To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

^THREE BODY OF EVIDENCE

The scene is monochrome: the wide, snow-covered bridge, a heavy, whitish morning sky, a shuffle of black-clad onlookers, snow and ice stretching east to the gracious range of lemon-and-white Petrograd palaces, and west to dark woods with the Gulf of Finland far beyond.

Not far from the bank of the wide, frozen channel, policemen are looking for something.

Some say it was on the Sunday afternoon that somebody – a policeman? a diver? – identified a shape, the length of a man, beneath the glassy crust of the Little Neva. But the divers, who had been told to search under ice inches thick, hauled nothing from the river. They waited until the following morning, being ‘not at all anxious to work’¹ because of the bitter cold; so while excitement, and in some cases fear, mounted in the city on that Sunday evening, only one fact seemed certain. The police now believed they were about to find Rasputin.

The body was retrieved at twenty to nine on the morning of Monday 19 December, or on Monday, New Year’s Day of 1917, London time. Or slightly later than twenty to nine, if you believe the dubious source that has Constable Andreev sweeping the ice at that time, discovering a frozen sable collar, reporting it, and the body being retrieved from under ice broken with crowbars.²

Planks were laid on the frozen surface. With the aid of grappling hooks, and watched by an unhelpful twitter of examining judges and journalists who had been herded to a vantage point on the bridge, men hauled the corpse, frozen stiff, out of the groaning, creaking ice and onto a raft of boards.

There was no mistaking the man. A fit-looking, bearded fellow in the loose blouse of a muzhik which had ridden up at the back, where his frigid flesh arched defensively away from the cold surface. A peasant with good hair and teeth in the prime of life, the legs below the thighs still tied in a sack. The face blackened and eyes and nose swollen, and the arms flung upward and bent at the elbows, the hands petrified as if clawing the air.

A police photographer shuffled gingerly along the planks and placed a ruler in shot before focusing carefully.

On the bridge, observers peered at the distant form, and glimpsed a flash of blue silk stained dark red. A sodden, frosted fur was heaped up next to it like a faithful dog.

An urgent telephone call brought out the bigwigs: the district Chief of Police, the Head of the Okhrana, an investigator from the Ministry of Justice called Zavadskis, General Popov and others.

The body would take a day to thaw out, so no immediate examination would be possible. But Petrograd could breathe again. Rasputin was well and truly dead.

The rigid form was loaded into the back of a motor lorry for despatch to the Vyborg Military Hospital. The journalists raced back to town to file their copy and the rest of the party drove to luncheon at a restaurant.

That Rasputin’s body was found by the police and pulled out of the Little Neva on that particular day is not in dispute. Most of the other ‘facts’ tend to be replaced by new ‘facts’ with each account that one reads. This is more than a problem of translation. There are different versions of almost everything that happened to Rasputin from the moment he left his apartment until his remains went up in smoke months later.

There is, for instance, the galosh. Or overshoe. Or pair of galoshes. Whether there was one or a pair, some kind of footwear was found and taken to Rasputin’s apartment where his daughters confirmed that it was his. Whether there was a sinister bloodstain on the galosh, or galoshes, varies according to who tells the story. Kyzmin the bridge guard described blood spots in the snow. There is a photograph purporting to show blood spots on the snowy struts projecting below the bridge, but since the picture is in black and white it is hard to be certain what the smudges are. There are no photographs showing footprints to and from the gap in the ice, yet there is an account of such footprints. One writer alleges that a hole had been carefully cut in the ice for disposal of the body; another (Hoare) that Makarov, the Minister of Justice, claimed to have received an anonymous phone call on the Saturday morning, telling him to search in the Islands.

The hidden agenda in all this, and of the message Hoare ‘received in strict confidence from the Chief of the Department of Military Police in the General Staff’ and would dutifully pass on to London, is the agenda of the searchers. The Okhrana, under Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior, was stressing in all public statements that ‘it was the intention of the murderers that the body should be discovered’. They had to make it clear that a group of people opposed to Rasputin, that is, opposed to the Tsar’s current policies as advised by Rasputin, wanted his death to be indisputable, so they had left clues. In other words, he had not died accidentally in some drunken brawl and been tossed into the Baltic never to be seen again, but must have been murdered and left in a place where he would be found, in a treasonable bid to clear the field for a change of policy or even a change of power. By inference, this was a political crime. So pleas of innocence from the likes of Prince Yusupov were not going to wash.

