on the night of Friday 16 December,

This Okhrana briefing went directly to the Tsar in person. The idea that Rasputin might have been murdered would appal him. The scenes the Tsarina would make; the blame, the resentment, the hysteria. On the other hand, he might now regain some authority in his own household…

The naming of Vladimir Purishkevich, a well-known member of the Duma (parliament) and monarchist loudly opposed to Rasputin, would have dismayed Tsar Nicholas, but not as much as the mention of Prince Felix Yusupov, who was married to his niece. He must also have been concerned to learn that his second cousin and one-time protégé, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, had also been present at the Yusupov Palace that Friday night. But Dmitri had always been close – too close – to Felix.⁸

That afternoon the Tsarina – German by birth, but brought up in England – scribbled a frantic note to the Tsar at the Stavka in her sometimes incoherent Russian.

Protopopov sent a memo to the head of the Palace Guard, General Voikov. Voikov was not at Tsarskoye Selo this weekend. Protopopov’s note contained more information about what Rasputin had been wearing – ‘an expensive shirt and a fur coat’ – and added that a party had taken place at the Yusupov Palace the night before and the Gendarmerie had now begun a full investigation.

Mounya Golovina had rung Yusupov as she promised. She knew he was staying at the palace of his father-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, further along the Moika, while his own set of apartments at the Yusupov Palace was refurbished. The servants told her ‘they’ were still asleep; which supported her theory that Yusupov and Rasputin had been out at the gypsy encampment.

When she arrived at Rasputin’s apartment on Gorokhovaya Street it was full of people, some looking concerned yet reluctant to voice fears that might distress Rasputin’s daughters. The girls were very tense. Mounya made some excuse to take Maria out with her to order more refreshments, and together they made their way past snow piles down the salt-strewn street to a local fruit shop, which had a telephone. Mounya made the call, but this time the servants told her Yusupov had gone out. She left a message. They went back to the flat, hoping that he would soon ring her back.

A couple of miles north, across the wide River Neva separating fashionable Petrograd from the St Peter and St Paul Fortress and the well-wooded Islands, a bridge guard called Fyodor Kyzmin began his shift at midday. The Little Neva here separated Petrovski Island from Kristovski Island. Kyzmin had to trudge across the long, wide bridge every hour.¹¹ It was covered in thick snow and any trace of recent crime would be visible. At about one o’clock, he was completing his usual round under a lowering grey sky in a temperature a couple of degrees below zero when some passing workmen told him that further back there was blood on the bridge, its barrier and its support, and a shoe lay on the ice below. He went to check and found that they were right. He hadn’t noticed this before. He went to fetch a policeman, who, having checked, also found that they were right, and went to fetch an inspector, Asonov. They all came back and the inspector took measurements, made notes, and induced Kyzmin to fish about with a boat-hook and retrieve ‘a man’s galosh and a worn brown shoe, Size 10, manufactured by Treygolnik’.

Not wanting to stir up trouble, Inspector Asonov put in a report early in the afternoon.

However, there were no divers in the Gendarmerie; the River Police had to provide those, and the system was slow to crank into action. It seems unlikely that any divers inspected the Petrovski Bridge on Saturday. Nobody came to ask Kyzmin, in his hut, about any shoe, or galosh, that had been found.

At last, at lunchtime Yusupov telephoned the apartment on Gorokhovaya Street and asked to speak to Mounya Golovina. She took the phone and – aware that the Okhrana were listening – spoke in English. She looked agitated. Shortly afterwards she left, telling Maria that she would be back but that she must speak to Yusupov alone, at the home she shared with her mother on the Moika. Maria and the others noticed that she seemed agitated. And when Mounya got home it is possible that, before he arrived, Anna Vyrubova called to tell her what the Okhrana suspected about Yusupov’s involvement, because according to him Mounya:

