To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (8 page)

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.

Those in attendance upon him said that on receiving the news of Rasputin’s death his mood was more cheerful than since the outbreak of war. He... evidently felt and believed that the disappearance of the
starets
had freed him from those heavy fetters which he had lacked the strength to cast off. But with his return to Tsarskoye Selo his mood abruptly changed, and once again he fell under the influence of those who surrounded him.
⁵

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:

Her grief was inconsolable. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son had been slain.
⁶

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.

Private
CTG.89. PETROGRAD. 1st January 1917, sent at 4.15p.m.
URGENT
Private for C:

Following is official and absolutely reliable but given me in strict confidence:-

Body of Rasputin has been found under ice in water near Petrovski Island Petrograd. Evidence shows that it was the intention of the murderers that body should be discovered. HOARE.
⁷

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.

Since writing the above memorandum I have received definite information that the body of Rasputin has been discovered in the River Neva, near the Petrovski Bridge. I received this information in strict confidence from the Chief of the Department of Military Police in the General Staff. I understand that he himself saw the body. It appears that traces were purposely left about the hole in the ice into which the body was thrown in order that it should be discovered… A rough map has already been published in the
Evening Times
under the heading of mysterious murder.

It is also certain that Rasputin was actually killed in Count Elston’s [Yusupov’s] house and not in the motor. During the evening there seems to have been a certain amount of promiscuous shooting in which a dog was killed in the courtyard and a window broken. Early in the morning six men appeared in the courtyard with a body dressed in a
shuba
[full-length fur coat] which they put in a motor that was waiting. I understand that these facts are stated in detail in the report of the four secret police who were waiting for Rasputin in the courtyard. A very well-known Russian told me that one of his friends had seen this report in which were stated all the details of the arrivals and departures to and from Count Elston’s house during the evening.

…I am also informed, upon absolutely reliable authority, that the Empress was informed of the crime either late on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning. As late as six o’clock on Saturday afternoon, when the news had already been published in the
Bourse Gazette,
she appears to have known nothing of what happened…
⁸

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.

On the morning that the body was found… the Colonel representing the Corps of Gendarmes in the General Staff came into my office and announced that in view of our friendly relationship he was ready to confer a great favour upon me.

‘They have just found Rasputin’s corpse. No one of importance has yet seen it. Would you like to go with me, and be the only foreigner to see it?’ It was one of those black and cruel Petrograd mornings and I was just recovering from a serious chill. Was I therefore very cowardly and unenterprising when, after thanking him for his kindness, I declined the offer that he had made to me? I fear that I seemed to him sadly lacking in nerve and that my stock fell heavily in his estimation.
⁹

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:

The body of the notorious monk Rasputin was found on the bank of one of the branches of the Neva this morning.

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:

The body was put into a motor lorry and ordered to be taken to the Vyborg Military Hospital. The whole party, examining judges, police, and the rest, then went off to have luncheon with a German Jew who is now known as Artmanov. They had not begun luncheon when they received a telephone message from Protopopov saying that on no account must the body be taken to the Vyborg side, because it was a workman’s quarter and there might be demonstrations. They replied that it had already been sent there but Protopopov said that it must be stopped. They asked how it could be stopped. He said that he did not mind how, but stopped it must be. Accordingly they informed all the police at the street corners along the route through which it was to pass that they were to stop the lorry when they saw it approaching. The lorry was finally stopped, and was ordered to proceed instead to the Tchesminskis Almshouse, a desolate institution on the road to Tsarskoye.
¹⁰

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:

Although the almshouse was lighted with electric light, there was no light at all when they arrived and no means of lighting it. The three
gorodovois
[watchmen] who were there said that no light was necessary as ‘dead men need no light’. The judge and the surgeon declared that they must have some light. Accordingly they sent out and obtained two small lamps to hang upon the wall, while one of the
gorodovois
held a lantern. After a while the
gorodovoi
declared that he felt ill and could not hold the lantern any more. The judge and the surgeon therefore were left alone in the partially lighted room.
¹²