Once the body was found, there are still more contradictory accounts. One has it being hauled immediately to the riverbank before being driven to a nearby police station for investigation by a police surgeon. ‘The greater part of the shirt was drenched in blood, which had started to decompose spreading a noxious smell around the investigation room.’Three bullet-holes were found, and a ‘vast wound on the head’. Then Simanovich and Isodor arrived and made the first official identification.

The early detection of the bullet-holes certainly took place. The police were releasing information to the press, and Robert Wilton, the Times’s correspondent, was able to cable London as early as Tuesday 2 January ‘it is stated that there were three bullet wounds in Rasputin’s body, in the head, chest, and side’.³ The source for the information about the bullet-holes was probably also the police. Yusupov has another account, which he says is from the ‘official report’:⁴ the police believed the boot to be a size 11, not a size 10; the ‘nearby police station’ has become a shed; the police believed the murder had taken place on the bridge; the sable collar was a sable sleeve; the first identification was by a domestic servant, and later by Rasputin’s two daughters and Maria Rasputina’s Cossack fiancé. And so on. The devil is certainly in the detail.

The Tsar had returned that Monday morning to Tsarskoye Selo.

The Tsarina was horrified when she heard that the body had been found and identified. Until now she had kept hope alive. Her faith in the charismatic peasant had been complete, her adoration of him beyond all reason. The Tsarevich’s tutor wrote:

As the corpse defrosted, news of its retrieval was nimbly set in lead type for the evening papers, and all Petrograd buzzed with excitement. This time Hoare got the electrifying intelligence from a source he trusted. He sent another telegram.

He had not long finished adding versions of Saturday’s Police Report to what he had written yesterday, and now there was this. His pages had already been removed from the typewriter. A fresh sheet was begun.

Hoare was doing his best to keep up, but it was now Monday, nearly twenty-four hours after Stopford, Buchanan and Robert Wilton of the Times had seen the Police Report he refers to.

He claims in his autobiography that he was immediately invited to a macabre viewing.

Whether out of cowardice or common sense, he had done the right thing. Already the British were being mentioned in connection with the murder.

In London, meanwhile, it was New Year’s Day, when little political news was generally reported. The Times’s Night Editor rifled through everything that had come in and suddenly found an astonishing message from Reuters in Petrograd:

He printed the bare sentence and Wickham Steed, the famous Foreign Editor, added some obituary to pad it out (‘…[Rasputin] described in unblushing detail the amazing attentions he had extorted from and paid to women of all classes. His actions gave rise to much scandal…’). If an obituary can be salacious, this was. There had been nothing at all from Wilton, their own correspondent, and a sharp query was sent.

Rasputin, even in death, perhaps especially in death, might cause scenes ugly enough to rattle the Tsar. The body had to be got away from the Petrovski Bridge for a rapid autopsy and immediate burial. Yet as usual, nobody in this bumbling government could work out how to get from intention to action. Samuel Hoare’s report was written one month later (British date 5 February). He had heard a convincing version of what happened:

According to Hoare, Protopopov insisted that the body must be returned to Rasputin’s family by eight o’clock the next morning and he didn’t care if it was impossible, it was necessary. The whole party then wanted to know how they were to examine a body out in the back of beyond when they didn’t have transport. A motor car would cost 200 roubles and it wasn’t in the budget. Protopopov told them the cost would be taken care of and one of the examining magistrates went off to find the pathologist Professor Kossorotov and take him out there in a car.

This account has the authentically chaotic ring of Protopopov, carrying out the unreasonable demands of an autocratic Tsarina, challenged by a group of underlings fortified by a lunchtime drink and community of feeling. However, Hoare had not seen the Autopsy Report, which shows the body was in fact examined a day later. The post mortem was not signed off by Professor Kossorotov until ten o’clock on the night of Tuesday 20 December/2 January. Kossorotov himself said, in an interview the following year, that he expected to perform the autopsy on Wednesday morning. But at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening, not long after his arrival at a professional dinner being held in his honour, he was called to the telephone and Protopopov told him to go and perform the autopsy now, or else.¹¹

Whenever the autopsy took place, according to Hoare:

The Autopsy Report appears competently done, given such circumstances. Professor Kossorotov wrote:

In one account, the Tsarina and Vyrubova arrived in a carriage early on Wednesday morning, disguised as nurses, to claim the body. In another they turned up at the almshouse in the middle of the autopsy and demanded to see it. On being told that this was impossible, they asked for the clothes. It is said that ‘a couple of days later’ a surgeon performing a routine operation on the Tsarevich’s knee (at Tsarskoye Selo) saw Rasputin’s blue silk shirt embroidered with yellow flowers under the operating table.¹⁴ Yet according to the paragraph at the end of the post mortem, it would be a week before the shirt – a gift from the Empress – was taken to Tsarskoye Selo.

