To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (27 page)

He missed. His second shot missed as well. Purishkevich was mad at himself, because he had allegedly done quite a lot of target practice at the Semionovski parade ground, ‘but today I was not able to lay out a man at twenty paces’. Rasputin was by the gate now. It was all a matter of concentration. Purishkevich bit his left hand as hard as he could, to focus his mind, and his third shot hit Rasputin in the back. He stopped,

…and this time, taking careful aim from the same spot, I fired for the fourth time. I apparently hit him in the head, for he keeled over face first in the snow, his head twitching. I ran up to him and kicked him in the temple with all my might. He lay there, his arms stretched far out in front of him, clawing at the snow as if he were trying to crawl forward on his belly. But he could no longer move and only gnashed and gritted his teeth.
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Purishkevich went back into the house the way he had come. Between his shots, he had noticed two men walking along the pavement outside; ‘the second of them’ had run away when he heard the shot.

Now he wondered what to do. ‘I am alone, Yusupov is out of his mind, and the servants don’t know what is going on’. And a corpse was in the yard. A passer-by might see it. And in particular –

Perhaps the servants had not heard Yusupov’s shots in this room, but it was impossible to imagine that two soldiers sitting in the main entrance hall could not have heard four loud shots from my Savage in the courtyard. I walked through the lobby to the main entrance.

‘Boys,’ I addressed them, ‘I killed…’ At these words they advanced on me in real earnest as if they wanted to seize me. ‘I killed,’ I repeated ‘Grishka Rasputin, the enemy of Russia and the Tsar.’At these last words, one of the soldiers became greatly agitated and rushed up to kiss me. The other said ‘Thank God, about time!’

He made them promise to say nothing. They said ‘we are Russians… we won’t betray you’.

Purishkevich found Yusupov throwing up in a bathroom of his parents’ apartments. He took him back to the study, while Yusupov mumbled ‘Felix, Felix’ over and over again. However, within moments of entering the study, the Prince broke free of Purishkevich, dashed to his desk, got the rubber truncheon Maklakov had given him, raced downstairs, berserk, and began to beat the corpse about the head with it.

It took two servants to drag Yusupov away, and there was blood everywhere. They ‘carried him upstairs in their arms’ all covered in blood, and sat him in the sofa, where he continued to roll his eyes, twitch, and repeat his own first name. Purishkevich told the servants to ‘find some cloth from somewhere’ and wrap the corpse and ‘bind the swaddled thing securely with the cord’. One of them went off to do this while the other one told him that the point-duty policeman had been enquiring about the shooting, and was insisting that he’d have to put in a report about it.

Ten minutes later, when Vlasuk came in, Purishkevich realised that he had made a mistake in calling him in because the policeman was ‘a veteran of the old school’. Perhaps he had hoped to bribe him. Anyway, he recognised Purishkevich at once, and, having had the case for murdering Rasputin put to him by the silver-tongued Duma deputy, was only too pleased to find out that the death had occurred. He promised not to say anything unless they made him swear an oath, in which case he would have to tell the truth. Purishkevich let him go, because ‘his district chief was Lt Grigoriev (who was, as far as I knew, a very decent fellow of good family)’. He decided ‘To leave the future to fate’.

Downstairs, the servant had wrapped the corpse, head and all, in what looked like a blue curtain and tied it with cord. Purishkevich told the servants to tidy Yusupov up and do the best they could with him.

The others returned. He told them what had happened. Hurriedly they dragged the corpse into the car ‘Together with the chains and the 2-pood weights I had brought to Yusupov’s apartment that night’. (Maybe Lazovert had loaded them into his car, and out of it at the Yusupov Palace later. Purishkevich didn’t take them with him on the tram to the Duma, or hang around in the snow before midnight with them.) Purishkevich deputed one of the soldiers to look after Yusupov.

Dmitri Pavlovich drove (he had several cars and was a keen motorist). Sukhotin sat next to him. Dr Lazovert sat in the back on the right and Purishkevich on the left ‘and squeezed in with the corpse was one of the soldiers, whom we had decided to take with us to help us throw the heavy body into the hole in the ice’.

