To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (23 page)

The following day,

I saw the costume Dr Lazovert acquired today on my orders for 600 roubles: a chauffeur’s fur coat, a sort of Astrakhan cap with ear flaps, and chauffeur’s gloves. Lazovert modelled all of these for me, looking like a typical chauffeur – foppish and impudent. For the time being he took all these purchases to the Astoria Hotel, where he stays during our visits to Petrograd.

The next decision was serious. They had to fit the murder into their busy schedules. Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich wanted to have it over with by 12 December, but Dmitri’s diary was full until Friday 16 December. In passing, Yusupov told them (as his own account confirms) that Rasputin had offered to get him a job in government.

‘And what did you say to that?’ the Grand Duke asked, throwing him a meaningful look while taking a drag on his cigarette.

‘I?’ replied Yusupov, who lowered his gaze and, fluttering his eyelashes, assumed an ironically languid look, ‘I modestly informed him that I consider myself too young, inexperienced and unprepared for service in the administrative field, but that I was gratified beyond belief that one so well known for his perspicacity as Grigori Efimovich should have such a flattering opinion of me.’

We all burst out laughing.

They were concerned that Rasputin might tell his Okhrana minders where he was going. To deflect suspicion, they decided that after the clothes had been taken for burning to the hospital train, Sukhotin would telephone the Villa Rhode from a phone booth in the Warsaw Station. He would ask whether Rasputin was there, and on being told that he wasn’t, would be overheard saying ‘He’s not there yet. That means he’ll be arriving any minute.’ So that if they were later asked whether Rasputin had been at the Yusupov Palace they would say yes, he came and later left for the Villa Rhode.

They were swept along on a tide of bravado. Plan A could go wrong at any juncture; but there was no Plan B.

On Tuesday 13 December they met for the last time. ‘Vanya has arrived’, the telephone signal, summoned them to the Yusupov Palace. Friday 16 December was to be the night. Another refinement was bolted onto the plan: a gramophone was to be put in the lobby outside the study, on the floor above the basement dining room. It would drown the voices of the men and make Rasputin understand that he must wait for the Princess Irina who, he would be told, was entertaining some ladies upstairs. And Yusupov showed them the sort of Indian club, or ‘twopound rubber dumb-bell like those used for indoor gymnastics’ he had got from Maklakov and was keeping ‘just in case’.

On the day before the murder, a Thursday, with Purishkevich and his family no longer living in their town apartment but having moved into the hospital train,

Dr Lazovert having bought a brush, khaki paint, and dressed in a leather apron, spent all day today on the car which will serve us tomorrow night to fetch our exalted guest. All the cars in my detachment have inscribed on them, in large red letters, semper idem, my motto. This inscription… could be that clue that could immediately lead the authorities to the Yusupov Palace and to my train.

Quite. Temperatures well below freezing are not generally the best for allowing paint to dry; but no matter. And Dr Lazovert, busily daubing icy coachwork in the freight area of the Warsaw Station, did look a little conspicuous. ‘The train crew crowded round him’, asking questions. He told them he was off on a spree to the Islands tomorrow night, and didn’t want the car to be spotted – the motto could be painted on again later, en route for Romania.

Purishkevich gave his staff Friday night off, to get them out of the way. He was perfectly satisfied there was no circumstantial evidence to link him with Rasputin’s murder.

Purishkevich’s
Diary
was published in Russia in 1918 and in Paris in 1923, when, its author having died, Maklakov was asked for his comments before publication.

Maklakov was now living in Paris. He had served as Ambassador to France under the Provisional Government in 1917. His letter makes certain points which are worth bearing in mind. One thing he very much doubted was the dates. As for the bits he was certain of, because he was there, they are all wrong in essential aspects.

