The Rasputin File

by Edvard Radzinsky

  By then the police had already intercepted the first congratulatory telegrams sent to Dmitry and Felix. Those from the God-fearing Ella must have especially stunned Nicholas II. She, the meek intercessor, had written to Dmitry: ‘18 December, 9:30 a.m….I just returned late last night after spending the whole week in Sarov and Diveev praying for all you dear ones. I ask you to send me a letter with the details of the events. May God give Felix strength after the patriotic act performed by him.’ And she sent another telegram to the Crimea to Zinaida Yusupova: ‘All my ardent and profound prayers surround all of you for the patriotic act of your dear son.’ So Ella, having only just returned from Diveev on 18 December, already knew all about the murder and the murderers. And she blessed the murder. She lacked only the details that Felix would tell Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich the day after after the murder.

  From the diary of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich: ‘The next day, the 19th, after Felix had moved to the apartment of Dmitry Pavlovich, I blurted out upon entering the room, “I greet you, gentlemen murderers!” ‘ And seeing that resistance was ‘pointless’, Felix began his story.

  The Story Of The Murder As Told By The Murderers

  Afterwards in Paris Felix Yusupov would publish his memoirs of the murder in a variety of editions. In them he would basically repeat what he had told Nikolai Mikhailovich on that evening in Petrograd.

  At the same time, however, there is another story about everything that happened at the Yusupov palace, written down by another participant in the murder.

  Unlike Felix, the Duma member Purishkevich had succeeded in getting out of the city. His hospital train safely left for the front the day after the murder. Purishkevich wrote continuously in his car, describing what happened. ‘I am surrounded by the deep of night and utter silence, while my train, gently swaying, carries me off into the distance … I cannot sleep … the events of the last forty-eight hours whirl through my mind … Rasputin is no more, he has been killed…It has pleased fate for him to fall at my hand … Thank goodness that the hand of Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich has not been stained with that dirty blood.’ And he explains: ‘The royal youth must not be guilty of…any matter connected to the spilling of blood. Even if it is the blood of Rasputin.’ We shall remember that: ‘the royal youth must not be guilty.’ And then Purishkevich proceeds to his narrative.

  It is in fact on the basis of those two sources — Yusupov’s and Purishkevich’s memoirs — that the story of Rasputin’s murder has been repeated from book to book. It is a story that, as Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote in his diary, is ‘reminiscent…of murder in medieval Italy’. Or, more accurately, of the thriller so popular in Rasputin’s time and our own, in which a terrible demon is killed by human heroes. Sensing that element of trashy fiction, Leon Trotsky would call the story ‘tasteless’. Its resemblance to ‘literature’ already puts you very much on your guard. And the more carefully you read about it, the more suspect it seems.

  Let us first permit the two murderers to speak for themselves, however.

  ‘An Evening Of Unforgettable Nightmare’

  Purishkevich: ‘I shall try to recount with photographic accuracy the whole course of the historically significant drama that unfolded. On that night… the weather was a mild two to three degrees above freezing and wet snow was falling.’

  And in that wet snow a military automobile rare for those times appeared at the Yusupov Palace. The automobile stood for a while, then departed, then came back again. And then, finally, it drove up to the palace’s main entrance.

  In the automobile, as Purishkevich writes, were himself and Dr Lazavert, who was sitting in for the driver. According to the agreement, they were supposed to drive into the courtyard up to the side entrance so as to enter the building unnoticed. But the courtyard gate was closed. Purishkevich realized the silly Felix had forgotten all about their compact.

  Purishkevich: ‘After circling a couple of times we drove up to the main entrance.’ And from there they passed into Yusupov’s study, where the others had already gathered (the grand duke, Felix, and Lieutenant Sukhotin). Felix greeted Purishkevich and Lazavert as if nothing was the matter. But they were in no mood for explanations. They all quickly went downstairs to the basement, where Purishkevich, delighted by its transformation ‘into an elegant honhonniére in the style of the ancient Russian palaces’, forgot his anger.

