Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  Gregory

  Because the plot hinged on Yussoupov being able to bring Rasputin to the cellar of the Moika Palace, the young Prince intensified his approaches to Rasputin. “My intimacy with Rasputin—so indispensable to our plan—increased each day,” he wrote. When near the end of the month Yussoupov invited him “to spend an evening with me soon,” Rasputin readily accepted.

  But there was more to Rasputin’s acceptance than friendship for a charming dilettante and a taste for midnight tea. Yussoupov deliberately encouraged Rasputin’s belief that Princess Irina, widely known for her beauty but a stranger to Rasputin, would be present. “He [Rasputin] had long wished to meet my wife,” wrote Yussoupov. “Believing her to be in St. Petersburg, and knowing that my parents were in the Crimea, he accepted my invitation. The truth was that Irina was also in the Crimea, but I thought Rasputin would be more likely to accept my invitation if he thought he had a chance of meeting her.”

  The bait was attractive and Rasputin swallowed it. Both Simanovich and Anna Vyrubova, hearing of the forthcoming supper, tried to dissuade Rasputin from going. Anna Vyrubova visited him in his flat that afternoon, bringing him an icon as a gift from the Empress. “I heard Rasputin say that he expected to pay a late evening visit to the Yussoupov palace to meet Princess Irina, wife of Prince Felix Yussoupov,” wrote Anna. “I knew that Felix often visited Rasputin, but it struck me as odd that he should go to their house at such an unseemly hour…. I mentioned this proposed midnight visit that night in the Empress’s boudoir, and the Empress said in some surprise, ‘But there must be some mistake, Irina is in the Crimea.’ … Once again she repeated thoughtfully, ‘There must be some mistake.’”

  By evening, the cellar room had been prepared. Yussoupov described the scene: “A low vaulted ceiling … walls of gray stone, the flooring of granite … carved wooden chairs of oak … small tables covered with ancient embroideries … a cabinet of inlaid ebony which was a mass of little mirrors, tiny bronze columns and secret drawers. On it stood a crucifix of rock crystal and silver, a beautiful specimen of sixteenth century Italian workmanship…. A large Persian carpet covered the floor and, in a corner, in front of the ebony cabinet, lay a white bear skin rug…. In the middle of the room stood the table at which Rasputin was to drink his last cup of tea.

  “On the table the samovar smoked, surrounded by plates filled with the cakes and dainties that Rasputin liked so much. An array of bottles and glasses sat on a sideboard…. On the granite hearth a log fire crackled and scattered sparks on the hearthstones…. I took from the ebony cabinet a box containing the poison and laid it on the table. Doctor Lazovert put on rubber gloves and ground the cyanide of potassium crystals to powder. Then, lifting the top of each cake, he sprinkled the inside with a dose of poison which, according to him, was sufficient to kill several men instantly,” When he finished, Lazovert convulsively tossed the contaminated gloves into the fire. It was a mistake; within a few moments the fireplace was smoking heavily and the air became temporarily unbreathable.

  Rasputin also prepared himself carefully for the rendezvous. When Yussoupov went alone at midnight to Rasputin’s flat, he found the starets smelling of cheap soap and dressed in his best embroidered silk blouse, black velvet trousers and shiny new boots. Yussoupov promised, as he took his victim away and led him down into the cellar, that Princess Irina was upstairs at a party but would be down Shortly. From overhead came the sounds of “Yankee Doodle” played on a phonograph by the other conspirators, simulating the Princess’s “party.”

  Alone in the cellar with his victim, Yussoupov nervously offered Rasputin the poisoned cakes. Rasputin refused. Then, changing his mind, he gobbled two. Yussoupov watched, expecting to see him crumple in agony, but nothing happened. Then, Rasputin asked for the Madeira, which had also been poisoned. He swallowed two glasses, still with no effect. Seeing this, wrote Yussoupov, “my head swam.” Rasputin took some tea to clear his head and, while sipping it, asked Yussoupov to sing for him with his guitar. Through one song after another, the terrified murderer sang on while the happy “corpse” sat nodding and grinning with pleasure. Huddled at the top of the stairs, scarcely daring to breathe, Purishkevich, Dmitry and the others could hear only the quavering sound of Yussoupov’s singing and the indistinguishable murmur of the two voices.