Purishkevich’s diary is not a diary at all. It is merely the literary form he chose for his memoirs… This story of Purishkevich’s is a nonsensical mixture of various conversations which took place at different times and even with different people, about which Purishkevich could only have learned at second hand…

I remember his first approach to me and even my surprise at it – a surprise related exclusively to the fact that
Purishkevich
was in the plot… Purishkevich told me the names of the participants, the
day
of the murder and that was all… I would never have talked to Purishkevich about it, since I did not consider him to be serious enough nor especially discreet enough for such an undertaking.

It seems that Yusupov approached Maklakov first, and got a dusty answer; then he asked Purishkevich, who agreed to participate; and then went to see Maklakov again and was given a truncheon (according to Yusupov). This Maklakov did not deny, but as to the potassium cyanide,

It was not I who gave Yusupov potassium cyanide, or more precisely, what to Yusupov passed for potassium cyanide – had it been genuine no amount of hardiness on Rasputin’s part would have saved him.
¹⁸

At the very least, Yusupov had told Irina, Purishkevich, Maklakov and Rodzyanko; Pavlovich had told Stopford and Purishkevich had told Hoare in November. Purishkevich had also enlisted Lazovert, who had told the train crew he was going to the Islands. Purishkevich was a blabbermouth, as were Dmitri Pavlovich and Yusupov. If this murder were to take place, it would be a miracle if all eyes did not turn in their direction. Yusupov was a tad worried about his legal position if he got caught, and Maklakov was a distinguished lawyer.

Just before the murder the participant, with whom I happened to talk, began to beg me urgently not to leave Petersburg on the day of the murder but to be there in case my advice might be needed. I will emphasise that… I did not suggest at any time to any of the participants that I would be their
defender at a trial.
¹⁹

Maklakov made it clear, he later wrote, that while he thought it impossible that the perpetrators would be tried, as it would be ‘Too upsetting for Russia’, on the other hand ‘To allow obvious murderers to go unpunished would also be impossible’.

Therefore it was their duty to act in such a way that they would not be discovered. In essence this would not be difficult since the authorities, understanding the significance of the affair, would hardly try to find the murderers. They need only
make it possible
that they not be discovered. Therefore the conspirators must refrain from any vainglorious urge to reveal themselves, must brag to no one, and on no account should they confess.
²⁰

Maklakov was close to putting off his prior appointment, which was a speaking engagement at the Law Society in Moscow, but found at the last moment that he couldn’t; he must catch a train out of town. He happened to meet Purishkevich at the Duma late in the afternoon of Friday 16 December, and told him to pass on that message to Yusupov. It was now, he said, that Purishkevich agreed to send him a telegram ‘if the affair ended successfully’.

T
he Yusupov Palace at 94 Moika had a long, high façade with twenty-six windows on each floor and a six-column Tuscan portico extending up to the second storey; high above this was a central attic carrying the Yusupov coat of arms. The façade ran along the pavement of the narrow road alongside the canal. At the back, projecting wings enclosed a colonnaded courtyard on two sides with a carriage entrance onto a street at the rear.

Adjoining the palace at the eastern side was a much more subdued building, number 92, also owned by the Yusupovs. It stood back about twelve metres from the façade of number 94. In front of it was a cobbled courtyard with handsome street railings made out of solid timber in the Russian style, having three sets of double gates along their course. Two of the sets of gates had high ornamental gateposts.

Prince Yusupov and Princess Irina had been having their private apartment in the eastern side of the palace remodelled since they married two years before; the work was still incomplete. Felix was at this time refurbishing his own set of private rooms within this partment, near the road alongside the Moika Canal. He would use them whenever he came to St Petersburg without his wife and baby. The ground-floor rooms were slightly above ground level. They were accessible from within the main palace, or from a small private door set centrally in the wall of the east wing overlooking the courtyard of number 92. This door opened onto the dog-leg landing of a narrow stairway. Six stairs led up to a large study with windows overlooking both the courtyard of number 92 and the canal, and more stairs led down to a roomy, vaulted basement, the street end of which had been converted into a dining room. Here, almost below ground, the front windows were small, set high in the walls, and gave onto the road at pavement level. The back windows were similarly small and high and gave onto the courtyard.

