The ebullient Purishkevich couldn’t resist bragging to the police that they had murdered Rasputin. But the police were unsure whether to take him seriously. Two days later, Yussoupov, still sticking to various false accounts, attempted to be breezy about Purishkevich’s ‘confession’. ‘I had a telephone conversation with Purishkevich about this matter and he explained that he had said something about Rasputin to the policeman, but because he had been very drunk he could not remember what exactly.’ In fact, for all his eccentricities, Purishkevich was a member of the Temperance League.
The conspirators wrapped Rasputin’s body in his coat and a blue curtain, before loading it into the car and driving to the Petrovsky Bridge. Purishkevich had an uncomfortable journey, complaining that his ‘knees touched the repulsive, soft corpse’. He added that the ‘body kept jumping about, despite a soldier sitting on top of it.’ While the body was heaved over the parapet into the river, Grand Duke Dmitri kept watch. As Purishkevich said: ‘The Royal youth must not touch the criminal body’.
At some point Yussoupov recovered himself sufficiently to send a telegram to his wife in the Crimea: ‘It’s all over.’ Purishkevich also sent a telegram, to Maklakov: ‘When are you coming?’ – the code message for ‘Rasputin has died.’
There was a further call from the police between 7.30 and 8.00. The police seem to have been singularly ineffective during these crucial hours; they may have been thrown by the presence, at the palace, of not just one but two members of the Imperial family. In any case, it was only now, during this second visit, that they conducted a proper inspection, discovering telltale bloodstains in the cellar. Yussoupov’s curious attempts to cover traces of blood with scent had evidently been unsuccessful. But, in his memoirs, Yussoupov failed to mention the police discoveries, stating simply that, after recovering from his attack of nerves, he managed to remove brown stains from floors and carpets with the help of his manservant.
The next day, the Rasputins’ maid, Katya, woke Maria and Varya to tell them that their father hadn’t returned. The telephone wires were soon buzzing. Maria rang Anna Vyrubova; Rasputin’s niece, Anna, rang Munia; Maria rang Yussoupov, but he said he knew nothing. When she told him he had been spotted at the flat, he claimed he’d taken Rasputin to the Villa Rhode restaurant. This would have been all too plausible; Rasputin never tired of ringing ‘Alphonse’ to book tables, which would duly be prepared with flowers and fish.
But when Maria rang the Villa Rhode, she was told that nobody had seen her father. Maria then got a call from Protopopov who had himself had a call from the Mayor of Petrograd enquiring about Rasputin’s disappearance. Yussoupov and Grand Duke Dmitri both rang the Palace in a bid to defend themselves from rumours already circulating about their involvement. But the Tsarina refused to speak to either of them. She said of Yussoupov coldly: ‘Let him write.’
The Tsarina wrote an agonised letter to her husband at the military headquarters. ‘We are sitting here together – can you imagine our feelings – thoughts – our Friend has disappeared… Felix [Yussoupov] pretends he never came to the house and never asked him… I can’t and won’t believe he has been killed. God have mercy. Such utter anguish.’ She added ominously: ‘Felix came often to him lately.’
With the prescience of a natural hysteric, the Tsarina soon had a good idea of the truth, writing to her husband the next day: ‘No trace yet… the police are continuing the search. I fear that these two wretched boys (Yussoupov and Grand Duke Dmitri) have committed a frightful crime but have not yet lost all hope. Start today, I need you terribly.’ The Tsarina was particularly distressed about the involvement of Grand Duke Dmitri: ‘whom I loved as my own son’.
Grand Duchess Olga wrote in her diary: ‘Father Grigory has been missing since last night. They are looking everywhere. It is terribly hard. The four of us [the young Grand Duchesses] slept together. God help us!’ The Tsar himself took the news of Rasputin’s disappearance differently. He is said to have walked away whistling.
Yussoupov may initally have denied any involvement in the murder to the police and the Tsarina, but he was not so circumspect with his friend, the Rev. Mr Lombard. After turning up at the chaplain’s house, he threw himself on a sofa, and pronounced: ‘Padre, we have done it.’
