By the end of 1916, some form of change at the top was regarded as inevitable in Russia. Many still hoped that the change could be made without violence, that the monarchy could be modified to make the government responsive to the nation. Others felt that if the dynasty was to be preserved, it had to be brutally purged. One group of officers revealed to Kerensky their plan to “bomb the Tsar’s motorcar from an aeroplane at a particular point on its route.” A famous fighter pilot, Captain Kostenko, plotted to nose-dive his plane into the Imperial car. There were rumors that General Alexeiev was plotting with Guchkov to force the Tsar to send the Empress to the Crimea. Alexeiev, however, came down with a high fever, and it was he who went to the Crimea to rest and recover in the sun.
The growing peril was obvious to other members of the Imperial family. In November, after his return from Kiev, the Tsar received a visit from his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, a well-known historian who was President of the Imperial Historical Society. The Grand Duke, a wealthy man-about-town and a habitué of Petrograd clubs, was an outspoken liberal; already he had written the Tsar a number of letters stressing the importance of broadening the government’s support in the Duma. At Headquarters, he had a long talk with Nicholas and then handed the Tsar a letter. The Tsar, believing that he already had fully understood his cousin’s views, forwarded the letter to the Empress without reading it. To her horror, Alexandra found in the letter a direct and scathing accusation against herself: “You trust her, that is quite natural,” the Grand Duke had written to the Tsar. “Still what she tells you is not the truth; she is only repeating what has been cleverly suggested to her. If you are not able to remove this influence from her, at least protect yourself.” Indignantly, the Empress wrote to her husband, “I read Nicholas’s [letter] and am utterly disgusted … it becomes next to high treason.”
Despite this setback, the family persisted. At a meeting of all the members in and near Petrograd, Grand Duke Paul, the Tsar’s only surviving uncle, was chosen to go to the Tsar and ask that he grant a constitution. On December 16, Paul had tea with Nicholas and Alexandra and made his request. Nicholas refused, saying that he had sworn at his coronation to deliver his autocratic power intact to his son. While he was speaking, the Empress looked at Paul and silently shook her head. Then the Grand Duke talked openly of the damaging influence of Rasputin. This time, Nicholas remained silent, calmly smoking his cigarette, while the Empress earnestly defended Rasputin, declaring that in his own time every prophet was damned.
The most poignant of all the warning visits was that of Grand Duchess Elizabeth. Dressed in the gray-and-white robes of her religious order, Ella came from Moscow especially to speak to her younger sister about Rasputin. At the mention of his name, the Empress’s face grew cold. She was sorry, she said, to find her sister accepting the “lies” told about Father Gregory; if that was all she had to discuss, her visit might as well end immediately. Desperate, the Grand Duchess persisted, whereupon the Empress cut off the conversation, rose and ordered a carriage to take her sister to the station.
“Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come,” said Ella sadly as she prepared to leave.
“Yes,” said Alexandra. On this cold note, the sisters parted. It was their last meeting.
On one matter, grand dukes, generals and members of the Duma all agreed: Rasputin had to be removed. The question was how. On December 2, a stinging public denunciation was delivered by Vladimir Purishkevich in the Duma. Then in his fifties, a man of sparkling intelligence and wit, the writer of brilliantly satiric political verse, Purishkevich was an orator of such renown that when he rose to speak the entire Duma, including his enemies, beamed in anticipation of what they were about to hear. Politically, Purishkevich was on the extreme Right, the most ardent monarchist in the Duma. He believed in absolute autocracy and rigid orthodoxy, in the Tsar Autocrat as the emissary of God. A fervent patriot, Purishkevich had thrown himself into war work, going to the front to organize a system of relief for the wounded and personally administrating a Red Cross train which traveled back and forth from Petrograd to the front. Invited to dine with the Tsar at Headquarters, Purishkevich had left a highly favorable impression: “wonderful energy and a remarkable organizer,” wrote Nicholas.
Devoted to the monarchy, Purishkevich stood before the Duma and for two hours thundered his denunciation of the “dark forces” which were destroying the dynasty. “It requires only the recommendation of Rasputin to raise the most abject citizen to high office,” he cried. Then in a ringing finale which brought his audience to a tumultuous standing ovation, he roared a challenge at the ministers who sat before him. “If you are truly loyal, if the glory of Russia, her mighty future which is closely bound up with the brightness of the name of the Tsar mean anything to you, then on your feet, you Ministers. Be off to Headquarters and throw yourselves at the feet of the Tsar. Have the courage to tell him that the multitude is threatening in its wrath. Revolution threatens and an obscure moujik shall govern Russia no longer.”
Amid the storm of cheers which rolled through the Tauride Palace when Purishkevich had finished, a slender young man sitting in the visitors’ box remained utterly silent. Staring at him, another visitor noticed that Prince Felix Yussoupov had turned pale and was trembling.
