The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (22 page)

It did not take long for the people—upper and lower classes alike—to lose all confidence in the ministers and, by extension, the tsar’s government. “
It is a terrible thing,” one Duma member remarked glumly. “The tsar offends the nation by what he allows to go on in the palace … while the country offends the tsar by its terrible suspicions. The result is the destruction of those centuries-old ties which have sustained Russia. And the cause of all this? The weakness of one man and one woman.… Oh, how terrible an autocracy without an autocrat!”

By late 1916, Russia was reaching the point of no return. Hundreds of thousands of men continued to die in a war that now seemed pointless to many. Away from the fighting, the country was falling into economic chaos, and the tsar’s government was crumbling.

The Russian people blamed much of it on the empress and her
starets
. Obscene pamphlets about them began circulating around Petrograd. Cartoons showed Rasputin as a puppet master who had the imperial couple on a string. By fall 1916, anger against Rasputin reached the boiling point. People everywhere believed he was the actual ruler of Russia. Despite censorship laws forbidding criticism of either the tsar or his government, the newspaper the
Siberian Trade Gazette
boldly called Rasputin a “thief” and a
“half-educated peasant.” Across Russia, citizens began calling the government “
the Reign of Rasputin.”

In the Duma, too, members publicly raged about the
starets
. “
Dark forces are destroying the Romanov dynasty,” shouted deputy Vladimir Purishkevich during a legislative session in December
1916. Purishkevich, who had never before breathed a word of criticism against the tsar, now pounded furiously on his desk. “If you are truly loyal to Russia, then on your feet. Have the courage to tell the tsar … an obscure [
starets
] shall govern Russia no longer!”

The hall erupted into wild cheering. Only one man did not leap to his feet—Prince Felix Yusupov, the dashing and rich husband of Nicholas’s favorite niece, Irina. Instead, he paled and trembled as he realized what needed to be done. There was only one sure way to break the empress’s dependence on the
starets
. Kill him.

But Yusupov couldn’t do it alone. So he begged Purishkevich, as well as the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, to help. He also asked an army physician, Dr. Stanislaw Lazovert, and an army officer named Sergei Sukhotin to join them. “
We will be heroes,” he told the men. “The Empress will land in an asylum within two weeks of Rasputin’s death.… And if the Emperor is freed of the influence of Rasputin and his wife, everything [will] change; he [will] be a good … monarch. And … we will have saved the empire.” Inspired by Yusupov’s words, the men threw themselves into murder plans. For the next four weeks they plotted. By December 29, all was ready.

It was just before midnight and snowing heavily when Rasputin arrived at Prince Yusupov’s palace. The
starets
had been lured there by the promise of finally meeting the prince’s wife, Irina, reportedly the most beautiful woman in Petrograd. He came dressed in his best—a silk blouse embroidered with cornflowers and tied with a red cord, black velvet pants, and brand-new boots. At first, everything went according to plan. Yusupov showed Rasputin into a basement room where he plied the
starets
with wine and cakes that
Dr. Lazovert claimed to have laced with cyanide. He waited for his guest to fall to the floor, writhing in pain. But to his amazement, the poison had no effect at all.

At this point, according to Yusupov, Rasputin pointed to a guitar in the corner. “
Play something cheerful,” he said. “I like your singing.”

As Yusupov strummed, Rasputin helped himself to another glass of poisoned wine.

Two hours later, the still-guitar-playing prince finally lost patience. Excusing himself, he hurried to the top of the stairs, where his fellow murderers sat listening. What should he do? Yusupov later claimed that Grand Duke Dmitri wanted to give up. But Purishkevich objected. He didn’t think it wise to send Rasputin home half poisoned. Said Yusupov, “
Then you wouldn’t have any objections if I just shot him, would you?”

Grabbing Dmitri’s pistol, he returned to the basement. The
starets
was gulping still more poisoned cakes, when Yusupov shot him in the back.

With a wild scream, Rasputin fell to the floor. He looked, Yusupov later recalled, “
like a broken marionette.”

The others rushed into the room. They found the prince standing over the body wearing, recalled Purishkevich, “
an expression of loathing.”

Feeling for Rasputin’s pulse, Dr. Lazovert declared the man dead.

Yusupov handed the gun back to Dmitri. Then, while the others went in search of something to wrap the body in, he collapsed with relief into a chair beside the corpse. “
That’s when I saw both eyes—the green eyes of a viper—staring at me with an expression of diabolical hatred,” claimed the prince.

Rasputin wasn’t dead after all! Staggering to his feet, his mouth foaming, the
starets
lunged at his would-be murderer. His long,
bony fingers dug like steel claws into the prince’s shoulders. Terrorstricken, Yusupov struggled and broke free from the death grip. He pounded up the stairs. Behind him wheezed Rasputin.
“Felix!” he called, using the prince’s first name. “Felix!”

“
He’s alive!” Yusupov screamed to the others as he reached the top of the stairs. “He’s getting away.”

Incredibly, the
starets
—who just minutes earlier had been dying on the cellar floor—was now
running
across the palace courtyard toward the gate. “
I will tell everything to the empress!” he shouted over his shoulder.

Purishkevich could not let that happen. Pulling out his own pistol, he chased after the
starets
. “I fired,” recalled Purishkevich.
“The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate.… I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulder. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him in the head.”

And yet, Rasputin kept breathing. Yusupov came running from the palace, a rubber club in his hand. “
In my frenzy, I hit anywhere,” he later said. Rasputin soon stopped moving. Then the murderers rolled the body in a blue curtain, tied it with ropes, and shoved it into the backseat of Purishkevich’s car. Driving a few blocks to the frozen Neva River, they shoved the body through a hole in the ice.