Unfazed by Yussoupov’s flagrant disregard of his earlier advice, the chaplain agreed to accompany him to the scene of the crime, where he insisted on blessing the cellar with holy water and incense. He was always to remember the blood on the white bearskin carpet: ‘I cannot describe the horror of the atmosphere. It felt filthy and unclean, the only other place where I have experienced the same feeling was in the Museum at Scotland Yard. I gained his consent to cleanse that room ceremonially.’
Less than 24 hours after watching her father leave Gorokhovaya Street with Yussoupov, Maria found herself having to identify one of his galoshes. The boot was one of the pair hidden by Maria and her sister in their vain attempt to stop their father leaving the night before. It was brought to the flat by a policeman, accompanied by Rasputin’s disgraced friend, Bishop Isidor.
The identification process was described baldly in a police report: ‘The brown size 10 shoe, manufactured by Treigol’nik, found under Petrovsky Bridge, on the River Neva, has been presented to Maria and Varvara [Varya] Rasputin. They confirmed that the shoe belonged to their father; it was the right size and looked the same.’
Rasputin’s body was finally discovered two days later, on the morning of December 19, after a sleeve of his fur coat had been spotted protruding from the ice on the Neva. The Rasputin sisters were taken, with Anna Vyrubova, to view their father’s body. ‘The face was almost unrecognisable: clots of dark blood had coagulated in the beard and hair; one eye was almost out of its socket and on the wrists were deep marks left by the bonds that my father had succeeded in breaking in his death struggle,’ wrote Maria with her usual candour.
The initial pathology report from Professor Dmitri Kosorotov was equally gothic; the autopsy had been conducted by the light of oil lamps and a lantern. ‘His left side has a weeping wound, due to some sort of slicing object or sword. His right eye has come out of its cavity and falls down into his face… The victim’s face and body carry traces of blows given by a supple but hard object.’ The pathologist was shocked by the extent of Rasputin’s head injuries. The ‘goat like expression and enormous head wound [were] hard even on my experienced eyes’.
There were disputes as to whether there was water in his lungs. If water was found, it would have proven that Rasputin had still been alive when thrown into the river and that he had, in fact, drowned. But that would give rise to a fresh problem: saints, it was believed, could not drown. Why had the divine force that protected Rasputin from poison and bullets not protected him from drowning? This particular worry should have died with the confirmation that there was no water in the lungs.
A photograph exists of the body on a sledge, having just been pulled from the Neva. His raised hands became the subject of much debate. Some believed, like Maria, that Rasputin had somehow retained the strength to free his arms. Others maintained he had miraculously come back to life, before breaking his bonds. The more fervent ‘Rasputinki’ believed he had raised his hand in a sort of benediction.
Maria’s emotional turmoil at the time was exacerbated by further questions from the police about the exact nature of her father’s relationship with the Tsarina. The police had been told that she had once found the pair in bed together; her silence had been bought with a bracelet. She convinced the police that the story was untrue with an unlikely burst of laughter.
Five days after her husband’s disappearance, Praskovia, their son Dmitri and the faithful Dounia reached Petrograd. Maria had sent a telegram to Pokrovskoye to say that her father was missing. When Praskovia arrived at the station and saw her daughters’ black clothes, she knew at once that her husband was dead.
When the ‘frightful crime’ was confirmed, the Tsarina was inconsolable. The children’s tut
or, Pierre Gilliard, was horrified by the effect of his death upon her: ‘Her agonised features betrayed… how terribly she was suffering… They had killed the only person who could save her child.’ The immediate reaction to Rasputin’s death of the children, to whom he had once been so close, was not recorded in any detail, though Grand Duchess Olga was heard to say: ‘I know he did much harm, but why did they have to treat him so cruelly?’
The initial plan to bury Rasputin at Pokrovskoye was shelved after fears were raised that his corpse would be attacked en route. It was judged wisest to bury him on land which, though close to the Alexander Palace, was not the property of the Imperial family. He was given a ceremonial burial just before Christmas, on December 21, in a chapel still in the process of being built by Anna Vyrubova. The proceedings had been planned in great secrecy, with those attending strictly limited to the Imperial family and a handful of retainers. No members of Rasputin’s family were invited, an oversight neither forgotten nor altogether forgiven by Maria. Of Rasputin’s ‘little ladies’, only the voluptuous Laptinskaya attended.
