To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (31 page)

Authentic or not, within months of Rasputin’s murder, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over 300 years did indeed fall. On 3 March 1917, the Putilov workforce in Petrograd went on strike, and this developed into a general strike on 9 March. On the night of 11 March, units of the troops that had been mobilised by the Tsar allied themselves with the strikers. On 15 March, Nicholas, under pressure from all sides, abdicated. On the day after the abdication, the Executive Committee of the fourth Duma formed a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. It proclaimed civil rights, made a commitment to convene a constituent assembly and declared its intention to continue the war against Germany.

This was not the course of events that Dmitri Pavlovich, Yusupov, Purishkevich and the others associated with the plot had envisaged or predicted. They had hoped that the Tsar would somehow exile his wife and lead Russia to victory with a united Duma behind him. Instead, the Tsar was banished, and the Tsarina with him, and the Duma proved incapable of taking control.

The Provisional Government kept Russia in the war on the Allied side until October 1917, when the Bolshevik coup took place. In this sense, time had worked in the Allies’ favour, as the Americans had entered the war in April and were finally beginning to make their mark. Initially, their standing army was tiny and it took nearly a year for them to recruit and train a large army. By the time Lenin declared an armistice in December 1917, American soldiers were flooding onto the Western Front. By March 1918, when Russia finally signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, a million Americans were in the field.

The peace treaty Germany forced on Lenin was a much harsher one than that offered to the Tsar in the summer of 1916. By this time, however, it was too late to prevent an Allied victory in the west, although the Germans did launch a massive last-ditch offensive on 21 March 1918 in a desperate attempt to score a decisive victory. Although the offensive achieved spectacular results early on, it gradually lost momentum, finally succumbing to an Allied counter-attack in July.

In a very real sense, being exiled probably saved the lives of Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich. Dmitri’s father, like the Tsar and his family, was shot by the Bolsheviks. Those who survived headed south to Ukraine, which was still nominally in the hands of anti-Bolshevik forces now battling Lenin’s new government in a fierce civil war. By early 1919, however, the Bolsheviks were advancing on the Crimea. In London, George V, no doubt regretting his earlier refusal to grant the Tsar and his family asylum in England, resolved to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie. The battleship HMS
Marlborough
was therefore despatched in March 1919 to the Black Sea to take Marie and other surviving members of the Romanov family to safety. The ship’s Captain, C.D. Johnson, carried with him a letter from George’s mother, Queen Alexandra, imploring her sister to place herself under Captain Johnson’s protection. In scenes that must have resembled the departure of Noah’s Ark, Dowager Empress Marie, Grand Duchess Xenia, her sons Princes Andrew, Fyodor and Nikita, Grand Duke Nicholas, Grand Duke Peter, Felix and Irina Yusupov were among those who hastily boarded the
Marlborough
from a small cove on the Crimean coast at Koreiz on 7 April 1919. According to Rayner’s family, he was present at Koreiz and accompanied Yusupov,
⁴
who was carrying as much of the family treasure as he could onto the ship.

John Scale, on the other hand, barely escaped in the clothes he was wearing following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. He eventually made his way back to London, where he reported to C at SIS Headquarters at Whitehall Court. C had decided to appoint him Head of the ST Station in Stockholm, with the task of covertly sending a new cadre of British agents into Russia to report back on Bolshevik policy and intentions. On 15 March 1918, Scale, now known as ST0, introduced C to one Sidney Reilly, who would later find fame as the ‘Ace of Spies’. Reilly became agent ST1. Scale recruited some thirty other ST agents, who included Oswald Rayner, Sir Paul Dukes, Arthur Ransome,
⁵
and Augustus Agar.
⁶
He stood down from intelligence work in 1922 due to ill health and finally retired from the army in May 1927. However, right up to his death in 1949
⁷
he kept in close touch with many of his former agents. Scale’s daughters remember in particular the numerous visits Sir Paul Dukes made to their home in the inter-war years. When Felix Yusupov was in desperate financial straits in the early 1930s, it was Dukes who went out to France and saved him from ruin.
⁸
At whose behest Dukes performed this service is unknown.