Yusupov tried to reassure her. He told her that policemen had been crawling all over the place this morning – he had held a small house-warming party last night and things had got rather out of hand; his closest friend Dmitri, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, had shot one of the yard dogs by accident. There had been a great fuss – there was a police station just across the canal beside the Ministry of the Interior, so of course they had heard the gun – and then Purishkevich had said something stupid to a policeman about shooting Rasputin, and at the crack of dawn a couple of examining magistrates had turned up asking about Rasputin and looking at the dog’s bloodstains in the snow in the yard. But Rasputin hadn’t been near the place! As it happened he’d rung up in the middle of the housewarming to ask Yusupov to make up a party and come out to the gypsies, but Yusupov had made his excuses because he’d got guests. He’d actually gone back into the dinner party and told them all what Rasputin had said. Anyway, he had been badly shaken by the examining magistrates and then this morning, at his father-in-law’s place where he was trying to get some sleep, he was woken up by a policeman called Grigoriev and had to go through the whole thing again. He had fully explained the situation. It was all cleared up now.

Mounya was not quite so sure.

‘It’s all too horrible,’ she said. ‘The Empress and Anna [Vyrubova] are convinced that you murdered him last night at your house.’

‘Will you telephone to Tsarskoye Selo and ask if the Empress will receive me? I’ll explain the whole thing to her, but be quick.’

Yusupov was spared ‘something dreadful’ when Anna Vyrubova rang and said the Tsarina had collapsed in a faint, and didn’t want Yusupov to come to the Alexander Palace but demanded that he write down what had happened. He promised to do so and left.

Later that afternoon Mounya returned to Rasputin’s apartment with her mother, hoping that Yusupov was telling the truth. He would probably figure in a list of suspects, if the police were making a list of people bearing a grudge against Rasputin. On the other hand, a list like that would be very long indeed. And back in the apartment that evening they were thinking exactly that, and were beginning to fear the worst, and Mounya and her mother had begun to cry a little when they heard a loud knock at the door.

The visitors wore uniform. General Popov and Lt-Col. Popel of the Detached Gendarme Corps explained that they were there to conduct certain enquiries on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior.

Popov had already spoken to Yusupov’s batman Ivan Nefedev at the Yusupov Palace, and had realised that he was going to get precious little change out of any of the servants there. According to Nefedev, on the night of Friday 16 December,

Mounya Golovina was interviewed on the Saturday. The rest had to wait until the following morning, which was fortunate for the investigators, as the women’s attitude to the police would change overnight. That evening, however, Mounya told Popov that, on Friday 16 December,

In fact, Yusupov had spent a busy morning firefighting – dashing from point to point in his chauffeured car. He knew Rasputin was dead; he had been intimately involved in arranging his murder. Now he set about covering his tracks. He made a statement to the city’s Governor, Alexander Balk. Then he was whisked from the Prefecture back to the palace on the Moika to check for bloodstains in daylight, and directed the servants to clean up wherever he found anything incriminating, before racing over to Mounya Golovina’s to act the innocent. He left Mounya’s house, which was also on the Moika, in order to visit Dmitri Pavlovich at his own apartment in the Sergei Palace on the Nevski Prospekt.

Dmitri Pavlovich, a sallow man with moody Greek eyes, was a few years younger than Felix Yusupov. Over a late lunch he was able to reveal to Yusupov what exactly had happened early that morning after he and the other murderers drove off with Rasputin’s body, and roughly where it had been dumped. Lt Sergei Sukhotin, who had been with them throughout the previous night and had assisted in the murder, came in and was sent off to fetch Vladimir Purishkevich, the idea being that they would all get their stories in line. This was particularly important because Felix Yusupov now had to compose a letter to the Tsarina.