  ‘That charming room,’ Purishkevich wrote, ‘was divided into two parts: the front one nearer the fireplace was a sort of miniature dining room… A fire was cosily burning in the fireplace, on the mantle stood a magnificent ivory crucifix, and under the window there was a small table with bottles — sherry, port, madeira, and marsala. The rear part of the room was a sitting room with a polar bear skin on the floor…in front of a settee.’

  They sat down at the table in the ‘dining room’, and Yusupov suggested they sample the pastries prepared for Rasputin before stuffing them with the poison. The pastries were well matched to the dining room — ‘little pink and brown petits fours chosen to complement the colour of the wall’. They drank tea and nervously ‘waited for 11:30 when the spies would abandon Rasputin’s apartment’. Felix knew that the external surveillance would be lifted then, as well. After finishing their tea, they ‘tried to make it look like a whole group had been scared off by the arrival of an unexpected guest’. They poured a little tea in the cups and scattered wrinkled napkins on the table. Then Dr Lazavert put on gloves and began to chip the poison — pellets of potassium cyanide — onto a plate for inserting into the little pastries with the pink cream filling. The chocolate pastries were left unpoisoned (for Felix). Lazavert ‘thickly sprinkled the poison inside the pastries’. After completing that rather awful task, Lazavert tossed the gloves into the fireplace, which ‘started smoking, so that the room had to be aired out’. Then he changed into a chauffeur’s uniform. Felix threw a fur coat over his shoulders and ‘pulled his fur cap down over his ears so that his face was completely hidden’. And shortly after, those remaining behind heard the sound an automobile pulling away.

  They drove up to the house on Gorokhovaya Street. The building custodian testified during the inquiry that ‘A motor drove up to the locked gates of the building after midnight. And an unknown man, after getting out of the motor, went directly to the door. In answer to the question where he was going, he said, “To Rasputin’s.” ‘ He was ‘beardless… with a black moustache … dressed in a long fur coat … and on his head he had a black fur cap’. The custodian pointed him to the front door, but instead of using it, the stranger went to the ‘back door. It was clear from everything that he was someone familiar with how the building was arranged,’ the custodian testified.

  ‘I went up the back stairway,’ Felix recalled. ‘It was unlit, and I felt my way along, finding the door to the elder’s apartment with great difficulty.’

  The chain jangled, the bolt squeaked, Rasputin opened the door, and Felix stepped into the kitchen.

  ‘It was dark, and it seemed to me that there was someone watching me from the next room. I instinctively pulled my cap down over my eyes.’

  It was not for nothing that Felix had sensed someone’s gaze. We recall here that he had been watched as he entered the kitchen by Katya Pechyorkina, who slept in the kitchen behind a curtain.

  And she testified when, ‘both passed by me in the kitchen to the other rooms’, parting the curtain, she saw ‘that it was the Little One who came’.

  ‘We went into the bedroom, whose only illumination was an icon lamp,’ Felix wrote.

  Rasputin lit a candle. I noticed that the bed was mussed. It’s possible he had been resting. His fur coat and beaver cap were ready by the bed. Rasputin was wearing… a silk shirt embroidered with cornflowers and girded with a thick crimson cord with two large tassels on the ends, wide black velveteen pants, and high boots … I was suddenly overwhelmed with infinite pity for that person. I was ashamed of the dirty, monstrous lie I was resorting to. At that moment I
despised myself. I asked myself how I could have conceived such a base crime … I looked with horror on my trusting victim.

  But Rasputin did not sense Felix’s disturbed state at all. And for that reason Felix asks the questions that we ourselves should like to ask. ‘What of his clairvoyance? What good was his gift of foresight if he did not see the trap that had set for him? But my pangs of conscience yielded to a firm resolve to carry out the business. We went out into the dark stairwell and Rasputin locked the door after him. I felt his fingers roughly take hold of my arm. “Better let me guide you,” he said, leading me down the dark stairway.’ Thus, they went down arm in arm. And even while holding his arm, Rasputin did not sense anything. For even with all his intuitive powers, he trusted Felix completely and blindly. They got in the car and set off for the Yusupov palace.