Yusupov’s finances were ultimately rescued by a stroke of good fortune. In 1932, MGM produced a big-budget epic,
Rasputin and the Empress
, starring John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, which was released in Britain the following year under the title
Rasputin, the Mad Monk
. While characters already dead were portrayed under their real names, others central to the plot who were still very much alive were given fictional names. For example, Rasputin’s assassin is named Prince Chegodiev, and the character most resembling that of Princess Irina Yusupova is called Princess Natasha. In March 1933, Irina was introduced to American lawyer Fanny Holtzman, who was convinced that MGM had committed libel against her. In Holtzman’s view, the film contained ‘pictures and words which were understood to mean that Princess Natasha had been seduced by Rasputin’.
⁹

In a landmark legal case at the High Court in London, which began on 28 February 1934, the Yusupovs’ contention that Princess Natasha was indeed Princess Irina, who had, by implication, been libelled by MGM, was upheld by the jury.
¹⁰
Irina was awarded £25,000 and later received a further £75,000 from MGM in settlement of other actions the Yusupovs had initiated in the USA and against the film’s distributors.

Further drama entered the Yusupovs’lives in 1940, when the German army swept through France. German officers apparently tracked them down to their Sarcells villa and informed them that they could return to Paris, where they would be lodged in a mansion of their choosing. In return, they would be asked to act as official hosts for important guests, throwing parties and dinners. To their credit, the Yusupovs rejected the offer. However, in 1941 they received a more profound offer, when Hitler dispatched his personal envoy to meet them.
¹¹
Following the German invasion of Russia, the Nazis were clearly thinking about the possibility of an imperial puppet regime in a defeated Russia, and it was suggested to Yusupov by the envoy that he might be a suitable candidate for the throne. Again, he tactfully declined by suggesting that there were surviving members of the Romanov family in Paris the Germans could approach. Indeed, he would gladly provide their names and addresses if required.
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Yusupov was to die in Paris in September 1967, aged eighty, far outliving the other four declared assassins. Purishkevich had died of typhus in 1920 while fleeing from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Sergei Sukhotin died in Paris in June 1939,
¹³
while Dmitri Pavlovich died of kidney disease in Davos, Switzerland in September 1942. Following his exile in Persia, Dmitri was given a commission in the British Army and served as a captain with the British Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. Most intriguingly of all, Stanislaus Lazovert, according to his son, apparently retracted his claim to have put poison in the cakes and wine on his death bed.
¹⁴
He also died in Paris in 1934.

In being considered a possible collaborator by the Nazis, Yusupov was unknowingly in the same company as former Head of the British Intelligence Mission Sir Samuel Hoare. Returning to active politics after the war, Hoare became Secretary of State for Air under Stanley Baldwin and Secretary of State for India in Ramsey MacDonald’s national government. He reached the high-water mark of his career in June 1935, when Baldwin appointed him Foreign Secretary. Later that year, Hoare joined with Pierre Laval, the French Prime Minister, in an effort to resolve the crisis created by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. A secret agreement, known as the Hoare-Laval Pact, proposed that Italy would receive two-thirds of the territory it conquered as well as permission to enlarge the existing colonies in East Africa. In return, Ethiopia was to receive a narrow strip of territory and access to the sea. Details of the pact were leaked to the press on 19 December 1935. The scheme was widely denounced as appeasement of Italian aggression. Baldwin’s cabinet rejected the plan and Hoare was forced to resign.