Purishkevich, whose loose talk had contributed so much to the mess they were in, was maintaining his usual high profile. He was an odd-looking character, bald with pebble glasses, and excitable. Having previously arranged for any member of the Duma who wished – there were about 400 of them – to visit his hospital train from nine o’clock in the morning onwards on Saturday 17 December, he had spent a busy morning showing parties around. Medical aid and expertise were carried to Russian soldiers at the front by around 300 private hospital trains like his; many rich individuals sponsored locomotives and staff and beautifully fitted carriages, but few regularly travelled with them as he did. He had made more than one trip to Romania in recent months, during the ignominious retreat in which Romanian and Russian troops had been beaten back by Germans. On his latest return, just six weeks before, he had personally reported to the Tsar at the Stavka on the situation in Rena, Braila and Galati. He had chosen this particular Saturday on which to depart once more on a mission of mercy.¹⁶

He and his wife and two sons were already installed in their private carriage and the train was ready to leave Petrograd’s Warsaw Station that evening on its long journey across the snowy wastes of Russia and Ukraine. His wife was a qualified nurse and his sons would act as orderlies. Purishkevich would support them and was sincere in his wish to assist. There was no doubt that his humanitarian efforts were valuable, albeit probably funded, at least, by the sinister Black Hundreds, a pro-German secret society of Russian autocrats. Purishkevich is said to have been ‘a major conduit’ for finance to this and other similar organisations for years; they paid for pogroms against the Jewish population.¹⁷

Purishkevich had slept in his clothes, spent the morning of Saturday 17 December conducting guests around his train, and in the afternoon had run errands and paid visits. He had arranged the train’s departure and was about to take a final meal before leaving when Sukhotin arrived to drag him off to the Sergei Palace for the final conspiratorial debriefing. He later recalled that:

All the conspirators contributed to Yusupov’s letter. Unctuous deference and injured innocence were laid on with a trowel…

It was a masterly picture. Behold the considerate host, enjoying a final nightcap with his guests before a roaring fire.

There was a good deal more along similar lines. The Tsarina does not seem to have been convinced.

Yusupov was going to leave that Saturday evening to join his wife, who was unwell, and their child in the Crimea and spend the Christmas holiday. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a serving officer, was due to return to the Tsar’s headquarters, the Stavka, on Sunday.

Today, Saturday, was 17 December in Petrograd, where the old Julian calendar was still in use. In Western Europe and North America it was 30 December. So for thirty-six-year-old newcomer Sir Samuel Hoare, Head of the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd,²⁰ it was the last working day of 1916. Tomorrow he and his wife would celebrate New Year’s Eve quietly. They were not yet so well integrated in the Petrograd social scene as some other officers of the Mission. A fair-haired, openfaced fellow, on this Saturday afternoon he was at the Restriction of Enemy Supplies Committee meeting – a Duma committee meeting which was taking place despite the sudden prorogation of the Duma the previous day. The point under discussion was how to keep goods from the Central Powers – Germany, Turkey, and Italy – out of Russia.

The meeting dragged on with the usual Russian disregard for time. Hoare remembered that:

‘I did not attempt to discuss the situation’. A strange remark for the head of the British Intelligence Mission to make; but then spying, at its untrustworthy end, was not Hoare’s speciality.

The following Sunday morning he set about drafting a report for despatch to London. By then he had ‘been in touch with various people representing different classes and sections of opinion’ and concluded that Yusupov had held ‘a ball’ on the Friday night which was attended by several Grand Dukes. He had heard more than one version of what happened but ‘the generally accepted story is that he was shot as he was leaving the house in a motor. The motor is supposed to have taken the body to the Islands where it was thrown into the sea or one of the rivers.’

Hoare felt confident enough to write all this down on Sunday and send it, amended, on Monday. But others in the British military and diplomatic community had heard about Rasputin’s disappearance even before the Saturday evening paper appeared.²² Many members of the British Intelligence Mission occupied rooms at the Hotel Astoria, opposite St Isaac’s Cathedral, more or less permanently, and nothing is known of what they had heard or whether, indeed, they spent Saturday sleeping off an eventful Friday night. But the Hon. Albert Stopford, a businessman and diplomat, a frequent visitor from England who was particularly well connected and always stayed at the Hotel d’Europe on the Nevski, had certainly been royally entertained on the night of Friday 16 December, so the next day,