As Kossorotov began his grisly work that Tuesday, Wickham Steed, the Foreign Editor of the Times, was scratching his head over a wire dated Petrograd, 1 January. It was both alarming and puzzling. It began:

Meaning murder. Prince Yusupov had been a well-known figure in London society before he married. There were cuttings… This was obviously big news, too big to spike, but it was just as obviously chapter two of a story. Where on earth was chapter one? Something was missing. By the time Steed had rummaged for anything from Petrograd correspondent Wilton that might have come in earlier and slipped behind the desk, it was the middle of the night in Russia. In London, the Times must also be put to bed, so late on Tuesday under the headlines RASPUTIN DEAD – BODY RECOVERED IN THE NEVA – SUSPICION OF MURDER, Steed composed the following lead-in, to appear in italics:

Wilton’s story appeared below this paragraph on Wednesday. His wire of Saturday had never arrived. He received a baffled enquiry from London that Tuesday, wrote a full report of the Rasputin affair and sent it back with the only explanation for the lost message that he could think of.

His notes show that he had been ahead of all the news agencies in that he saw the Police Report on Sunday, just as Stopford did. Wilton was well connected in Petrograd, and in a position to see what had been going on since he worked out of an office in Gorokhovaya Street.

For a Head of the British Intelligence Mission, Hoare was comparatively ill-informed. He knew Purishkevich, and had been told well in advance by the man himself that there was to be an attempt to ‘liquidate the affair of Rasputin’. He had, however, taken no notice at all, thinking Purishkevich’s tone ‘so casual that I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying rather than an expression of a definitely thought out plan’. Now, presumably cursing his own lack of judgement, he kept quiet about Purishkevich’s warning in his despatches to London.¹⁶ Stopford did not confide in him. Nor, for reasons we shall discover later, did certain members of his own team.

Stopford wrote on Tuesday morning to the Marchioness of Ripon, a society hostess of his own age.¹⁷ She was a remarkable woman; Prince Yusupov had been a great friend of hers, despite the difference in their ages, in London before the war, when she had been responsible for bringing Diaghilev and Nijinskis to London. Stopford, knowing that she could be relied upon to pass information to people in government who mattered, sent regular letters to her or her daughter Lady Juliet Duff, a Russophile and fluent Russian speaker who also knew Yusupov well.¹⁸

In England people told each other that those Russians were quite mad. Things had changed in the last century or so, and it seemed unlikely that any present-day Romanovs would actually kill the Tsar. On the other hand, if Felix Yusupov, of all people, could murder that ghastly monk, who knew what was possible?

Rasputin was buried in a quiet private ceremony at Tsarskoye Selo at half-past eight in the morning of Wednesday 21 December, less than forty-eight hours after his body was found. Eyewitness accounts of the funeral are in the files of the Extraordinary Commission set up by the Provisional Government six months later to examine the circumstances of Rasputin’s death. A grave had been dug beneath the nave of a still unfinished church, endowed by Anna Vyrubova, at Tsarskoye Selo. The mourners were Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, the four royal daughters and the Tsarevich, Vyrubova, Lili Dehn the actress, who was also a close friend of the Tsarina, and the nurse Akilina Laptinskaya. She had been close to Rasputin for a decade, and had brought the body in a car overnight from the Tchesma Infirmary. Regarding them from a respectful distance were the usual unnoticed smattering of retainers and personal maids, the architect, another priest, and the man in charge of construction. Numerous Okhrana officers lurked in the surrounding woods. Colonel Loman, whose wife and daughter were followers of Rasputin but whose own devotion to the dead mystic was in doubt, watched from behind a bush.

