Rasputin (21 page)

Purishkevich leapt downstairs, drawing a gun from his pocket. Rasputin had by now somehow heaved
himself
through a gate and into the palace yard, and was running at speed through the snow yelling: ‘Felix,
Felix
, I’ll tell the Tsarina everything.’ Purishkevich ran after him and fired two shots, but they both missed. In a desperate bid to help himself focus, Purishkevich then bit his own left hand and fired a third shot which he claimed killed Rasputin.

There were disputes about whether Purishkevich did, in fact, fire the fatal shot. It was mooted that Grand Duke Dmitri, a trained soldier, was the more likely
candidate
. The Tsar’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, was in no doubt that it was her former fiancé. She wrote in her diary: ‘We have learned that Father Grigory has definitely been killed, it must have been by Dmitri.’

There is also evidence, however, that the
coup de grâce
was fired by a British secret service agent. The idea is not so outlandish. The Tsar and George V were
cousins
: the Man of God had become an embarrassment for the British as well as the Russian monarchy. But the more urgent concern would have been the widely held notion that Rasputin was somehow lobbying for a
separate
peace with Germany.

The agent most frequently referred to as the assassin was Oswald Rayner, a friend of Yussoupov’s from Oxford. He had visited the Moika Palace several times during November; he was with Yussoupov the morning after the murder and for the next 24 hours. Another British agent said shortly afterwards that ‘awkward
questions were being asked.’ The Tsar later told the Ambassador, George Buchanan, that he had heard that British officers were involved. Buchanan’s insistence that the allegation contained ‘not a word of truth’ did nothing to quell rumours. It is said, even now, that King George V was involved.

Alternative rumours were rife. Bertie Stopford, an English friend of the Tsar’s cousins, was in close contact with Yussoupov at the time. He was told that
Rasputin
had been given a gun and ordered to shoot himself. Perhaps the least likely suggestion put forward was that Rasputin was shot by Yussoupov’s Ethiopian servant, Tesphe, a man so unsophisticated that he liked to peer into lavatories to watch the water flushing.

I
n the early hours of the morning of the 17th,
Purishkevich
persuaded two soldiers to help him drag the body inside. He then searched for Yussoupov,
finding
him in a bathroom, trembling, spitting and
vomiting
. Purishkevich led him to the stairs above where the body was lying, so that he could see that Rasputin was actually dead. Yussoupov peered over the bannister and glared at the body, before throwing Maklakov’s cudgel at it. He then ran downstairs and set about beating it. In the end Purishkevich – puzzled by the passionate ferocity of Yussoupov’s attack – had to order the two soldiers to pull him off.

Yussoupov was by now finally convinced that
Rasputin 
was dead, but, at that moment, Purishkevich began to entertain his own doubts. He maintained that he saw and heard Rasputin still showing signs of life: ‘Turning his face up, he groaned and it seemed that he rolled his right eye which fixed me, dazed but terrible, I see it before me now.’

A spanner should have fallen into the works when the police called, after hearing shots at 3.00am. But Yussoupov somehow managed to fob them off, telling them he had been holding a party and that Grand Duke Dmitri had shot the porter’s dog for fun. In the course of the evening Yussoupov had, indeed, shot his dog as a way of accounting for blood in the snowy yard. He later complained: ‘Because of that reptile I had to shoot one of my best dogs.’

The ebullient Purishkevich couldn’t resist bragging to the police that they had murdered Rasputin. But the police were unsure whether to take him seriously. Two days later, Yussoupov, still sticking to various false
accounts
, attempted to be breezy about Purishkevich’s ‘confession’. ‘I had a telephone conversation with Purishkevich about this matter and he explained that he had said something about Rasputin to the policeman, but because he had been very drunk he could not remember what exactly.’ In fact, for all his eccentricities, Purishkevich was a member of the Temperance League.

The conspirators wrapped Rasputin’s body in his coat and a blue curtain, before loading it into the car and driving to the Petrovsky Bridge. Purishkevich had an uncomfortable journey, complaining that his ‘knees touched the repulsive, soft corpse’. He added that the
‘body kept jumping about, despite a soldier sitting on top of it.’ While the body was heaved over the parapet into the river, Grand Duke Dmitri kept watch. As Purishkevich said: ‘The Royal youth must not touch the criminal body’.

At some point Yussoupov recovered himself
sufficiently
to send a telegram to his wife in the Crimea: ‘It’s all over.’ Purishkevich also sent a telegram, to
Maklakov
: ‘When are you coming?’ – the code message for ‘Rasputin has died.’

There was a further call from the police between 7.30 and 8.00. The police seem to have been
singularly
ineffective during these crucial hours; they may have been thrown by the presence, at the palace, of not just one but two members of the Imperial family. In any case, it was only now, during this second visit, that they conducted a proper inspection, discovering telltale bloodstains in the cellar. Yussoupov’s curious attempts to cover traces of blood with scent had evidently been unsuccessful. But, in his memoirs, Yussoupov failed to mention the police discoveries, stating simply that, after recovering from his attack of nerves, he managed to remove brown stains from floors and carpets with the help of his manservant.