His grave was marked with a wooden cross. Months earlier there had been a service marking the laying of the chapel’s foundations. ‘Our Friend and nice Bishop Isidor there,’ the Tsarina had reported gaily.
Anna Vyrubova arrived for the service in a carriage with inappropriately jingling bells. The Tsar, Tsarina and their four daughters drew up in a motor car; the Tsarevich, Alexis, was ill and could not attend. The Tsarina wept at the sight of the coffin. The Tsar’s diary entry demonstrated that, for all his whistling, he had not taken the murder lightly: ‘At 9.00 o’clock we went to… the field where we were present at a sad scene: the coffin with the body of the unforgettable Grigory, killed on the night of the 17th by monsters in the Yussoupov house.’
The Romanovs’ lively priest, Father Vassiliev, conducted the service. Bishop Isidor continued the singing, after his fellow miscreant, Bishop Pitirim, found himself overcome with emotion.
The Imperial family were in deep mourning that Christmas. There were no presents and the Tsarina wept for hours at a time. ‘I can do nothing but pray & pray & our Friend does so in yonder world for you,’ she wrote to the Tsar.
She may have found consolation from Protopopov’s claim that he was in regular communion with Rasputin. Protopopov became the Tsarina’s new ‘homme de confiance’. Liberals who had once loathed Rasputin now hated Protopopov. At a New Year’s Day celebration, Protopopov offered his hand to Rodzyanko, who spat: ‘Nowhere and never.’
Rasputin’s body was finally discovered two days later, on the morning of December 19, after a sleeve of his fur coat had been spotted protruding from the ice on the Neva.
The punishment of Rasputin’s murderers proved problematic. The 12-year-old Tsarevich Alexis protested to his father: ‘Is it possible you will not punish them? Stolypin’s assassins were hanged.’ But this was a rather more awkward case, one which highlighted, once again, the rift which Rasputin had created among the Tsar’s relations. Sixteen Romanovs signed a petition opposing the Tsar’s decision to punish Grand Duke Dmitri. Two days after the murder, the Tsarina’s own sister, Ella, had sent Grand Duke Dmitri a congratulatory telegram: ‘May God give Felix strength after the patriotic act performed by him.’
Yussoupov was feted as a hero. Though he had his own reservations, the British diplomat Samuel Hoare reported jubilantly that ‘all classes speak and act as if [Rasputin’s death] is better than the greatest victory in the Russian field’. The Times printed photographs of Yussoupov and his wife, Princess Irina, captioned ‘Saviours of Russia’. The Manchester Guardian leader on the death of Rasputin was resolute: ‘Few men so well known have had so little good said about them, and if a fraction of what has been said against him be true, Russia will be a better place without him.’
The Prince would find people kneeling and crossing themselves outside his palace. There were cheers in factories, with workers passing resolutions to protect him. Photographs of the assassins decorated shops. Yussoupov was accosted by Rodzyanko, who said, ‘Moscow wants to proclaim you Emperor. What do you say?’
The Tsarina’s sister, Ella, claimed that nuns at a certain convent had gone mad with glee, shrieking and blaspheming. Jubilant sisters ran along the corridors as though possessed, howling and lifting their skirts.
In the end, the Tsar, perhaps mindful of his wife, decided to exile both Yussoupov and the Grand Duke, proclaiming: ‘No one has the right to commit murder.’ Yussoupov was to be sent to one of his family’s far-flung estates, while the Grand Duke was dispatched to Persia.
In the first weeks of 1917, the Tsarina found solace at Rasputin’s graveside: ‘Went to our Friend’s grave… I feel such peace and calm when I visit his dear grave.’ She continued issuing instructions to the Tsar: ‘Wear his cross, even if it is uncomfortable, for my peace of mind.’
By February 1917, however, events in Petrograd had spun out of control. Opposition had been growing to Russia’s involvement in the war and rumours of impending bread shortages triggered a panic reaction among the populace. Textile workers went on strike; they were joined by tens of thousands more strikers who then took to the streets.