  Back at the palace, as Purishkevich recounts, they ‘were checking the gramophone’ that was supposed to create the impression of a soirée in progress, and ‘were busy with a vial of dissolved potassium cyanide’, which they added to two of the four wine glasses, as had been agreed with Felix. Then, they ‘waited, silent pacing, since there was no interest in talk’. Purishkevich ‘took out the heavy Savage revolver that was weighing down his pocket’ and placed it on the table in Yusupov’s study. A revolver that would, according to him, play a central role in the tragedy. Finally, they heard the sound of the car entering into the yard. ‘And then the lieutenant turned on the gramophone and started playing the American march “Yankee Doodle”,’ a march that Purishkevich would remember for the rest of his life. Then they heard the voice of Rasputin saying. ‘Where be you, dear one?’

  Yusupov: ‘Entering the house …I heard the voices of my friends … the gramophone was merrily playing an American tune … Rasputin listened and said, “What’s going on there, a spree?”

  “No, my wife’s got company. They’ll be leaving soon. In the meantime, let’s have some tea in the dining room.”‘ And Rasputin and Felix went downstairs to that basement turned into ‘a charming dining room’.

  Meanwhile, Dr Lazavert, after doffing his chauffeur’s uniform, had gone upstairs to the study to join the other murderers. And they all came out of the room and stood by the railing of the stairway leading to the basement. And started their vigil. Halfway down the stairs below them was the door from the courtyard through which Rasputin and Felix had come in. Crowding against the railing, they waited. ‘I with a knuckleduster in my hand, behind me the grand duke, behind him Lieutenant Sukhotin, and Dr Lazavert in the rear,’ Purishkevich recalled. Thus they stood ‘listening to every rustle coming from below’. They heard the echoes of speech and the strains of ‘Yankee Doodle’ but not the crucial sound — the sound of bottles being uncorked. They were talking downstairs, but ‘they weren’t drinking or eating anything.’

  ‘Rasputin took off his coat and started to study the furniture with interest,’ Felix recalled.

  The chest with the maze particularly attracted his attention. Admiring it like a child … he opened and closed it and studied it inside and out …I offered him some tea and wine … to my disappointment he declined. ‘Has something happened?’ I wondered. We sat down at the table and chatted, going through our mutual acquaintances. Exhausting that topic, Rasputin asked for some tea. I offered him a plate of pastries. For some reason I offered him the ones that hadn’t been poisoned. A moment later, I passed him the plate with the poisoned pastries. At first he refused. ‘I don’t want any; they’re too sweet.’

  And that is a moment we shall remember — Rasputin refusing to eat the pastries after explaining, ‘I don’t want any; they’re too sweet.’

  But afterwards, Felix declares, ‘he took first one and then another. I looked at him in horror.’ But between those two events another event took place that Felix does not mention. Although it is described by Purishkevich.

  When Rasputin refused to eat the ‘sweet’ pastries, Felix, as it turns out, panicked and went upstairs. And Purishkevich describes in detail how, as they stood by the stairway, they heard the sound of a door opening downstairs in the basement, and how they ‘all soundlessly hurried back on tiptoe to Yusupov’s study. Yusupov came in. And said, “Imagine, gentlemen, the animal will not eat or drink.”’

  ‘What’s his mood?’ Purishkevich asked.

  ‘Not good. It’s as if he’s had a premonition.’

  And Felix went back downstairs to Rasputin.

  And it was then that Rasputin for some reason changed his mind and started to drink and partake of the pastries. And that circumstance is one that we shall also remember. Purishkevich: ‘Soon afterwards the sound of bottles being uncorked was heard. “They are drinking,” the grand duke whispered. “We won’t have to wait much longer, now.” But half an hour passed and nothing.’

  ‘The potassium cyanide should have had an immediate effect,’ Felix recalled, ‘but Rasputin … continued to chat with me as if nothing was the matter.’ Felix poured a second glass and Rasputin drank it, but ‘the poison did not manifest its strength’. A third glass remained, the last. Felix himself had then ‘in desperation started drinking to force the peasant to drink the last glass’.

  We sat in front of each other and silently drank. He looked at me, and his eyes cunningly smiled: ‘so you see, however hard you try, you can’t do anything to me.’ Then … an expression of hatred suddenly took the place of that craftily saccharine smile. Never had I seen him so frightening. He looked at me with diabolical eyes … I was overcome by a kind of strange immobility and my head began to spin … Coming to, I saw Rasputin on the settee, his head down, hiding his eyes from view. ‘Pour me a cup, I’m very thirsty,’ he said in a feeble voice. While I was pouring him a cup, he got up and walked across the room. His eye fell on a guitar that I had accidentally forgotten in the dining room.

  ‘Play something merry, my friend. I like it when you sing.’

  And Felix began to sing. ‘When I finished singing, he … looked at me with a sad, quiet expression. “Sing some more, I really like the music, you have much soul in you.” I started singing again … And the time passed — the clock showed 2:30. The nightmare had lasted over two hours.’

  Two legitimate questions arise here. The fact is that because of his delight in Felix’s singing, Rasputin completely forgot why he had come — he forgot all about Irina. The ‘several friends’ he had been promised ‘would soon be leaving’ had been sitting upstairs for two and a half hours! And he hadn’t objected! For two whole hours and more he’d been drinking and listening to songs and forgetting the purpose of his visit. Furthermore, during that two and a half hours he hadn’t sensed anything peculiar in Felix’s behaviour — the sensitive, nervous, and, as we shall see, highly susceptible Felix. Could Felix, obviously no professional murderer, really not have revealed anything of his agitation during that two and a half hours? It’s highly unlikely! And there is a third question that will perplex everyone and provoke numerous other questions. And that would become the basis of the legend about Rasputin’s superhuman capacities. Why hadn’t the poison taken him?

  However, let us leave these questions unanswered for the time being and continue our narration of the murder.

  And so the poison had not taken Rasputin. Felix was naturally shaken by the situation. ‘Upstairs, their patience had apparently run out,’ Felix recalled. ‘The noise coming from up there grew louder and louder. “What’s all that noise?” Rasputin asked.

  “The guests are probably leaving. I’ll take a look.’“

  Purishkevich:

  A wan Yusupov came upstairs. ‘It’s not possible! He drank two glasses with poison and ate several of the pink pastries and nothing. It’s beyond me what we’ll do now, all the more since he’s started worrying why it’s taking the countess so long to come to him [note that he has already ‘started worrying’ after more than two hours]. I managed to explain that it would be hard for her to absent herself without being noticed … as there aren’t many guests upstairs, but that in
all likelihood she’ll be down in ten minutes or so… He’s sitting gloomily … the poison’s effect is apparent only in the fact that he keeps belching and there seems to be an increase in saliva. Gentlemen, what do youadvise me to do?

  And the gentlemen decided that if the poison did not take effect within the next five minutes, Felix should come back upstairs to them and they would decide how to do away with the peasant.

  It was then that Lazavert began to feel ill. Although he had worked many times under fire at the front, the doctor sat exhausted and apoplectically red in a chair and whispered, ‘I don’t think I can bear it.’ And then Yusupov came upstairs again and told them that the poison still wasn’t working. At that point he asked, ‘Do you mind if I shoot him?’ And, as he recalled, he ‘took a pistol from Dmitry [we shall remember that, too] and went back down to the basement’.

  ‘How did he not notice with his perceptive eyes that I was clutching a pistol behind my back?’ (And here we may share Felix’s wonder.)

  And Felix was also stunned (as are we) that Rasputin, who sensed and guessed at everything, ‘was then far from any awareness of his own death’.

  The scene next described by Felix definitely seems like an episode from a novel of the period about a noble avenger.

  Felix went over to the rock crystal crucifix.

  ‘I like this Cross very much.’

  ‘I kind of like the cabinet, it’s more interesting.’ And Rasputin opened the cabinet with the maze again.