T
he next day, the Rasputins’ maid, Katya, woke Maria and Varya to tell them that their father hadn’t returned. The telephone wires were soon buzzing.
Maria rang Anna Vyrubova; Rasputin’s niece, Anna, rang Munia; Maria rang Yussoupov, but he said he knew nothing. When she told him he had been spotted at the flat, he claimed he’d taken Rasputin to the Villa Rhode restaurant. This would have been all too plausible; Rasputin never tired of ringing ‘Alphonse’ to book tables, which would duly be prepared with flowers and fish.

But when Maria rang the Villa Rhode, she was told that nobody had seen her father. Maria then got a call from Protopopov who had himself had a call from the Mayor of Petrograd enquiring about Rasputin’s
disappearance
. Yussoupov and Grand Duke Dmitri both rang the Palace in a bid to defend themselves from
rumours
already circulating about their involvement. But the Tsarina refused to speak to either of them. She said of Yussoupov coldly: ‘Let him write.’

The Tsarina wrote an agonised letter to her husband at the military headquarters. ‘We are sitting here
together
– can you imagine our feelings – thoughts – our Friend has disappeared… Felix [Yussoupov] pretends he never came to the house and never asked him… I can’t and won’t believe he has been killed. God have mercy. Such utter anguish.’ She added ominously: ‘Felix came often to him lately.’

With the prescience of a natural hysteric, the Tsarina soon had a good idea of the truth, writing to her husband the next day: ‘No trace yet… the police are continuing the search. I fear that these two wretched boys (Yussoupov and Grand Duke Dmitri) have
committed
a frightful crime but have not yet lost all hope.
Start today, I need you terribly.’ The Tsarina was particularly distressed about the involvement of Grand Duke Dmitri: ‘whom I loved as my own son’.

Grand Duchess Olga wrote in her diary: ‘Father Grigory has been missing since last night. They are looking everywhere. It is terribly hard. The four of us [the young Grand Duchesses] slept together. God help us!’ The Tsar himself took the news of Rasputin’s
disappearance
differently. He is said to have walked away whistling.

Yussoupov may initally have denied any
involvement
in the murder to the police and the Tsarina, but he was not so circumspect with his friend, the Rev. Mr Lombard. After turning up at the chaplain’s house, he threw himself on a sofa, and pronounced: ‘Padre, we have done it.’

Unfazed by Yussoupov’s flagrant disregard of his earlier advice, the chaplain agreed to accompany him to the scene of the crime, where he insisted on blessing the cellar with holy water and incense. He was always to remember the blood on the white bearskin carpet: ‘I cannot describe the horror of the atmosphere. It felt filthy and unclean, the only other place where I have experienced the same feeling was in the Museum at Scotland Yard. I gained his consent to cleanse that room ceremonially.’

L
ess than 24 hours after watching her father leave
Gorokhovaya Street with Yussoupov, Maria found herself having to identify one of his galoshes. The boot was one of the pair hidden by Maria and her sister in their vain attempt to stop their father leaving the night before. It was brought to the flat by a policeman, accompanied by Rasputin’s disgraced friend, Bishop Isidor.

The identification process was described baldly in a police report: ‘The brown size 10 shoe, manufactured by Treigol’nik, found under Petrovsky Bridge, on the River Neva, has been presented to Maria and Varvara [Varya] Rasputin. They confirmed that the shoe belonged to their father; it was the right size and looked the same.’

Rasputin’s body was finally discovered two days
later
, on the morning of December 19, after a sleeve of his fur coat had been spotted protruding from the ice on the Neva. The Rasputin sisters were taken, with Anna Vyrubova, to view their father’s body. ‘The face was
almost
unrecognisable: clots of dark blood had coagulated in the beard and hair; one eye was almost out of its socket and on the wrists were deep marks left by the bonds that my father had succeeded in breaking in his death struggle,’ wrote Maria with her usual candour.

The initial pathology report from Professor
Dmitri
Kosorotov was equally gothic; the autopsy had been conducted by the light of oil lamps and a lantern. ‘His left side has a weeping wound, due to some sort of
slicing
object or sword. His right eye has come out of its cavity and falls down into his face… The victim’s face and body carry traces of blows given by a supple but hard object.’ The pathologist was shocked by the extent
of Rasputin’s head injuries. The ‘goat like expression and enormous head wound [were] hard even on my
experienced
eyes’.

There were disputes as to whether there was water in his lungs. If water was found, it would have proven that Rasputin had still been alive when thrown into the river and that he had, in fact, drowned. But that would give rise to a fresh problem: saints, it was believed, could not drown. Why had the divine force that protected
Rasputin
from poison and bullets not protected him from drowning? This particular worry should have died with the confirmation that there was no water in the lungs.