Had he known this, the Hon. Albert Stopford would have drawn comfort from the intelligence. As it was, that Sunday he was out picking up the gen as best he could. He had heard at the embassy that Prince Yusupov had been at the Anglo-Russian Hospital that afternoon, having a fish-bone removed. Stopford, who knew both Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix Yusupov well, had until now assumed that the wanted Prince was serenely en route to the Crimea. The Yusupov Palace had been assuring callers that Prince Felix had gone there. The second, and much more worrying, piece of news came from his friend the Grand Duchess Vladimir, to whom, with Sir George’s permission, he had shown the Police Report. The Grand Duchess told him that Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had been placed under house arrest.:
…an unheard-of thing, for since the murder of the Emperor Paul (1801) no grand Duke has ever been put under arrest on a grave charge, and on that occasion the Emperor Paul lost his life for only threatening it.20
This was bad enough. But later that evening she had heard from Dmitri Pavlovich himself that it was the Empress who had ordered him to be detained. In other words, the Tsarina had not acted within her rights, yet her orders had been carried out. What the British most feared was a palace coup engineered by the Tsarina; and here, de facto, was the first sign of it.
Over dinner with the Grand Duchess, Stopford discovered that Dmitri Pavlovich had spoken to the Grand Duchess Vladimir and sworn that he had left Yusupov’s party at four o’clock on Saturday morning and was innocent.
We were all petrified by the Grand Duke Dmitri’s denying all knowledge of the affair, and saying that, although he had been to supper there, he had left before four.
He was ‘petrified’. The implication is that Dmitri had been expected to take the rap. Nobody else would do, because nobody else was fully a Romanov, with a cast-iron excuse to get away with murder. If Dmitri refused to take blame, then Yusupov might be accused and put on trial for his life. Yusupov’s position was by no means as secure as Dmitri’s and he knew it; with the prospect of a firing squad in sight, he would crack.
And if he did, what might he reveal?
But maybe Dmitri was just being careful. After all, telephones were not secure. Comforting himself with this thought, Stopford walked rapidly to the embassy rather than ring with the news.
There were lights on the Embassy staircase, so I asked if I could see Lady Georgina, and was shown up to the Ambassador’s bedroom; he was just going to undress. I told him of the Grand Duke Dmitri’s absolute denial of any share in the murder – which, after all, is only natural, though he swore it on his own icon. If all the conspirators acknowledged their complicity on the telephone to their friends and relations it might be disastrous to the actual perpetrator or to the whole lot.
I found the Ambassador very much perturbed and tired. He walked up and down the room; I sat by the fire.21
Sir George Buchanan was not a young man. He cut a strange figure, and with his spare frame, red face, shock of white hair and droopy white moustache was a dream for caricaturists. Dmitri’s denial was clearly unexpected.
In Hoare’s flat across town, it was getting late, and he had to finish his report to get it typed up for despatch tomorrow.
The feeling in Petrograd is most remarkable. All classes speak and act as if some great weight had been taken from their shoulders. Servants, isvostchiks, working men, all freely discuss the event…
Servants and cab-drivers were the only people he would have had the opportunity to ask. Nonetheless, he felt compelled to finish on a predictive note, so he took a wild guess.
What effect it will have in Government circles is difficult to say. My own view is that it will lead to the immediate dismissal of Protopopov and of various directors of the Secret Police, whilst in the course of the next few weeks the most notorious of Rasputin’s clientele will gradually retire into private life. I would suggest for instance that careful attention should be paid to any changes that take place in the Department of the Interior and the Holy Synod, where Rasputin’s influence was always strongest.22
He turned out to be completely wrong.
In the embassy, having wished Buchanan goodnight, Stopford went to sit with Lady Georgina. At half-past ten she got a phone call from the Reuters man, Pierre Beringer, to say that the police of the district where Rasputin lived had ‘seen an automobile go to his house at about 4a.m., fetch him and take him away’. Yet there was still no proof that he was dead. Who knew what to believe?
THREE
BODY OF EVIDENCE
The scene is monochrome: the wide, snow-covered bridge, a heavy, whitish morning sky, a shuffle of black-clad onlookers, snow and ice stretching east to the gracious range of lemon-and-white Petrograd palaces, and west to dark woods with the Gulf of Finland far beyond.
Not far from the bank of the wide, frozen channel, policemen are looking for something.
Some say it was on the Sunday afternoon that somebody – a policeman? a diver? – identified a shape, the length of a man, beneath the glassy crust of the Little Neva. But the divers, who had been told to search under ice inches thick, hauled nothing from the river. They waited until the following morning, being ‘not at all anxious to work’1 because of the bitter cold; so while excitement, and in some cases fear, mounted in the city on that Sunday evening, only one fact seemed certain. The police now believed they were about to find Rasputin.
The body was retrieved at twenty to nine on the morning of Monday 19 December, or on Monday, New Year’s Day of 1917, London time. Or slightly later than twenty to nine, if you believe the dubious source that has Constable Andreev sweeping the ice at that time, discovering a frozen sable collar, reporting it, and the body being retrieved from under ice broken with crowbars.2
Planks were laid on the frozen surface. With the aid of grappling hooks, and watched by an unhelpful twitter of examining judges and journalists who had been herded to a vantage point on the bridge, men hauled the corpse, frozen stiff, out of the groaning, creaking ice and onto a raft of boards.
There was no mistaking the man. A fit-looking, bearded fellow in the loose blouse of a muzhik which had ridden up at the back, where his frigid flesh arched defensively away from the cold surface. A peasant with good hair and teeth in the prime of life, the legs below the thighs still tied in a sack. The face blackened and eyes and nose swollen, and the arms flung upward and bent at the elbows, the hands petrified as if clawing the air.
A police photographer shuffled gingerly along the planks and placed a ruler in shot before focusing carefully.
On the bridge, observers peered at the distant form, and glimpsed a flash of blue silk stained dark red. A sodden, frosted fur was heaped up next to it like a faithful dog.
An urgent telephone call brought out the bigwigs: the district Chief of Police, the Head of the Okhrana, an investigator from the Ministry of Justice called Zavadskis, General Popov and others.
The body would take a day to thaw out, so no immediate examination would be possible. But Petrograd could breathe again. Rasputin was well and truly dead.
The rigid form was loaded into the back of a motor lorry for despatch to the Vyborg Military Hospital. The journalists raced back to town to file their copy and the rest of the party drove to luncheon at a restaurant.