  After this game had gone on for two and a half hours, Yussoupov could stand it no longer. In desperation, he rushed upstairs to ask what he should do. Lazovert had no answer: his nerves had failed and he had already fainted once. Grand Duke Dmitry suggested giving up and going home. It was Purishkevich, the oldest and steadiest of the group, who kept his head and declared that Rasputin could not be allowed to leave half dead. Steeling himself, Yussoupov volunteered to return to the cellar and complete the murder. Holding Dmitry’s Browning revolver behind his back, he went back down the stairs and found Rasputin seated, breathing heavily and calling for more wine. Reviving, Rasputin suggested a visit to the gypsies. “With God in thought, but mankind in the flesh,” he said with a heavy wink. Yussoupov then led Rasputin to the mirrored cabinet and showed him the ornate crucifix. Rasputin stared at the crucifix and declared that he liked the cabinet better. “Gregory Efimovich,” said Yussoupov, “you’d far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer.” Rasputin glared at the Prince, then turned briefly to look again at the cross. As he did so, Yussoupov fired. The bullet plunged into the broad back. With a scream, Rasputin fell backward onto the white bearskin.

  Hearing the shot, Yussoupov’s friends rushed into the cellar. They found Yussoupov, revolver in hand, calmly staring down at the dying man with a look of inexpressible disgust in his eyes. Although there was not a trace of blood, Dr. Lazovert, clutching Rasputin’s pulse, quickly pronounced him dead. The diagnosis was premature. A moment later, when Yussoupov, having surrendered the revolver, was temporarily alone with the “corpse,” Rasputin’s face twitched and his left eye fluttered open. A few seconds later, his right eye also rolled open. “I then saw both eyes—the green eyes of a viper—staring at me with an expression of diabolical hatred,” Yussoupov wrote. Suddenly, while Yussoupov stood rooted to the floor, Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, leaped to his feet, grabbed his murderer by the throat and tore an epaulet off his shoulder. In terror, Yussoupov broke away and fled up the stairs. Behind him, clambering on all fours, roaring with fury, came Rasputin.

  Purishkevich, upstairs, heard “a savage, inhuman cry.” It was Yussoupov: “Purishkevich, fire, fire! He’s alive! He’s getting away!” Purishkevich ran to the stairs and almost collided with the frantic Prince, whose eyes were “bulging out of their sockets. Without seeing me … he hurled himself towards the door … [and into] his parents’ apartment.”

  Recovering, Purishkevich dashed outside into the courtyard. “What I saw would have been a dream if it hadn’t been a terrible reality. Rasputin, who half an hour before lay dying in the cellar, was running quickly across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate which led to the street…. I couldn’t believe my eyes. But a harsh cry which broke the silence of the night persuaded me. ‘Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!’ It was him, all right, Rasputin. In a few seconds, he would reach the iron gate…. I fired. The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate. I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head. I ran up and kicked him as hard as I could with my boot in the temple. He fell into the snow, tried to rise, but he could only grind his teeth.”

  With Rasputin prostrate once again, Yussoupov reappeared and struck hysterically at the bleeding man with a rubber club. When at last the body lay still in the crimson snow, it was rolled up in a blue curtain, bound with a rope and taken to a hole in the frozen Neva, where Purishkevich and Lazovert pushed it through a hole in the ice. Three days later, when the body was fo
und, the lungs were filled with water. Gregory Rasputin, his bloodstream filled with poison, his body punctured by bullets, had died by drowning.

  “Next morning,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “soon after breakfast, I was called on the telephone by one of the daughters of Rasputin. … In some anxiety, the young girl told me that her father had gone out the night before in Yussoupov’s motor car and had not returned. When I reached the palace, I gave the message to the Empress who listened with a grave face but little comment. A few minutes later, there came a telephone call from Protopopov in Petrograd. The police … had reported to him that a patrolman standing near the entrance of the Yussoupov palace had been startled by the report of a pistol. Ringing the doorbell, he was met by … Purishkevich who appeared to be in advance stages of intoxication. [He said] they had just killed Rasputin.”

  In the excitement of the moment, Purishkevich had again completely forgotten the need for secrecy. After the sharp report of his four pistol shots had split the dry winter air and roused a policeman, Purishkevich had thrown his arms around the man and shouted exultantly, “I have killed Grishka Rasputin, the enemy of Russia and the Tsar.” Twenty-four hours later, the story, embroidered with a thousand colorful details, was all over Petrograd.

