Rasputin condemned himself. The plan was to poison him, lacing cakes and drink with cyanide potassium provided by Dr. Lazovert. The bait they offered Rasputin was Yusupov’s wife Irina — she was eager to meet him, he was told; in truth, she had gone off to the Crimea for Christmas.
A basement was hurriedly converted into a dining room. Yusupov collected Rasputin from his apartment on Gorokhovaya Street on Friday evening, December 16, and drove him to the Moika. Taking him into the basement dining room he told Rasputin that Irina would join him as soon as she could get rid of her last guests upstairs; to keep up the pretence of a party, the other plotters were talking noisily in the room above and playing ‘Yankee Doodle’ on a gramophone.14
Yusupov handed out cakes, which Rasputin devoured with obvious relish, while drinking glass after glass of poisoned wine, firstly Crimean then Madeira. To Yusupov’s horrified amazement, neither the cakes nor the wine had any apparent effect. Two hours after his arrival, Rasputin appeared no worse than before. Making an excuse that he wanted Irina to come down, Yusupov hurried frantically upstairs to report that the poison had failed entirely. Aghast, the plotters swiftly decided that the only alternative now was to shoot him. Dimitri offered to do it, but when Yusupov insisted that this was his task, he handed him his revolver.15
Yusupov went back downstairs, gave Rasputin another glass of Madeira and, after suggesting that they look closely at a crucifix on a cabinet, shot him through the chest. Rasputin gave ‘a wild scream’ and crumpled onto the bearskin rug. When the others rushed down at the sound of the shot, they found Rasputin lying on his back, his blouse bloodstained, and his face twitching. In a moment he was motionless; the doctor examined him and pronounced him dead.
The plotters went back upstairs, leaving the body in the basement. Dimitri, the doctor and the captain then drove off to Gorokhovaya Street, the captain in Rasputin’s overcoat and cap, so as to pretend that Rasputin had returned home safely. Dimitri then went to collect his closed car in which the body was to be taken away to be dumped in the frozen Neva. It was reasoned that the corpse, weighted down with chains, would stay hidden under the ice until the spring thaw. It would be at least three months before he could possibly be found.
While Yusupov and Purishkevich were waiting for Dimitri to return, Yusupov went back to the basement to check on the body. As he bent over him he was horrified to see an eye open, and then with a violent effort the ‘dead man’ leapt to his feet and grabbed at Yusupov, his hands reaching out to strangle him. Yusupov desperately struggled to free himself, then rushed upstairs to Purishkevich.
The two men came back just in time to see Rasputin, ‘gasping and roaring like a wounded animal’,16 stumbling out through a side door in the basement to the courtyard outside. Running after him, Purishkevich fired two shots, and then two more. The fleeing Rasputin collapsed into the snow. This time he must be dead. Although he had clearly survived the first bullet, he could not survive four more.
However, the shots had been heard, and a curious policeman arrived to find out the cause. Yusupov stood so that he could not see the body and told the policeman that there had been some ‘horseplay’ and a dog had been shot. The man went away, but returned after his superiors queried his explanation. This time, Purishkevich confronted him and boldly told him what had actually happened, but adding that ‘if you love your country and your Tsar, you will keep your mouth shut’.17
The man nodded, as if in promise, turned and went away. After he had gone, Dimitri and the others returned. Desperate to get rid of the body, they bundled it into Dimitri’s car, and raced off through the dark, early-morning streets to Petrovsky Island where they realised that in their haste they had forgotten the chains intended to weigh down the body. It was too late to do anything about that. At a bridge they took the body and threw it into the icy Neva below.
Two days later, on Monday December 19, searching police found the corpse, visible just below the ice, with one arm outstretched. A post-mortem examination found there was water in his lungs, suggesting that he was still alive when he was thrown into the river.18 Nevertheless, poisoned, shot or drowned, it came to the same thing. The hated Rasputin was no more.
THERE was never any chance that the identity of those involved in the murder would remain unknown. The policeman who had spoken to Purishkevich filed a full report; two servants had seen the body in the courtyard; and at Tsarskoe Selo they knew that Rasputin was going to the Yusupov palace that Friday evening, because he had announced it. By early Saturday evening, hardly more than twelve hours after his body was dumped in the Neva, Petrograd was alive with rumours of his death — at seven p.m. the French ambassador Paléologue was noting the details of it all.19
It was about that time that Dimitri went to the Michael Theatre, taking his place in a box as if nothing had happened. He would not be there long, fleeing to ‘escape the ovation of the audience.’ And when he got back to his palace on the Nevsky Prospekt it was to find ‘people kneeling in prayer’; he had become so much a hero that in churches across the country candles were being lit in his honour before icons of St. Dimitri.
This was not what he and Yusupov had intended. The murder planned to be kept secret for months had become public knowledge even before the discovery of the body. Yusupov, who had intended to go off to the Crimea to the house just vacated by Michael and Natasha, was ordered to stay in the capital; next day at lunchtime, Dimitri, who was about to leave to spend Christmas with Michael and Natasha at Brasova, found himself ‘under house arrest’. In both instances the order came from the Empress — as ever, assuming powers she did not properly have. Yusupov later claimed that Alexandra’s first instinct was to have Dimitri shot.20
Dimitri, in fact, was at risk of being killed in a revenge attack at his palace on the Nevsky Prospekt. At the beginning of the war he had given it over and it was now the Anglo-Russian hospital, staffed by British doctors and nurses; however he maintained an apartment on an upstairs floor. While he was there, a gang of armed men, probably sent by the interior minister Protopopov, arrived to hunt him down — but went away after the British staff convinced them that Dimitri was not in the building. Troops were then sent to guard the palace from any further threats.21
Rasputin was buried in near-secrecy at Tsarskoe Selo on Friday, December 23, on a plot of land owned by Alexandra’s devoted companion Anna Vyrubova, four days after his corpse was pulled from the Neva, and with a grief-stricken Alexandra pinning a farewell note to his body. 22
Afterwards the punishment Nicholas decreed for Dimitri was his immediate exile to Kasvin, on the Persian front. Yusupov was banished to his estate in Kursk. However, Purishkevich was deemed too powerful and escaped punishment entirely, as did the others in consequence.23
WAITING for Dimitri at Brasova, Michael and Natasha did not know that he had been arrested until the arrival from Petrograd of other guests joining them for Christmas. Michael had written in his diary on the day Rasputin’s body was found that ‘we read in the papers that Grigory Rasputin was assassinated in Petrograd’,24 though there were no details, and thereafter the newspapers were banned from reporting more. However, when their guests and staff arrived, they brought them all the rumours from the capital.