Lady Georgina’s husband, the British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan, telephoned his friend Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, a relative of Dmitri Pavlovich, at half-past five on Saturday 17 December and told him the news. Stopford set off for the theatre, where he saw ‘Grand Duke Boris [Vladimirovich], Grand Duke Dmitri [Pavlovich] and a cousin of Felix Yusupov’s’ but nobody knew anything definite. The ‘cousin of Yusupov’s’ was probably Vera Koralli, a ballerina who was Dmitri Pavlovich’s lover at the time. She was briefly staying in Petrograd while engaged to perform with the Moscow Imperial Theatre.²⁴

Stopford was shocked but not at all surprised that Rasputin had been done away with. He had heard ten days before, apparently from Dmitri Pavlovich himself, that what he coyly described in his diary as a ‘tragic dénouement’ might be on the cards.

By now the diligently lying Felix Yusupov had (according to his own later account) visited A. A. Makarov, the Minister of Justice, who seemed pretty well satisfied with the shot-dog story, ²⁵ and Mikhail Rodzyanko, the Speaker of the Duma, who was a distant relation, and who ‘applauded my conduct in a voice of thunder’ for he knew that Yusupov had intended to kill Rasputin. As Yusupov nipped about town in his small brown motor car he might have been less sanguine had he known that the Okhrana were sceptical of everything he said and preferred to listen to the police witnesses and officials who had searched the yard at his palace on 94 Moika.

Dmitri Pavlovich, having rested that Saturday morning before his late lunch with Yusupov, was now running on adrenalin. He dined that evening at the Yacht Club. There he was seen by his father’s cousin Nikolai Mikhailovich, who had heard of the scandal, and of Felix’s involvement, from Sir George Buchanan at half-past five.²⁶ Dmitri Pavlovich left the theatre early in order to avoid ovations.²⁷ He had given orders for a party to be held in his apartment, and when his guests left theatres and restaurants, they began to arrive.

Yusupov returned to dine early at the palace of his father-inlaw Alexander Mikhailovich, where he was staying. Afterwards he was due at the station to catch his train out of town. As he entered the hall a porter told him that a lady was waiting. She had claimed that she had an appointment with him at seven. He had made no such arrangement and when he heard her description – ‘she was dressed in black, but he could not make out her features as she was wearing a thick veil’ – he was understandably suspicious and took a surreptitious peep at the waiting visitor. She was ‘one of Rasputin’s most fervent admirers’, so he told the porter to tell her he would be back very late, and hurried off to pack.²⁸ And then, in Yusupov’s own account,

Prince Felix Yusupov was having a long day, and it had not ended yet. He had just retired to his room to discuss events with Prince Fyodor Romanov, one of his brothers-in-law, when Nikolai Mikhailovich bustled in to see him. Nikolai Mikhailovich was about sixty, liberal in his views, and a very good friend of Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador.³⁰ He had called much earlier in the evening and had been put off; but he was certainly persistent.

The others left, and Nikolai Mikhailovich tried to bluff Yusupov into telling the truth. He failed; he left; and at last Yusupov got some sleep.³¹

Purishkevich, the eccentric member of the Duma, steamed out of the city at ten o’clock that Saturday night on his hospital train. It was he who had first boasted of Rasputin’s murder to a policeman, yet, according to extant records, nobody had questioned him further.

At midnight, a couple of miles away across the icy Neva and the woods of Petrovski Island, Fyodor Kyzmin was to due to finish his shift at midnight. The beat policeman he’d seen in the morning came over to his hut shortly beforehand, and as soon as he had handed over to the night guard, Kyzmin and the policeman set off together through the snow to the police station with the boot. (From now on, most accounts refer to it as a single, brown boot).

A police inspector took it, at three o’clock in the morning on Sunday, to 64 Gorokhovaya Street. Most of the household were still up and Rasputin’s friend Aron Simanovich was with the girls. The boot was identified by Simanovich, Maria and Varvara Rasputina, two Okhrana agents and the lady dvornik, or concierge, of the block, as belonging to the missing Grigori Rasputin.

Dmitri Pavlovich’s party in the Sergei Palace reportedly continued until half-past seven on Sunday morning, and was ‘of a most riotous description’.³²