* Buchanan and Paléologue, as representatives of Russia’s allies, were naturally the preeminent members of the Petrograd diplomatic corps, but American representation was unusually and unnecessarily weak due to President Wilson’s appointment of nonprofessionals to the post. From 1914 to 1916, the U.S. Ambassador was George T. Marye, a San Franciscan who had little contact or interest in Russia and got most of his information from the newspapers he received from Paris. At his farewell audience with the Tsar, Marye mentioned that he hoped that after the war American businessmen would flock to invest in Russia. “Russia needed American energy, American money and the Americans who engaged in business in Russia would find the field immensely profitable. No one, of course, is in business for his health—the Emperor smiled slightly as I indulged in this somewhat homely expression,” reported Marye. Marye’s successor was David R. Francis, a wealthy businessman and former Governor of Missouri who arrived in Russia with a portable cuspidor with a foot-operated lid.
* Fifty years later, struggling to convey his strong impression of the Empress, Balanchine said, “Beautiful, beautiful—like Grace Kelly.”
25
The Prince and the Peasant
At twenty-nine, Prince Felix Yussoupov was the sole heir to the largest fortune in Russia. There were four Yussoupov palaces in Petrograd, three in Moscow and thirty-seven Yussoupov estates scattered across Russia. The family’s coal and iron mines, oil fields, mills and factories churned out wealth which exceeded even the wealth of the tsars. “One of our estates,” wrote Yussoupov, “stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the ground seemed soaked with it and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.” Once, on a whim, Prince Yussoupov’s father had given his mother the highest mountain in the Crimea as a birthday present. In all, the size of the Yussoupov fortune was estimated fifty years ago at $350 million to $500 million. What the same possessions would be worth today, no one can guess.
The wealth of the Yussoupovs had been accumulated by centuries of standing at the elbows of Russia’s tsars and empresses. Prince Dmitry Yussoupov, descended from a Tartar khan named Yusuf, had whispered in the ear of Peter the Great. Prince Boris Yussoupov was a favorite of Empress Elizabeth. Prince Nicholas, the greatest Yussoupov of all, was a friend of Catherine the Great, an advisor to Catherine’s son, Tsar Paul, and a counselor to her two grandsons, Tsar Alexander I and Tsar Nicholas I. Prince Nicholas Yussoupov’s estate at Archangelskoe near Moscow was a city in itself, boasting huge parks and gardens with heated greenhouses, a zoo, private glass and porcelain factories, a private theatre and the Prince’s own companies of actors, musicians and ballet dancers. Seated in
the audience, Prince Nicholas could, with a wave of his cane, produce an extraordinary effect: all the dancers would suddenly appear on stage, stark naked. A gallery on this Archangelskoe estate contained portraits of the Prince’s three hundred mistresses. When the old grandee died at eighty-one, he had just concluded a liaison with a girl of eighteen.
At his birth in 1887, Felix Yussoupov stepped into a fairyland of art and treasure left behind by these lusty progenitors. The drawing rooms and galleries of the Moika Palace, where he was born, were lined with a finer collection of paintings than those hanging in most of the museums of Europe. There was furniture which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and a chandelier which had lighted the boudoir of Mme. de Pompadour. Jewel-encrusted cigarette boxes by Fabergé were scattered idly about on tables. Dinner parties brought two thousand guests to sit before golden plates and be served by costumed Arab and Tartar footmen. One Yussoupov mansion in Moscow had been built in 1551 as a hunting lodge for Ivan the Terrible; it was still connected by tunnel with the Kremlin several miles away. Beneath its vaulted halls, filled with medieval tapestries and furniture, there were sealed underground chambers which, when opened in Felix’s boyhood, revealed rows of skeletons still hanging in chains from the walls.
Cradled in wealth, Felix nevertheless was a spindly, lonely child whose birth caused his mother great disappointment. Princess Zenaide Yussoupov, one of the most famous beauties of her day, had borne three previous sons of whom only one had survived. She had prayed that her next child would be a girl. To console herself when Felix was born, she kept him in long hair and dresses until he was five. Surprisingly, this pleased him and he used to cry out to strangers in the street, “Look, isn’t Baby pretty?” “My mother’s caprice,” Prince Yussoupov wrote later, “was to have a lasting influence on my character.”
In adolescence, Felix Yussoupov was slender, with soft eyes and long lashes; he was often described as “the most beautiful young man in Europe.” Encouraged by his older brother, he took to dressing up in his mother’s gowns, donning her jewels and wigs and strolling in this costume on public boulevards. At The Bear, a fashionable St. Petersburg restaurant, he attracted enthusiastic attention from Guards officers, who sent notes inviting him to supper. Delighted, Felix accepted and disappeared into intimate private dining rooms. In Paris, continuing these masquerades, he once noticed a fat, whiskered gentleman staring persistently at him from the opposite side of the Théatre des Capucines. A note arrived which Felix hastily returned; his beaming admirer was King Edward VII of England.