They had already set off when Purishkevich saw Rasputin’s galoshes and fur coat in the back of the car. The redoubtable Mrs Purishkevich had refused to cut it up for burning, and when Dmitri Pavlovich protested, she had not been one bit intimidated. They had burned his ‘sleeveless coat’ and his gloves, but the rest would have to be drowned with him. They had made their phone call to the Villa Rhode.

After this they continued the journey in silence, enjoying the icy air blowing through the open windows, with Purishkevich silently daydreaming about the time when Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich had summoned him to hear about his, the Grand Duke’s, anxiety about Rasputin and how it had been expressed to the Tsar.

This unlikely digression over, Purishkevich found himself still in the car, the corpse soft ‘at my feet’, and outside the city on a bumpy road. At last, Dmitri Pavlovich drove onto the bridge and coasted to a halt. They saw a sentry-box on the far side before the headlamps were extinguished. (The photograph taken on Monday 19 December shows that there were gas-lights at intervals on either side of the Petrovski Bridge.) Purishkevich was first out of the car and the soldier and Dr Lazovert and Captain Sukhotin helped him swing the corpse and fling it into the ice-hole (a drop of about five metres, to judge from photographs). Dmitri Pavlovich stood guard by the car.

Then they remembered they’d forgotten the weights, and dropped them after it; and weighted the coat with chains and hoisted that over as well. Dr Lazovert found one of the galoshes and threw it off the bridge. Then they drove across the bridge, and saw the sentry asleep, and returned by a route that would take them past the St Peter and St Paul Fortress. It wasn’t an easy journey; the car kept stopping, the engine misfiring, and ‘each time… Dr Lazovert jumped out, fiddled with the spark plugs, cleaned them, and somehow or other got us going again’. Despite all this, on the way back Purishkevich found time belatedly to express his doubts about the method of disposal to Dmitri Pavlovich. He hoped the body would be found, he pointed out, because otherwise ‘false Rasputins’ would appear; they should have left it somewhere conspicuous.

The last repair stop was almost opposite the St Peter and St Paul Fortress itself. After this, they bowled along without mishap to the Sergei Palace. On alighting from the motor, they found the other galosh and some bloodstains on the car’s carpet. Dmitri Pavlovich’s servant, ‘who had met us on the steps and who struck me as having been initiated into the whole affair’, was ordered to burn the carpet and the galosh. Then Lazovert, Sukhotin and Purishkevich took their leave. They took two cabs to the Warsaw Station where their womenfolk awaited – including Mrs Sukhotin, who had also spent the night on the hospital train. It was after five o’clock in the morning when they got back, and all aboard the train were asleep, except for Mrs Purishkevich.

We return to the story from Yusupov’s point of view. We left him in the courtyard with Rasputin’s body, aware that people were approaching. They were his two servants from the house, and a policeman. He stood to block the policeman’s view of Rasputin as the officer asked what was going on. He explained that the noise had been mere drunken revelry, and led him to the gates. When he returned, his servants ‘stood there. Purishkevich had told them to carry the body into the house’. Rasputin was lying differently in the snow and Yusupov was terrified; thinking the man was still alive, he went indoors, calling for Purishkevich, and then into his dressing-room for water. Purishkevich came in and saved him from swooning, and took him to the study.

While they were there, Yusupov’s servant came in and said the policeman was back; shots had been heard at the district police station, and he was being asked to tell his superior officer what he knew on the phone.

It was up to Yusupov and Purishkevich to persuade the man to keep his mouth shut. They had him brought in. Out of the blue, Purishkevich excitedly declared that Rasputin had been murdered. ‘I was horror-stricken at this conversation, but it was quite impossible to intervene and put an end to it.’Afterwards, Feeling ill, Yusupov left the study with his truncheon and saw the body below on the landing, pouring with blood. Like Purishkevich, Yusupov was overtaken by an irresistible, inexplicable impulse: this time, to batter the corpse to smithereens.

At that moment all laws of God and man were set at naught. Purishkevich subsequently told me that it was such a harrowing sight that he would never be able to forget it.

After this, he fainted, and the others went off with the body.

When he came to, he told his servant to take a dog to one of the outbuildings and shoot it. ‘He then dragged its body over Rasputin’s trail, so as to frustrate any subsequent blood analysis, and threw it on the snow-mound where not so long before the dead
starets
had lain.’

Yusupov gathered his servants together and swore them to silence, and set off at around five o’clock in the morning for Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich’s, where Fyodor, his young brother-inlaw, was waiting up for him. He said he would explain everything in the morning; and ‘I went to bed and fell into a deep sleep’.

We therefore have two ‘first-hand’accounts of the night in question; two accounts which contain a substantial number of major and important inconsistencies, to such a degree that it is impossible to reconcile the two accounts. For example:

Yusupov says that Dmitri Pavlovich and the other three conspirators arrived together at the palace,
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while Purishkevich says that he and Lazovert arrived together – Dmitri Pavlovich was already there.
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Yusupov says that the chocolate cream cakes were poisoned,
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while Purishkevich says the pink ones were.
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Yusupov says he played the guitar for Rasputin,
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but Purishkevich makes no reference to this at all.

Yusupov says he left Rasputin only once in order to go upstairs to the study,
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while Purishkevich says he came up to three times.
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After Rasputin had taken several glasses of wine and eaten some of the cakes, Yusupov says he had an ‘irritated throat’,
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while Purishkevich says there was ‘constant belching and hypersalivation’.
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Purishkevich says that, while in the study, Lazovert began feeling unwell and went downstairs to go outside. When he returned to the study he looked very ill and told the others that although he had fainted outside, the cold snow had revived him.
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Yusupov makes no mention of Lazovert coming down the stairs or returning afterwards.

Yusupov says that when he returned to his fellow conspirators in the study he was handed a gun by Dmitri Pavlovich,
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while Purishkevich says that Yusupov returned to the room and took his own ‘small Browning’ from the desk drawer in the study.
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It should also be recalled that, in his June 1917 version of the story, Yusupov states that he was given the gun by Purishkevich.

After Yusupov had shot Rasputin and the others had gone down to see the body, Yusupov says that he turned off the electric light and locked the dining room door.
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Purishkevich says that they switched the light off but left the door open.
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Purishkevich says that after he shot Rasputin in the courtyard he stood by the body for several minutes – Yusupov was not there.
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In Yusupov’s account he is standing there with Purishkevich.
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Yusupov was to deviate further from his 1927 account when he gave evidence, under oath, in two libel cases he initiated in 1934 and 1965. In the 1934 trial at the High Court in London, he claimed that Rasputin was still alive when he beat him with the truncheon. In his 1927 book, this happened after Rasputin was dead. In 1965, in a similar case in New York State Supreme Court, Yusupov claimed that not only had he fired the first shot, but had also fired the second shot, which in the book he attributes to Purishkevich.
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In addition to the conflicting written accounts of Yusupov and Purishkevich, the 1923 account of Dr Stanislaus Lazovert, ‘The Assassination of Rasputin’, adds further seeds of doubt and incongruence:

When Yusupov and Lazovert went to Rasputin’s apartment to collect him in the car, Lazovert says that ‘he (Rasputin) admitted me in person’ and also asserts that ‘I persuaded the black devil to accompany me to the home of Prince Yusupov’.
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In Yusupov’s account, Lazovert stays in the car while Yusupov himself goes into the apartment alone.
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Back at the Yusupov Palace, in the downstairs dining room, Lazovert claims Rasputin spoke about plots he had been involved in and stated that the Germans will soon be in Petrograd.
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None of this features in either the Yusupov or Purishkevich accounts.

Lazovert gives the impression that he is in the dining room when Rasputin consumes the poisoned cakes and wine: ‘after a time [Rasputin] rose and walked to the door. We were afraid that our work had been in vain. Suddenly… someone shot at him… we left the room to let him die’. In the other accounts, Lazovert is upstairs and only comes down to examine Rasputin’s body and declare him dead.
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