The metal casket was lowered into the grave. An icy church smelling of fresh-sawn planks and builders’ sand was a bizarre resting place for a person who might have expected to take his leave in a candle-lit cathedral amid clouds of incense, weeping women and priests intoning a doleful lament. But the tenminute service was conducted by Father Vasiliev, the imperial family’s confessor, specially brought from Petrograd, and by nine o’clock the mourners were turning away. When they had gone, Okhrana men emerged from the woods and shovelled earth over the coffin.

News of the funeral did not immediately reach Petrograd. The following Saturday 24 December, 6 January in the British calendar, Albert Stopford wrote again to Lady Ripon:

Until the unexpected arrest of Dmitri Pavlovich, the whole tribe of Romanovs, along with almost every other aristocrat, had believed that, with Rasputin out of the way, the Tsar would somehow regain control. They still hoped that, with the passage of time, he would. Stopford would learn that night that Grand Duke Dmitri was already under escort – in a train without a restaurant car – to Kasmin, on the Persian front, one of the hardest postings of the war. Felix Yusupov had been banished to Archangelskoye, the legendary family palace outside Moscow. A few days later Stopford wrote:

The British were waiting for great developments of a different kind. Hoare was not the only one who saw in Rasputin’s murder the coming of a new dawn. Sir George Buchanan was convinced that the Duma would take advantage of the situation and push the Tsarina into the background, clearing the way for the Tsar to listen to sensible advice from a pro-Ally perspective. The very day before Rasputin’s death, the Duma’s proceedings had been summarily halted by imperial command because so many parliamentarians had spoken up against Rasputin and the politicians and churchmen he had put in place. Now that he was gone, and there was such visible public support on every side for his supposed assassins, the British expected the liberals in Parliament to rally their forces and reconstitute the Duma as an effective force firmly behind the Allies in the war, instead of the limp assembly it had become.

Buchanan and the others miscalculated badly. The pro-Ally members of the Duma had neither influence nor ability, nor sufficient drive to take action.

On the morning of Friday 31 December/12 January, Sir George Buchanan had an audience with the Tsar. He was realistic about the desperately precarious state of political order in Russia and knew he must speak frankly; no one else would. He asked the Foreign Office for permission to say his piece on behalf of the King, but London replied that the King was out of town. Sir George would have to make it clear to the Tsar that his views were purely personal.

The forthcoming Allied Mission – a deputation from England and France, due to arrive in less than three weeks – was to see people of influence and set up links to enable Russia to get in step with the other two Allied powers. Buchanan explained that it was difficult for the English and French visitors to have any faith in this process when one hardly knew which Minister would be in power from one week to the next. It was important to allow good people to make their own decisions about the team they wanted to work with. And on this topic, he felt he must warn His Majesty (again) that the Tsarina must not be used as a tool of the German propaganda machine by those around her. He tried to tell him (again) how important it was to work with the people of Russia. Warming to his theme, Sir George suggested that the Tsar had come to the parting of the ways.

The Tsar thanked him but told him not to exaggerate Russia’s problems. If they were in any way as severe as he implied, he could in any case rely on his army to defend him from an uprising.

According to Stopford, who met him bounding up the embassy stairs, Sir George came back from the audience looking rather chipper. However, at some point the following day, his mood was to change to one of concern and trepidation. Quite how or when it reached him is not clear, but his own diary leaves us in little doubt that Buchanan received news of the most unwelcome kind – news that could have catastrophic diplomatic consequences for Britain. Rather than wait to see if he would be summoned, Buchanan decided to take the bull by the horns and raise the matter directly with the Tsar himself at the Russian New Year’s Reception.

The stunning news Buchanan had heard on the grapevine was to the effect that evidence had recently come into the possession of the Tsar that led him to suspect ‘a certain British subject’ of being Rasputin’s killer. According to Buchanan:

Whether or not the Tsar believed Buchanan’s assurance and indeed how assured Buchanan himself actually was that no British subject was in anyway involved is equally unclear. It would seem that Buchanan had contacted Hoare for his reaction, but then again, Hoare was not necessarily aware of what his own men were up to a good deal of the time.

Who then was this nameless mystery man who had come to the Tsar’s attention and who had caused Buchanan at least one night’s troubled sleep? The Tsar had supported the Allies in the first place in order to get foreign debt written off and access to Constantinople as a reward when they won, so he did not want to offend them. But he, the Okhrana and Rasputin’s friends had been asking themselves exactly who had had an interest in murdering Rasputin, and had drawn certain conclusions.