A consultation took place in the second-floor dining room. Grand Duke Dmitrii thought it best to let Rasputin go and try again some other time. But the others would not hear of it: Rasputin was not to be allowed to leave alive. Iusupov offered to shoot Rasputin. He borrowed Dmitrii’s revolver and returned to the ground floor, the weapon concealed behind his back. Rasputin looked thoroughly sick and was breathing heavily, but a sip of Madeira revived him and he suggested a visit to the gypsies—“with God in mind but mankind in the flesh.”119 Like many murderers, Iusupov had a dread of his victim’s eyes: being superstitious, he also feared that Rasputin could be as impervious to bullets as to poison. To ward off evil spirits, he invited Rasputin to inspect an elaborate seventeenth-century Italian crucifix made of rock crystal and silver which stood on a commode. As Rasputin bent over it and crossed himself, Iusupov fired into his side. With a wild scream, Rasputin fell to the floor.
The instant they heard the shot, the conspirators rushed down. They saw Iusupov bending over the body. In Iusupov’s recollection, Rasputin was dead, but Purishkevich recalled him writhing in agony and still breathing. Dmitrii, Dr. Lazavert, and the lieutenant departed in Purishkevich’s car to the Warsaw Railroad Terminal to dispose of Rasputin’s overcoat and rubber boots in the stove of his Red Cross train. Purishkevich and Iusupov, awaiting their return, relaxed in the study.
According to his memoirs, Iusupov was suddenly seized with an urge to see Rasputin’s body. Rasputin lay motionless, to all appearances dead. But on scrutinizing the victim’s face more closely, Iusupov noticed the left eye twitch and open, followed by the right: Rasputin stared at him with boundless hatred. As Iusupov watched in disbelief, frozen with fear, Rasputin struggled to his feet and seized him by the throat, screaming through foaming lips, “Felix, Felix!” Iusupov managed to tear himself away and run upstairs, where Purishkevich was enjoying a cigar. As Purishkevich recalled the scene:
Iusupov was literally faceless: his lovely large blue eyes were still larger and bulging. Half conscious, virtually oblivious of me, seemingly out of mind, he flung himself at the door leading to the main hall and ran to his parents’ apartment …120
Purishkevich seized his gun and rushed downstairs. Rasputin was gone. He found him in the garden, staggering through the snow toward the gate, bellowing, “Felix, Felix, I will tell everything to the Empress!” He fired at him but missed. He fired again and missed again. Rasputin was nearing the gate leading to the street. Steadying his arm, Purishkevich fired a third shot, which felled Rasputin. He shot him one more time and, bending over the lifeless body, kicked it in the temple.
A short time later a policeman who had been patrolling the neighborhood appeared and said that he had heard shots. Iusupov explained that a party had just broken up and some revelers had fired in the air. But as bad luck would have it, police officers at a nearby station at Moika 61 had also heard the sounds of shooting and soon more policemen appeared. Purishkevich, who never could control his tongue, blurted out: “We have killed Rasputin.”
The sight of Rasputin’s lifeless corpse in the snow drove Iusupov into a frenzy. He ran up to his study and brought out of the desk drawer the truncheon which Maklakov had given him. With it he beat the body like a man possessed, screaming, “Felix, Felix!” He then collapsed in a faint. On regaining consciousness, he ordered a servant to shoot one of the dogs to provide an alibi.
With the help of domestics, Rasputin’s body was tied and weighed down with iron chains. Loaded into Dmitrii’s car, it was driven to a remote and sparsely populated spot, the bridge linking Krestinskii and Petrovskii islands, and dumped into the Malaia Moika canal, along with his coat, which had not been destroyed because it was too large to fit into Purishkevich’s train stove. Dr. Lazavert, noting the victim’s rubber boots in the car, threw them into the canal, but he missed and one of them fell on the bridge, where its subsequent discovery led the police to Rasputin’s body.
The news of Rasputin’s death spread rapidly: the French Ambassador claims to have heard it before the day was out. The Empress received from Protopopov a fairly accurate account of what had happened, but as long as the corpse had not been found she continued to believe that Rasputin was hiding. On December 17, she wrote Nicholas: “I cannot & won’t believe He has been killed. God have mercy.” She drew some encouragement from Iusupov’s letter in which he flatly denied any knowledge of Rasputin’s where-abouts and indignantly rejected accusations of complicity in his murder.121 In the city, however, Rasputin’s death was taken for granted and joyously celebrated. Dmitrii, who attended the theater on the evening of December 17, had to leave because the public was about to give him an ovation.122 One contemporary says that the atmosphere in Petrograd resembled Easter, as the rich toasted with champagne and the poor with such drink as they could lay their hands on.123 “Sobake sobachaia smert’” (“For a dog, a dog’s death”), the French envoy heard the people say.*
Rasputin’s battered corpse, encased in ice, was dragged out on December 19. The autopsy revealed the victim had been dead from three bullet wounds by the time he struck water, which did not stop the spread of legends that the lungs were filled with water. No traces of poison were found.† At Alexandra’s wish, Rasputin was buried in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the palace grounds, on land belonging to Vyrubova, and a chapel constructed over it, although officially he was reported to have been taken for burial to Siberia. Immediately after the outbreak of the February Revolution the body was disinterred, burned, and the ashes scattered.124
It fell to General Voeikov, the Tsar’s aide, to communicate to him the news of Rasputin’s death. In his recollections, he described Nicholas’s reaction as follows:
From the very first report, about Rasputin’s mysterious disappearance, to the last, about the placement of his body in the chapel … I did not once observe signs of sorrow in His Majesty, but rather gathered the impression that he experienced a sense of relief.125
Iusupov claims having heard from people who traveled with Nicholas to Tsarskoe on December 18–19 that the Tsar was “in a happy mood such as he had not shown since the outbreak of the war.”126 In fact, in his diary for December 17–19 Nicholas made no reference to Rasputin, and noted that on the night of December 18–19 he had “slept soundly.”127
It so happened that Nicholas had planned, before Rasputin’s murder, to return home to be with the family for Christmas. The Okhrana now encouraged him to do so from fear that Rasputin could be the first victim of a terrorist campaign.128 Indeed, as will be discussed later, several conspiracies against Nicholas were in progress.
Rasputin’s death had the contrary result from the one the assassins had expected. They had intended to separate Nicholas from Alexandra and make him more amenable to Duma pressures. Instead, Rasputin’s murder drew him closer to his wife and confirmed the correctness of her belief that there could be no compromises with the opposition. He was revolted by the involvement of his nephew Dmitrii in a murder plot and disgusted by the cowardly lies of Iusupov. “I am ashamed before Russia,” he said, “that the hands of my relations should be smeared with the blood of this peasant.”129 After Dmitrii’s involvement became known, he ordered him to Persia to join the Russian armies there. He was appalled by the reaction of high society to this punishment. When sixteen grand dukes and duchesses pleaded with him to allow Dmitrii to remain in Russia, he responded: “No one is entitled to engage in murder.”130 The petition compromised in his eyes many of the grand dukes and led him to cut off relations with them. Some, among them Nikolai Mikhailovich, were asked to leave Petrograd. To ingratiate himself with the Imperial couple, Protopopov would show Nicholas and Alexandra congratulatory messages sent by prominent public figures to Purishkevich and Iusupov intercepted by the police: among them was one from Rodzianko’s wife.131 This evidence embittered Nicholas and reinforced his sense of isolation.*