  The Empress, remaining calm, ordered Protopopov to make a complete investigation. A squad of detectives, entering the Yussoupov palace, found the stains of a trail of blood running up the stairs and across the courtyard. Yussoupov explained this as the result of a wild party the night before at which one of his guests had shot a dog—the body of the dog was lying in the court for the police to see. Nevertheless, Protopopov advised Alexandra that Rasputin’s disappearance was almost certainly linked to the commotion at Yussoupov’s house; Purishkevich’s boast and the blood found by the police suggested that the starets had probably been murdered. Technically, only the Tsar could order the arrest of a grand duke, but Alexandra ordered that both Dmitry and Felix be confined to their houses. Late that day, when Felix telephoned asking permission to see the Empress, she refused, telling him to put his message into a letter. When the letter arrived, it contained a denial of any part in the rumored assassination. Grand Duke Paul, shocked at rumors of his son’s complicity, confronted Dmitry with a holy icon and a photograph of Dmitry’s mother. On these two sacred objects, he asked his son to swear that he had not killed Rasputin. “I swear it,” said Dmitry solemnly.

  On the afternoon after the murder, the Empress’s friend Lili Dehn found Alexandra lying on a couch in her mauve boudoir, surrounded by flowers and the fragrant odor of burning wood. Anna Vyrubova and the four young Grand Duchesses sat nearby. Although Anna’s eyes were red from weeping, Alexandra’s blue eyes were clear. Only her extreme pallor and the frantic disjointedness of the letter she was writing to the Tsar betrayed her anxiety.

  My own beloved sweetheart,

  We are sitting together—you can imagine our feelings—thoughts—Our Friend has disappeared.

  Yesterday A. [Anna] saw him, and he said Felix asked him to come in the night, a motor would fetch him, to see Irina. A motor fetched him (military one) with two civilians and he went away.

  This night big scandal at Yussoupov’s house—big meeting, Dmitry, Purishkevich, etc. all drunk; police heard shots, Purishkevich ran out screaming to the police that Our Friend was killed.

  … Our Friend was in good spirits but nervous these days. Felix pretends he [Rasputin] never came to the house…. I shall still trust in God’s mercy that one has only driven Him off somewhere. Protopopov is doing all he can….

  I cannot and won’t believe that He has been killed. God have mercy. Such utter anguish (am calm and can’t believe it) … Come quickly….

  Felix came often to him lately.

  Kisses,

  Sunny

  The following day, when Rasputin still had not appeared, Alexandra telegraphed: “No trace yet…. The police are continuing the search. I fear that these two wretched boys have committed a frightful crime, but have not yet lost all hope. Start today, I need you terribly.”

  On the third day, January 1, 1917, Rasputin’s body was found. In their haste, the murderers had left one of his boots on the ice near the hole. Divers probing beneath the ice in that vicinity brought up the corpse. Incredibly, before he died, Rasputin had struggled with sufficient strength to free one of his hands from the ropes around him. The freed arm was raised above the shoulder; the effect was that Rasputin’s last gesture on earth had been a sign of benediction.

  In Petrograd, where everyone knew the details and juicy stories of the Rasputin scandal, confirmation that the Beast was slain set off an orgy of wild rejoicing. People kissed each other in the streets and hailed Yussoupov, Purishkevich and Grand Duke Dmitry as heroes. At the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, there was a crush to light a sea of candles around the icons of St. Dmitry. Far off in the provinces, however, where the peasants knew only that a moujik, a man like themselves, had become powerful at the court of the Tsar, the murder was regarded differently. “To the moujiks, Rasputin has become a martyr,” an old prince just returned from his estate on the Volga reported to Paléologue. “He was a man of the people; he let the Tsar hear the voice of the people; he defended the people against the court folk, the pridvorny. So the pridvorny killed him. That’s what’s being said.”

  History, with all its sweep and diversity, produces few characters as original and extravagant as Gregory Rasputin. The source and extent of his extraordinary powers will never be fully known; the shadow of this uncertainty perpetually will refresh the legend. The duality of his countenance—the one face peaceful, soothing, offering the blessings of God; the other cynical, crafty, reddened by lust—is the core of his mysterious appeal. In his single, remarkable life, he represents not only the two sides of Russia’s history, half compassionate and long-suffering, half savage and pagan, but the constant struggle in every soul between good and evil.