Three days later, police divers pulled the body from the icy river. They were surprised to see that Rasputin’s right arm was freed from the ropes and slightly raised. This left people with the notion that the
starets
had still been alive when his murderers dumped him in the water, that he struggled with incredible strength until he finally drowned.

An autopsy performed that very day, however, refuted this notion. According to the senior autopsy surgeon, Dmitri Kosorotov, the body was riddled with bruises. This was consistent with Yusupov’s story about the rubber club. Curiously, though, while the
autopsy
did
reveal cakes and wine in Rasputin’s stomach, no traces of the cyanide Dr. Lazovert had supposedly put in them was found. Had Lazovert changed his mind without telling the others and not poisoned the food? Was this why Rasputin continued to eat and drink that night with no ill effects?

Dr. Kosorotov also noted three gunshot wounds. The first bullet had entered Rasputin’s chest, slicing through the
starets’
stomach and liver. The second had gone through his back, piercing his kidney. And the third had struck the back of the head. Either of the first two wounds would have killed Rasputin in minutes, the doctor determined. But the third injury would have killed him instantly. There was no way, he concluded, that Rasputin was alive when his killers dumped him in the river. This was corroborated by the fact that no water was found in the lungs. Rasputin had not died from drowning. The cause of his death was a gunshot wound.

The discovery of Rasputin’s body touched off public celebrations across Russia. Bells rang. Flags waved. “
People kissed each other in the street,” recalled Ambassador Paléologue, “and many went to burn candles [of thanksgiving] in Our Lady of Kazan.” Some shops even posted photographs of Yusupov and the others in their front windows. Banners beneath them boldly proclaimed the men heroes.

The morning after the murder, the telephone in the Alexander Palace rang. It was the minister of the interior calling with grave news. “
A patrolman standing near the entrance of the Yusupov palace was startled by the [sounds] of a pistol,” he reported. “Ringing the doorbell, he was met by … Purishkevich who appeared to be in an advanced state of intoxication. [He said] … they had just killed Rasputin.”

Struggling to stay calm, Alexandra ordered an investigation. Then she closed herself up in her lilac drawing room.
“I cannot, and
won’t
believe He has been killed,” she wrote to Nicholas. “God have mercy. Such utter anguish.”

The children could not stop crying. Why would anyone want to hurt their friend? “
[They] sat on the sofa, huddled up close together,” recalled one courtier. “They were cold and visibly terribly upset.… They evidently sensed that, with his murder, something terrible and undeserved had started for … themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly toward them.”

In the weeks following Rasputin’s death, the weather turned bitter cold. At times, the mercury dropped to fifty below zero in Petrograd, and great drifts of snow buried railroad cars and supply depots, making delivery of desperately needed goods impossible. With millions of peasants fighting instead of working in the fields, food shortages loomed and prices soared. A loaf of black bread cost three times as much as it had at the start of the war, a pound of potatoes eight times as much. Rents tripled even as thousands of workers found themselves unemployed, their factories shut for lack of coal. Fewer and fewer people could afford even the most basic necessities, even
if
those items could be found in the city.

Still, the nobility’s palaces blazed with light. Music still floated from their ballrooms. And lavish midnight suppers of cold sturgeon, stuffed eggs, and rose cream cakes were still laid out temptingly in elegant dining rooms. Jewels glittered. Gold braid dazzled. And both champagne and laughter bubbled up as partygoers discussed the latest craze in card games and the shocking price of caviar. Above all, they gossiped about Rasputin’s murder.

Had they heard about the
starets’
private funeral in a secluded corner of the Imperial Park at Tsarskoe Selo? they asked one another. Besides the royal family, only Anna Vyrubova had attended. The tsar and Alexei had traveled all the way from Stavka to be there. Before closing the coffin, the grand duchesses had placed an icon on Rasputin’s chest, their tears falling on the oak casket. Alexandra,
too, had left behind a token—a pitiful little note that read “
My dear martyr, give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers. Alexandra.”

Members of the nobility expressed shock over the harsh punishment given to Rasputin’s murderers. Incredibly, Nicholas had ordered his own cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, to leave Petrograd and join the Russian army. And Yusupov? The man married to the tsar’s dearest niece had been exiled to one of his huge estates in the center of the country. Only Purishkevich had been lucky. He went free, not because he wasn’t guilty, but because he’d become such a big hero in the Duma that even the tsar was afraid to punish him. No one seemed to know what happened to Dr. Lazovert or Officer Sukhotin.

Instead of returning to Stavka after the funeral, the tsar remained in Tsarskoe Selo. People who had seen him claimed he acted tired and confused. Said one minister, “
He listened to me with a strange, almost vacant smile, glancing nervously about him.” When asked a question, he was “reduced to a state of helplessness.… For a long time he looked at me in silence, as if trying to collect his thoughts, or recall what had escaped his memory.”

All these rumors were true. Suddenly unable to make any decisions at all, Nicholas simply stared for hours on end at the battlefield maps he’d spread out on his pool table. So changed was he that many people claimed Alexandra was giving him drugs. But Ambassador Paléologue knew better. “
The Emperor’s words, his silences … his grave, drawn features and vague, distant thoughts confirm in me the notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed by events … and is now resigned to disaster.”

Even though the tsar was back in the palace, Alexandra remained in control of the government. Rumor had it that the palace’s main
telephone was removed from Nicholas’s desk and put in her lilac drawing room, and ministers’ reports were still handed to her. Some claimed she’d even taken to eavesdropping on her husband’s conversations with advisers and generals, hiding behind thick velvet curtains on a balcony located just above the tsar’s study. Later she gave Nicholas her opinions.