These two objects [presumably the bracelet and the cross] and the blue silk flowers [flowered smock] and white shirt worn by the deceased were reclaimed by the Imperial Palace on 28th December. After medical/legal examination and autopsy, the body of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin was transported to the chapel of Tchesma Hospital.13
In one account, the Tsarina and Vyrubova arrived in a carriage early on Wednesday morning, disguised as nurses, to claim the body. In another they turned up at the almshouse in the middle of the autopsy and demanded to see it. On being told that this was impossible, they asked for the clothes. It is said that ‘a couple of days later’ a surgeon performing a routine operation on the Tsarevich’s knee (at Tsarskoye Selo) saw Rasputin’s blue silk shirt embroidered with yellow flowers under the operating table.14 Yet according to the paragraph at the end of the post mortem, it would be a week before the shirt – a gift from the Empress – was taken to Tsarskoye Selo.
As Kossorotov began his grisly work that Tuesday, Wickham Steed, the Foreign Editor of the Times, was scratching his head over a wire dated Petrograd, 1 January. It was both alarming and puzzling. It began:
The body of Rasputin was recovered this morning by divers from the bottom of an ice-hole in the Neva near Petrovski Bridge, which crosses one of the lesser arms of the river north of the city.
According to this morning’s newspapers, the tragedy to which this discovery points appears to have been enacted on Saturday morning at the Yusupov Palace on the Moika canal. But none of the names of participants is mentioned.
Meaning murder. Prince Yusupov had been a well-known figure in London society before he married. There were cuttings… This was obviously big news, too big to spike, but it was just as obviously chapter two of a story. Where on earth was chapter one? Something was missing. By the time Steed had rummaged for anything from Petrograd correspondent Wilton that might have come in earlier and slipped behind the desk, it was the middle of the night in Russia. In London, the Times must also be put to bed, so late on Tuesday under the headlines RASPUTIN DEAD – BODY RECOVERED IN THE NEVA – SUSPICION OF MURDER, Steed composed the following lead-in, to appear in italics:
Telegrams received from Petrograd allege that the notorious monk Rasputin, whose body has just been recovered from the Neva, was murdered. The messages so far to hand from our Petrograd Correspondent make no direct reference to this and other material points. His narrative must therefore be regarded as still incomplete.15
Wilton’s story appeared below this paragraph on Wednesday. His wire of Saturday had never arrived. He received a baffled enquiry from London that Tuesday, wrote a full report of the Rasputin affair and sent it back with the only explanation for the lost message that he could think of.
I send you my notes of the Rasputin affair written on the day after he was killed. [Sunday 31 December.] A full message was cabled, but probably never reached you… any delay in messages sent from here is due entirely to the censorship which invariably gives preference to Agency telegrams.
His notes show that he had been ahead of all the news agencies in that he saw the Police Report on Sunday, just as Stopford did. Wilton was well connected in Petrograd, and in a position to see what had been going on since he worked out of an office in Gorokhovaya Street.
For a Head of the British Intelligence Mission, Hoare was comparatively ill-informed. He knew Purishkevich, and had been told well in advance by the man himself that there was to be an attempt to ‘liquidate the affair of Rasputin’. He had, however, taken no notice at all, thinking Purishkevich’s tone ‘so casual that I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying rather than an expression of a definitely thought out plan’. Now, presumably cursing his own lack of judgement, he kept quiet about Purishkevich’s warning in his despatches to London.16 Stopford did not confide in him. Nor, for reasons we shall discover later, did certain members of his own team.
Stopford wrote on Tuesday morning to the Marchioness of Ripon, a society hostess of his own age.17 She was a remarkable woman; Prince Yusupov had been a great friend of hers, despite the difference in their ages, in London before the war, when she had been responsible for bringing Diaghilev and Nijinskis to London. Stopford, knowing that she could be relied upon to pass information to people in government who mattered, sent regular letters to her or her daughter Lady Juliet Duff, a Russophile and fluent Russian speaker who also knew Yusupov well.18
I have got such awful rheumatism in both arms and both hands I can hardly hold a pen…
All the Imperial Family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest, for even the Emperor has not the right to arrest his family. It has never been done since Peter the Great had his son Alexei Petrovich arrested, and it was for threatening to arrest the Tsarevich (Alexander I) that the Emperor Paul was killed.19
In England people told each other that those Russians were quite mad. Things had changed in the last century or so, and it seemed unlikely that any present-day Romanovs would actually kill the Tsar. On the other hand, if Felix Yusupov, of all people, could murder that ghastly monk, who knew what was possible?
Rasputin was buried in a quiet private ceremony at Tsarskoye Selo at half-past eight in the morning of Wednesday 21 December, less than forty-eight hours after his body was found. Eyewitness accounts of the funeral are in the files of the Extraordinary Commission set up by the Provisional Government six months later to examine the circumstances of Rasputin’s death. A grave had been dug beneath the nave of a still unfinished church, endowed by Anna Vyrubova, at Tsarskoye Selo. The mourners were Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, the four royal daughters and the Tsarevich, Vyrubova, Lili Dehn the actress, who was also a close friend of the Tsarina, and the nurse Akilina Laptinskaya. She had been close to Rasputin for a decade, and had brought the body in a car overnight from the Tchesma Infirmary. Regarding them from a respectful distance were the usual unnoticed smattering of retainers and personal maids, the architect, another priest, and the man in charge of construction. Numerous Okhrana officers lurked in the surrounding woods. Colonel Loman, whose wife and daughter were followers of Rasputin but whose own devotion to the dead mystic was in doubt, watched from behind a bush.
The metal casket was lowered into the grave. An icy church smelling of fresh-sawn planks and builders’ sand was a bizarre resting place for a person who might have expected to take his leave in a candle-lit cathedral amid clouds of incense, weeping women and priests intoning a doleful lament. But the tenminute service was conducted by Father Vasiliev, the imperial family’s confessor, specially brought from Petrograd, and by nine o’clock the mourners were turning away. When they had gone, Okhrana men emerged from the woods and shovelled earth over the coffin.
News of the funeral did not immediately reach Petrograd. The following Saturday 24 December, 6 January in the British calendar, Albert Stopford wrote again to Lady Ripon:
Here we are all expecting anything may happen. I won’t write you all the gossip, mostly founded on lies, some on antiquated truths. Dmitri Pavlovich and Felix are kept under arrest, and when the Grand Duke Paul [Dmitri’s father] asked on Monday last for his son to be allowed to come and stay in his palace at Tsarskoye Selo the Emperor replied: ‘The Empress cannot allow it for the present’!