The small door, the basement dining room, the upper-groundfloor study, the windows and the courtyard figure crucially in the events of the night of the murder.

The Ministry of the Interior and its adjoining police station stood no more than fifty metres from the façade of number 94, across the frozen Moika Canal. On the east side of number 92, at right angles to the Moika, is Prachesni Lane. The temperature on the night of 16 December was well below freezing; snow was falling at least some of the time, certainly between the time of any activity in the courtyard and the time when the three police scene of crime photographs were taken at around midday on Saturday 17 December.

What happened in the basement room of number 92 Moika in the early hours of 17 December 1916, and who was ultimately responsible for the death of Grigori Rasputin, has been the subject of many theories over the years. With the wealth of original investigation documents and testimonies, the 1916 autopsy evidence, the subsequent forensic reviews and the new evidence, which has only recently come to light, we can now begin to eliminate some of the more fanciful and intangible accounts that have muddied the waters over the past nine decades.

The Police Department Report, written on 17 December, was compiled from police interviews the morning after the affair. It states
¹
that at half-past two on the Saturday morning, the policeman on guard at the Interior Ministry across the canal from the Yusupov Palace heard ‘a detonation’ from the palace. The terms of his duty did not allow him to leave his post, so he went into the Ministry and phoned the Duty Sergeant at the police station next door. The police station notified the District Office, and the Chief Police Officer, Colonel Rogov, went to the palace with a detachment of men. They made enquiries of the janitor at the palace and were told that ‘The shot’ had been fired from the Prince’s wing. Rogov’s assistant, Krylov, entered the building (presumably the main palace) and was told by the butler that there was a party going on, and one of the guests had aimed at a target but hit a window. He was shown ‘The broken window on the ground floor overlooking the forecourt of the adjoining house’. Rogov reported back to his senior officer, Grigoriev, and to an official on duty at the Prefecture.

Scarcely had the police officers left the palace when a motor-car drove up along the Moika Canal quay and stopped near a small foot-bridge almost facing the palace. Four men were seen to alight from the car. The moment they had left it the chauffeur extinguished the lights, and putting on full speed, made off along the canal. This scene was witnessed by a detective belonging to the Okhrana, named Tihomirov, who had been detailed by the Police Department to look after Rasputin.

The men did not go into the palace through its main entrance. They entered through Yusupov’s private door from the courtyard of number 92.

Tikhomirov thought they were robbers, ran across the canal to the police station, and telephoned the Chief of the Okhrana. Colonel Rogov, having put in his report and gone home, got there only to be alerted to the ‘attack’ on the palace by the Okhrana (Rogov, as a senior officer, would no doubt have had a telephone at home). He sent some police officers there, and the butler came out and told them that ‘some very highly placed guests had just arrived from the environs of Petrograd’. The policemen went back and put in a report to the Governor of Petrograd, General Balk. Shortly after six o’clock in the morning, when the policemen going off duty were, as was their routine, answering questions about the events of the night, ‘The sound of several police whistles was heard from the street’. They all rushed to the police station windows and saw that from the main entrance to the palace ‘Two women were being helped out, and that they were offering resistance to their ejection and refusing to enter a motor-car, and doing their best to force a way back into the palace’.

The police had blown their whistles in response to the protestations of the women, but by the time the police rushed out to assist, ‘The motor-car was already whirling off along the quay’. Rushing out in pursuit of his men, their senior officer Colonel Borozhdin ‘hailed the motor-car belonging to the secret police, which was permanently on duty at the Home Office building, and started off in pursuit’. His men ran to the palace. They were told that the two women had been
demi-mondaines
who were ‘misconducting themselves’ and had been asked to leave. Borozhdin’s car was not fast enough to catch the other one, ‘which carried neither number nor lights’. He returned, and he and Rogov (who must by now have needed some sleep) put in a joint report ‘in the morning’ to General Balk, about the events of the night.