by Cook, Andrew
Building on the fault lines of the haphazard and incomplete contemporary investigations, Purishkevich, Yusupov and Lazovert published their own accounts with ulterior motives. Purishkevich was used to the adulation of the crowd, and in 1918, after the revolution, he wanted to regain popular attention. By 1927, Yusupov needed the money. He had also remained in touch with Oswald Rayner. Lazovert, too, used his short 1923 account to boost his own modest role in events and was no doubt well paid for his trouble.
The three stories are similar in key respects: the poison failed; Rasputin did not die of the first lethal gunshot wound; he got out of the house and ran across the yard;he was hit by two more bullets; he was kicked in the head and he was beaten frenziedly by Yusupov. In that order.
The details vary. The poison is crystals or shavings;it’s in either the chocolate cakes or the pink ones; the gang stay upstairs or don’t… Neither of them has Rasputin wearing a blue embroidered silk smock – in both accounts it is white, and embroidered. It is odd that a scene that would have been imprinted on most minds was wrong in this respect. They both get the colour of the cord right.
The major difference between the accounts is the key protagonist. The eager reader of Purishkevich finds that he was the dynamic one: some kind of supernatural force flooded through him and he saved the day by shooting Rasputin. In Yusupov’s story, he tries to be the hero, but ends up the victim of Rasputin’s superhuman powers. Lazovert, too, casts himself in a central, proactive role.
Yusupov does not claim to have delivered the final shot and Purishkevich’s story does not match the forensic evidence. Many at the time expected Dmitri Pavlovich to take the blame. Within thirty-six hours it became apparent that he was not going to admit a thing. Lazovert and Sukhotin are equally improbable candidates. So who did kill Rasputin?
He was strong and healthy, and harder to kill than they had expected. The poison failed. He was stabbed with a sword and left for dead. He escaped when the others were upstairs and they heard him opening the door. One of the party fired at him through the window, maybe another went out into the yard to have a look. Further firing was impossible. Reinforcements arrived.
As soon as the police had gone away, they dragged him back into the house. They did not want to shoot him because of the police. They tied him up and waited for him to die before taking him out to the Petrovski Bridge. But he did not die.
In desperation, two of them shot him outside in the yard. As they were carrying him out to the car, a third man checked, found that he still had a pulse, and put a bullet through his brain.
With the exception of Oswald Rayner’s involvement with the production of Yusupov’s Rasputin book in 1927, no one else in British circles wrote an account about Rasputin’s murder. Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir George Buchanan wrote memoirs which included brief references to background events. Albert Stopford’s diary likewise gives a commentator’s account rather than a participant’s.
However, a rich seam of oral history has survived through the children and grandchildren of the British officers who were involved in the planning of Rasputin’s death. The family of William Compton, the chauffeur, have recollections of stories about his time in Petrograd, the terrible conditions, the Red Cross Hospital and the murder of Rasputin. According to Compton, it was ‘a little known fact’that Rasputin had been shot not by a Russian but by ‘an Englishman’ whom he had known in Russia.28 He said nothing more about the man other than that he was a lawyer and was from the same part of the country as Compton himself. This story was never taken seriously by Compton’s family, who assumed that it was nothing more than a tale the old man told to add some colour to an otherwise uneventful and bleak period in his life.
According to the Compton family, William had been born not far from Birmingham. A search for his birth records reveals that he was born on 27 January 1881 in Kempsey, Worcestershire, some ten miles from where Oswald Rayner had been born and brought up.29 On all official documents, right up to his death in 1961, Rayner described himself as a ‘Barrister at Law’.30 He had not only confided in his cousin, Rose Jones, that he had been at the Yusupov Palace when the murder took place, but he also showed close members of the family a bullet which he claimed he had acquired from the murder scene.31 We also know that Rayner carried a .455 Webley service revolver, which, according to Professor Derrick Pounder, is the handgun that corresponds to the bullet that caused the fatal forehead wound.