  As for the evil in Gregory Rasputin, it should be carefully weighed. He has been called a monster, yet, unlike most monsters in history, he took not a single life. He schemed against his enemies and toppled men from high places, yet, once they had fallen, he sought no vengeance. In his relations with women he was undoubtedly villainous, but most of these episodes occurred with the consent of the women involved. Unquestionably, he used his “holy” aura to seductive advantage and, failing all else, forced himself upon unwilling victims. But even here the screams of outrage were greatly amplified by rumor.

  Rasputin’s greatest crime was his delusion of the Empress Alexandra. Deliberately, he encouraged her to believe that there was only one side of him: Father Gregory, Our Friend, the Man of God who gave relief to her son and calmed her fears. The other Rasputin—drunken, leering, arrogant—did not exist for the Empress except in the malicious reports of their common enemies. An obvious rogue to everyone else, he carefully hid this side from her. Yet no one could believe that the Empress did not know; therefore, her acceptance of him was taken as acceptance of his worst behavior. On her part, this can be called foolishness, blindness, ignorance. But on his part, the deliberate exploitation of weakness and devotion was nothing less than monstrous evil.

  Predictably, the impact of Rasputin’s death fell less severely on Nicholas than on Alexandra. Told of Rasputin’s disappearance while he sat in a staff meeting at Headquarters, the Tsar left the room immediately and telegraphed “Am horrified, shaken.” Nevertheless, he did not leave for Petrograd until January 1, when Rasputin’s death was confirmed. Once again, in death as in life, Nicholas was less concerned about Rasputin than about the effect that the murder would have on his wife. In the months preceding the assassination, Rasputin’s advice had become less welcome. Often Nicholas was irritated by what he regarded as clumsy intrusions by Rasputin into political and military matters. The Tsar, wrote Gilliard, “had tolerated him [Rasputin] because he dared not weaken the Empress’s faith in him—a faith that kept her alive. He did not like to send him away, for if Alexis Nicol
aievich died, in the eyes of the mother, he would have been the murderer of his own son.”

  For Nicholas himself, the quickest pang of Rasputin’s death lay in the fact that the murder had been committed by members of the Imperial family. “I am filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant,” he exclaimed. “A murder is always a murder,” he replied stiffly in refusing an appeal from his relatives on behalf of Dmitry. Almost fifty years later, the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna still showed the same shame and scorn for her family’s behavior: “There was nothing heroic about Rasputin’s murder,” she said. “It was … premeditated most vilely. Just think of the two names most closely associated with it even to this day—a Grand Duke, one of the grandsons of the Tsar-Liberator, and then a scion of one of our great houses whose wife was a Grand Duke’s daughter. That proved how low we had fallen.”

  Soon after Nicholas’s return to Petrograd, enough evidence had been amassed to incriminate the three leading conspirators. Grand Duke Dmitry was ordered to leave Petrograd immediately for duty with the Russian troops operating in Persia; the sentence undoubtedly saved his life, as it put him out of reach of the revolution which was soon to follow. Yussoupov was banished to one of his estates in the center of Russia; a year later, he left his homeland with Princess Irina, taking with him, from all his vast fortune, only a million dollars in jewels and two Rembrandts. Purishkevich was allowed to go free. His part in the murder had placed his prestige at a peak. To strike down a member of the Duma who had also become a hero was no longer possible even for the Autocrat of all the Russias.

  In secrecy, Rasputin’s body was taken to the chapel of a veterans’ home halfway between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo, where an autopsy was performed and the body was washed and dressed and laid in a coffin. Two days later, on January 3, Rasputin was buried in a corner of the Imperial Park where Anna Vyrubova was building a church. Lili Dehn was present: “It was a glorious morning,” she wrote. “The sky was a deep blue, the sun was shining and the hard snow sparkled like masses of diamonds. My carriage stopped on the road … and I was directed to walk across a frozen field towards the unfinished church. Planks had been placed on the snow to serve as a footpath, and when I arrived at the church I noticed that a police motor van was drawn up near the open grave. After waiting several moments, I heard the sound of sleigh bells and Anna Vyrubova came slowly across the field. Almost immediately afterwards, a closed automobile stopped and the Imperial family joined us. They were dressed in mourning and the Empress carried some white flowers; she was very pale but quite composed although I saw her tears fall when the oak coffin was taken out of the police van … the burial service was read by the chaplain and after the Emperor and Empress had thrown earth on the coffin, the Empress distributed her flowers between the Grand Duchesses and ourselves and we scattered them on the coffin.”