On February 28 the city was at a standstill and the Tsar was cabled at the front by one of his desperate ministers: ‘The Government, never having enjoyed Russia’s trust, is utterly discredited and completely powerless to deal with the grave situation. Further delays and vacillations threaten untold misfortunes.’
The Tsar finally agreed, in anguish, to abdicate on March 2. Days later, rebel soldiers found and desecrated Rasputin’s grave, relieving themselves on the site and writing on the wall: ‘Here lies Grishka Rasputin, shame of the House of Romanov and the Orthodox Church.’ They dug up the coffin, hoping to find jewellery. Rasputin’s saintly aspirations had not protected him from decomposition: his corpse stank and his face was blackened.
He was reburied secretly by Provisional Government soldiers but then dug up again, stowed in a piano box and driven down the Old Petersburg Highway, destined for a third burial site. But, in a manner foreshadowing the fate of the corpses of the Imperial family, the vehicle carrying the piano box broke down and it was decided to burn the body at the roadside.
On March 11, at seven in the morning, the corpse of the Man of God was set alight. The fire burned for two hours and, at one point, the body appeared to rise up out of the flames. One reason for this may have been that the soldiers who burned him had no experience of cremating and failed to cut his tendons. When the tendons contracted in the heat, the body gave the appearance of sitting up. In another of his fortuitous prophecies, Rasputin once told a journalist: ‘If they do burn me, Russia is finished; they’ll bury us together.’
Maria claimed that, after her father’s death, she and her sister Varya visited the Palace regularly. Though they had not been invited to their own father’s funeral, the sisters were now warmly welcomed by the Tsarina, who assured them: ‘The Tsar is your father now.’ But the visits began to peter out when three of the young Grand Duchesses caught measles and completely stopped after the Imperial Family’s house arrest. On Maria’s final visit, the Tsarina reached into a large jar in the hall and presented her with a handful of butterscotch balls.
When the Tsarina heard that the captive Imperial family was to be taken to Siberia, she firmly believed they were following ‘our Friend’. On August 1 1917 she wrote a strangely buoyant letter to Anna Vyrubova: ‘My sweet beloved Precious childy… one does not tell us where we go (only in the train shall we know) nor for how long – but we think it is where you and ours were last summer – our Saint calls us there & our Friend – wonderful is it not?’
On their way, the family travelled in a steamer, Rus, from Tyumen to Tobolsk and all seven gathered on the deck as they sailed past the village of Pokrovskoye. Rasputin’s two-storey house loomed above the other simple huts. His shadow continued to haunt them, as their guard in Tobolsk, Vasily Pankratov, testified: ‘He removed the
last vestiges of the halo from the Tsar’s family. He was constantly drunk here, on drunken business, he pestered women with dirty propositions.’
But the Tsarina was indifferent to the guard’s disapproval. On the anniversary of Rasputin’s death, she wrote in her diary: ‘The terrible 17th. Russia too suffers for this, all must suffer for this.’
Eight months later, on their way to what would be their final resting place, Ekaterinburg, the Tsar and Tsarina found themselves, under guard, actually stopping in Rasputin’s village. On April 27 1918 the Tsarina wrote: ‘About 12, got to Pokrovskoe, changed horses, stood long before our Friend’s house, saw his family & friends looking out of the window.’
The predicament of the Imperial couple was, by this time, critical. The Tsarina, as usual oblivious, wrote: ‘Com [Commandant Yakovlev] fidgety, runing [sic] about, telegraphing.’ The desperate Commandant had, in fact, heard of several plans to attack the party, to ‘disarm us in order to seize the baggage’ (‘the baggage’ being the Tsar). It happened, once again, as Rasputin had predicted: ‘Willing or unwilling they will come to Tobolsk and they will see my village before they die.’
A month after the Tsar and Tsarina travelled to Ekaterinburg, glimpsing the Rasputins for the last time, the Tsarevich Alexis followed with three of his sisters. On May 22 1918, their ship docked at Tyumen where Maria Rasputin happened to be at the pier, in the course of a home visit, buying tickets. She spotted two of the Imperial family’s retainers with Alexis, waving through a dirty window: ‘They were like angels.’
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