The mysterious Englishman that the Tsar referred to during his conversation with Sir George Buchanan, whom he suspected of involvement in the murder, was certainly not Sir Samuel Hoare, who, as we have already seen, was not a college contemporary of Yusupov. Rayner was clearly the man whose identity Buchanan so carefully shielded when he came to relate the story in his memoirs.
On the afternoon following the murder, Yusupov met Rayner at the palace of his father-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.32 Together they had dinner with Irina’s three elder brothers, Prince Andrew, Prince Fyodor and Prince Nikita, their tutor Mr Stuart and Mlle Evreinova, a lady-in-waiting to Irina’s mother. Following the meal, Rayner, Yusupov, his three brothers-in-law and Mr Stuart took a car to the railway station in order to catch the nine o’clock train to the Crimea. At the station they found a large force of Palace Police on the steps of the main entrance. On getting out of the car, Yusupov was informed by a colonel that on the orders of the Tsarina he was forbidden to leave Petrograd and was to be placed under house arrest. Prince Nikita decided to proceed to the Crimea with Mr Stuart. Everyone else got back into the car and returned to the palace. Rayner, we are told, remained there with Yusupov. Although his escape had been foiled, Yusupov would survive to tell his story. After a brief appearance in the limelight of Yusupov’s book, Rayner melted back into the milieu as unobtrusively as he had made his entrance.
TWELVE
AFTERMATH
Out of the chaos, an aim was achieved: Rasputin died. Nobody was arrested for the crime and no charges were ever brought. When the Tsar realised the extent of his own family’s involvement, the investigations were effectively closed. Despite Dmitri Pavlovich’s request to be tried before a courtmartial, Nicholas decided to exile Yusupov to his Rakitnoe estate near Kursk and exile Dmitri Pavlovich to Persia. No action was taken against anyone else allegedly involved in the murder. A court-martial would have made Dmitri a hero and given him a public platform. Nicholas’s response was therefore a reluctantly practical one while at the same time typically weak and lenient.
Rasputin’s body did not lie in peace for very long. In March 1917, a group of soldiers guarding the palace apparently dug up the body, soaked it in petrol and set fire to it in a nearby forest. This story is not wholly substantiated, however, and other evidence suggests that the body was exhumed on the orders of Alexander Kerenski and taken away to be secretly cremated.1
Many Rasputin biographers have, over the years, maintained that he foresaw his own death, alluding to a letter Rasputin apparently wrote to the Tsar, the contents of which Simanovich made public.
Russian Tsar! I have a presentiment that I shall leave this world by 1st January. If I am killed by hired assassins, then you Tsar will have no one to fear. Remain on your throne and rule. But if the murder is carried out by your own kinsmen, then not one member of your family will survive more than two years.2
However, the original copy of this letter in Rasputin’s own handwriting has never been found (if indeed it ever existed). Those who have, in recent years, made a study of Rasputin’s writings have concluded that the construction of the prose has no similarity with Rasputin’s own uneducated but highly poetic written style and grammatical conventions.3
The language in the passage bears all the hallmarks of Simanovich himself, who published it after the execution of the Tsar and his family, adding further to the myths surrounding Rasputin.
Authentic or not, within months of Rasputin’s murder, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over 300 years did indeed fall. On 3 Marc
h 1917, the Putilov workforce in Petrograd went on strike, and this developed into a general strike on 9 March. On the night of 11 March, units of the troops that had been mobilised by the Tsar allied themselves with the strikers. On 15 March, Nicholas, under pressure from all sides, abdicated. On the day after the abdication, the Executive Committee of the fourth Duma formed a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. It proclaimed civil rights, made a commitment to convene a constituent assembly and declared its intention to continue the war against Germany.
This was not the course of events that Dmitri Pavlovich, Yusupov, Purishkevich and the others associated with the plot had envisaged or predicted. They had hoped that the Tsar would somehow exile his wife and lead Russia to victory with a united Duma behind him. Instead, the Tsar was banished, and the Tsarina with him, and the Duma proved incapable of taking control.