Yussoupov’s first sexual experience occurred at the age of twelve in the company of a young man from Argentina and his girl friend. At fifteen, roaming Italy with his tutor, Felix first visited a Neapolitan bordello. Thereafter, he wrote, “I flung myself passionately into a life of pleasure, thinking only of satisfying my desires…. I loved beauty, luxury, comfort, the color and scent of flowers.” He also tried opium and a liaison with “a charming young girl” in Paris. Bored, he enrolled as a student at Oxford, maintaining at the university a chef, a chauffeur, a valet, a housekeeper and a groom to look after his three horses. From Oxford, he moved on to a flat in London, where he installed black carpets, orange silk curtains, modern furniture, a grand piano, a dog, a pet macaw and a French couple to cook and serve. He moved in a gay circle which included ballerina Anna Pavlova, Prince Serge Obolensky and ex-King Manuel of Portugal. Day or night, when friends visited Felix Yussoupov, he took out his guitar and sang gypsy songs.
Felix, the younger Yussoupov brother, became the family heir when Nicholas, his older brother, was killed in a duel by an outraged husband. In 1914, Felix returned to Russia to marry. His bride, Princess Irina, was the niece of the Tsar and the most eligible girl in the empire. At their wedding, Felix wore the uniform of the Russian nobility: a black frock coat with lapels and collar embroidered in gold, and white broadcloth trousers. Irina wore Marie Antoinette’s lace veil. The Tsar gave her in marriage and presented as his gift a bag of twenty-nine diamonds, ranging in size from three to seven carats apiece.
During the war, Yussoupov was not called for military service. Remaining in Petrograd, he achieved a glittering reputation as a bohemian. “Prince Felix Yussoupov is twenty-nine,” Paléologue observed, “and gifted with quick wits and aesthetic tastes; but his dilettantism is rather too prone to perverse imaginings and literary representations of vice and death … his favorite author is Oscar Wilde … his instincts, countenance and manner make him much closer akin to … Dorian Grey than to Brutus.”
Yussoupov first met Rasputin before his marriage. He saw him often, and they caroused together at dubious night spots. As treatment for an illness, Yussoupov submitted himself to Rasputin’s caressing eyes and hands. During this time, he often heard Rasputin speak of his Imperial patrons: “The Empress is a very wise ruler. She is a second Catherine but as for him, well, he is no Tsar Emperor, he is just a child of God.” According to Yussoupov, Rasputin suggested that Nicholas should abdicate in favor of Alexis, with the Empress installed as Regent. One year before he finally acted, Yussoupov concluded that Rasputin’s presence was destroying the monarchy and that the starets had to be killed.
Purishkevich spoke in the Duma on December 2. The following morning Yussoupov called on Purishkevich in a fever of excitement. He said that he planned to kill Rasputin, but that he needed assistance. Enthusiastically, Purishkevich agreed to help. Three other conspirators were brought into the plot: an officer named Sukhotin, an army doctor named Lazovert and Yussoupov’s youthful friend Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. At twenty-six, Dmitry was the son of Nicholas II’s last surviving uncle, Grand Duke Paul. Because of the difference in age, Dmitry referred to the Tsar—actually his first cousin—as “Uncle Nicky.” Elegant and charming, Dmitry was a special favorite of the Empress, who often found herself laughing at his jokes and stories. Nevertheless, she worried about his character. “Dmitry is doing no work and drinking constantly,” she complained to Nicholas during the war. “… order Dmitry back to his regiment; town and women are poison for him.”
As December progressed, the five conspirators met regularly, weaving the threads of entrapment, death and disposal of the corpse. The date was determined by Grand Duke Dmitry’s heavy social calender; December 31 was the first evening he had free. To cancel one of his previous engagements, the conspirators decided, might arouse suspicion. The place selected for the murder was the cellar of Yussoupov’s Moika Palace. It was remote and quiet and Princess Irina was away in the Crimea for her health. Yussoupov himself was to bring Rasputin there in a car driven by Dr. Lazovert disguised as a chauffeur. Once in the cellar, Yussoupov would feed Rasputin poison, while the others, waiting upstairs, would take charge of removing the body.
As the heavy December snows swirled through the streets of Petrograd, Rasputin sensed that his life was in danger. After the impassioned denunciations hurled at him in the Duma, he understood that a crisis was coming. The ebullient Purishkevich, unable to abide by his pledge of secrecy, soon was bubbling with hints to other Duma members that something was about to happen to Rasputin. Catching wisps of these rumors, Rasputin became moody and cautious. He avoided as much as possible going out in daylight. He was preoccupied with the idea of death. Once after a lonely walk along the Neva he came home and declared that he had seen the river filled with the blood of grand dukes. In his last meeting with the Tsar, he refused to give Nicholas his customary blessing, saying instead, “This time it is for you to bless me, not I you.”
According to Simanovich, Rasputin’s secretary and confidant, it was during these last weeks of December 1916 that Rasputin produced the mystically prophetic letter which has become part of the legend of this extraordinary man. Headed “The Spirit of Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novykh of the village of Pokrovskoe,” its message of warning is directed mainly at Nicholas:
I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1. I wish to make known to the Rus
sian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear, remain on your throne and govern, and you, Russian Tsar, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Gregory has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people…. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 47