Hoare returned to the government as First Lord of the Admiralty in June 1936. His appeasement views were popular with Neville Chamberlain, and in 1937 he was promoted to Home Secretary. On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the War Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Hoare was one of a number of ministers weeded out for their pro-appeasement views. In the opinion of Sir Alexander Cadogan, at that time Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, Hoare was an obvious candidate to head a puppet government in the event of a German occupation of Britain.
¹⁵
‘He’ll be the Quisling of England’, Cadogan confided in his diary shortly after Hoare’s removal from the cabinet.
¹⁶
In October 2004, a newly released MI5 file on Albrecht Haushofer, described by the Service as ‘The greatest expert in Germany on the British Empire’, shed new light on Cadogan’s suspicions. In a 1941 memo to Hitler entitled ‘English Connections and the Possibility of their Employment’, Haushofer listed a number of ‘younger Conservatives’ who, he believed, would collaborate – the names included the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Astor, Sir Samuel Hoare and R. A. B. Butler.
¹⁷

Shortly after Rasputin’s murder, it seems clear that London was actively considering replacing Hoare as Head of the British Intelligence Mission. On 29 January 1917 he cabled London:

My health has been so bad during the last year that from every personal consideration I should welcome the opportunity of giving up my present work. I came out here a year ago as medically unfit to go abroad (with my yeomanry) and during that time I do not suppose that I have been well a single day. If, therefore, it is decided to discontinue my work in Russia, no one will be more delighted than myself.
¹⁸

Soon after writing the letter, he was removed and sent on a new posting to Rome. Bearing in mind that he had been ill throughout his stint in Petrograd and that he was no worse in January 1917 than at any other time during his tenure, it seems unlikely that he was removed for purely health reasons. Neither does it seem likely that he was replaced because of any involvement in the Rasputin episode. If anything, he seems throughout to have been blissfully ignorant of what was going on around him. It is certainly possible that at some point in late 1916 London had taken the decision to actively sideline him and wait for an opportune moment to recall him. Equally, if he was considered in any way tainted by association with the events surrounding Rasputin’s death, it seemed highly unlikely that London would opt for Stephen Alley as his successor, who, after all, seemed to have been in the thick of the plot.

It was, however, Alley that London turned to. Throughout the chaotic days of the Provisional Government, he, John Scale and the rest of his team struggled to do everything they could to help the new government hold on to the reins of power. When they were overthrown by the Bolsheviks, Alley did all he could to liaise with Lenin’s commissars. During the months preceding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he was secretly meeting with those on the Central Committee who would ultimately have to approve the treaty.
¹⁹
The objective was clearly to bring about a rejection of its terms and a consequent delay in the transfer of German troops to the Western Front. Trotsky, the Commissar for External Affairs, initially opposed ratification, pursuing a policy of ‘neither peace nor war’ in the hope that revolution would shortly erupt in Germany and Austria. Stalin, throughout, was in favour of the treaty. Trotsky eventually decided to back Lenin’s appeal for ratification, so as to avert Germany’s threat to resume its attack on Russia if there was a further delay in accepting the terms of the treaty. Ultimately, on 23 February 1918, the Central Committee of fifteen members gave its assent by seven votes to four, with four abstentions. While the majority were still unwilling to vote in favour of the treaty, Trotsky’s change of mind and the four abstentions enabled its approval.

It was during the course of his secret meetings with Central Committee members in the weeks leading up to 23 February that Alley recalled:

One telegram I got was that I had to liquidate Stalin. Seeing that I was negotiating with them at the time, it did not seem to be quite a good idea as it would have meant liquidating myself and him at the same time.

When I got back to London… I was told that somebody had been put in my job and he happened to be E T Boyce, who had been one of my men in Russia. I believe the reason for my summary dismissal was that I had not killed Stalin, who, history tells, became the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
²⁰

Apart from the enormity of Alley’s statement concerning Stalin, and the consequent issues it raises in relation to British policy, significant questions about Rasputin’s murder are also revived. While one might conclude, on the balance of the evidence so far considered, that Alley, Rayner and Scale were involved in a rogue operation
²¹
against Rasputin, conducted without London’s knowledge, the Stalin claim raises some significant doubts.