The Provisional Government kept Russia in the war on the Allied side until October 1917, when the Bolshevik coup took place. In this sense, time had worked in the Allies’ favour, as the Americans had entered the war in April and were finally beginning to make their mark. Initially, their standing army was tiny and it took nearly a year for them to recruit and train a large army. By the time Lenin declared an armistice in December 1917, American soldiers were flooding onto the Western Front. By March 1918, when Russia finally signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, a million Americans were in the field.
The peace treaty Germany forced on Lenin was a much harsher one than that offered to the Tsar in the summer of 1916. By this time, however, it was too late to prevent an Allied victory in the west, although the Germans did launch a massive last-ditch offensive on 21 March 1918 in a desperate attempt to score a decisive victory. Although the offensive achieved spectacular results early on, it gradually lost momentum, finally succumbing to an Allied counter-attack in July.
In a very real sense, being exiled probably saved the lives of Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich. Dmitri’s father, like the Tsar and his family, was shot by the Bolsheviks. Those who survived headed south to Ukraine, which was still nominally in the hands of anti-Bolshevik forces now battling Lenin’s new government in a fierce civil war. By early 1919, however, the Bolsheviks were advancing on the Crimea. In London, George V, no doubt regretting his earlier refusal to grant the Tsar and his family asylum in England, resolved to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie. The battleship HMS Marlborough was therefore despatched in March 1919 to the Black Sea to take Marie and other surviving members of the Romanov family to safety. The ship’s Captain, C.D. Johnson, carried with him a letter from George’s mother, Queen Alexandra, imploring her sister to place herself under Captain Johnson’s protection. In scenes that must have resembled the departure of Noah’s Ark, Dowager Empress Marie, Grand Duchess Xenia, her sons Princes Andrew, Fyodor and Nikita, Grand Duke Nicholas, Grand Duke Peter, Felix and Irina Yusupov were among those who hastily boarded the Marlborough from a small cove on the Crimean coast at Koreiz on 7 April 1919. According to Rayner’s family, he was present at Koreiz and accompanied Yusupov,4 who was carrying as much of the family treasure as he could onto the ship.
John Scale, on the other hand, barely escaped in the clothes he was wearing following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. He eventually made his way back to London, where he reported to C at SIS Headquarters at Whitehall Court. C had decided to appoint him Head of the ST Station in Stockholm, with the task of covertly sending a new cadre of British agents into Russia to report back on Bolshevik policy and intentions. On 15 March 1918, Scale, now known as ST0, introduced C to one Sidney Reilly, who would later find fame as the ‘Ace of Spies’. Reilly became agent ST1. Scale recruited some thirty other ST agents, who included Oswald Rayner, Sir Paul Dukes, Arthur Ransome,5 and Augustus Agar.6 He stood down from intelligence work in 1922 due to ill health and finally retired from the army in May 1927. However, right up to his death in 19497 he kept in close touch with many of his former agents. Scale’s daughters remember in particular the numerous visits Sir Paul Dukes made to their home in the inter-war years. When Felix Yusupov was in desperate financial straits in the early 1930s, it was Dukes who went out to France and saved him from ruin.8 At whose behest Dukes performed this service is unknown.
Yusupov’s finances were ultimately rescued by a stroke of good fortune. In 1932, MGM produced a big-budget epic, Rasputin and the Empress, starring John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, which was released in Britain the following year under the title Rasputin, the Mad Monk. While characters already dead were portrayed under their real names, others central to the plot who were still very much alive were given fictional names. For example, Rasputin’s assassin is named Prince Chegodiev, and the character most resembling that of Princess Irina Yusupova is called Princess Natasha. In March 1933, Irina was introduced to American lawyer Fanny Holtzman, who was convinced that MGM had committed libel against her. In Holtzman’s view, the film contained ‘pictures and words which were understood to mean that Princess Natasha had been seduced by Rasputin’.9
In a landmark legal case at the High Court in London, which began on 28 February 1934, the Yusupovs’ contention that Princess Natasha was indeed Princess Irina, who had, by implication, been libelled by MGM, was upheld by the jury.10 Irina was awarded £25,000 and later received a further £75,000 from MGM in settlement of other actions the Yusupovs had initiated in the USA and against the film’s distributors.
Further drama entered the Yusupovs’lives in 1940, when the German army swept through France. German officers apparently tracked them down to their Sarcells villa and informed them that they could return to Paris, where they would be lodged in a mansion of their choosing. In return, they would be asked to act as official hosts for important guests, throwing parties and dinners. To their credit, the Yusupovs rejected the offer. However, in 1941 they received a more profound offer, when Hitler dispatched his personal envoy to meet them.11 Following the German invasion of Russia, the Nazis were clearly thinking about the possibility of an imperial puppet regime in a defeated Russia, and it was suggested to Yusupov by the envoy that he might be a suitable candidate for the throne. Again, he tactfully declined by suggesting that there were surviving members of the Romanov family in Paris the Germans could approach. Indeed, he would gladly provide their names and addresses if required.12
Yusupov was to die in Paris in September 1967, aged eighty, far outliving the other four declared assassins. Purishkevich had died of typhus in 1920 while fleeing from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Sergei Sukhotin died in Paris in June 1939,13 while Dmitri Pavlovich died of kidney disease in Davos, Switzerland in September 1942. Following his exile in Persia, Dmitri was given a commission in the British Army and served as a captain with the British Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. Most intriguingly of all, Stanislaus Lazovert, according to his son, apparently retracted his claim to have put poison in the cakes and wine on his death bed.14 He also died in Paris in 1934.
In being considered a possible collaborator by the Nazis, Yusupov was unknowingly in the same company as former Head of the British Intelligence Mission Sir Samuel Hoare. Returning to active politics after the war, Hoare became Secretary of State for Air under Stanley Baldwin and Secretary of State for India in Ramsey MacDonald’s national government. He reached the high-water mark of his career in June 1935, when Baldwin appointed him Foreign Secretary. Later that year, Hoare joined with Pierre Laval, the French Prime Minister, in an effort to resolve the crisis created by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. A secret agreement, known as the Hoare-Laval Pact, proposed that Italy would receive two-thirds of the territory it conquered as well as permission to enlarge the existing colonies in East Africa. In return, Ethiopia was to receive a narrow strip of territory and access to the sea. Details of the pact were leaked to the press on 19 December 1935. The scheme was widely denounced as appeasement of Italian aggression. Baldwin’s cabinet rejected the plan and Hoare was forced to resign.
Hoare returned to the government as First
Lord of the Admiralty in June 1936. His appeasement views were popular with Neville Chamberlain, and in 1937 he was promoted to Home Secretary. On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the War Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Hoare was one of a number of ministers weeded out for their pro-appeasement views. In the opinion of Sir Alexander Cadogan, at that time Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, Hoare was an obvious candidate to head a puppet government in the event of a German occupation of Britain.15 ‘He’ll be the Quisling of England’, Cadogan confided in his diary shortly after Hoare’s removal from the cabinet.16 In October 2004, a newly released MI5 file on Albrecht Haushofer, described by the Service as ‘The greatest expert in Germany on the British Empire’, shed new light on Cadogan’s suspicions. In a 1941 memo to Hitler entitled ‘English Connections and the Possibility of their Employment’, Haushofer listed a number of ‘younger Conservatives’ who, he believed, would collaborate – the names included the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Astor, Sir Samuel Hoare and R. A. B. Butler.17
Shortly after Rasputin’s murder, it seems clear that London was actively considering replacing Hoare as Head of the British Intelligence Mission. On 29 January 1917 he cabled London: