Rasputin’s dramatic death has, to a great degree, obscured other questions about his life. Why, for example, does the story about a peasant from a distant Siberian village becoming the all-powerful favourite of the last Russian Emperor excite us more than almost any other episode in Russian history? Why are there more lies and concealment than truth in the story of his murder? What is hidden under the contradictions of his life that have been woven from the real facts, rumours, mysticism, myths and pure invention? Was Rasputin a victim or an immoral charlatan? An evil demon that brought down the royal family, or somebody who could have been its saviour?
These were some of the questions foremost in my mind when I set out to reinvestigate the circumstances behind his death. The results of that search eventually led to the commissioning of the BBC Timewatch film Who Killed Rasputin?, for which I acted as Historical Consultant, and ultimately to the publication of this book, which draws on significant new discoveries made since the film was broadcast.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Stephen Alley — Member of the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd.
Alexander Balk — Governor of Petrograd.
Sir George Buchanan — British Ambassador to Petrograd.
Byzhinski — Prince Yusupov’s butler.
Mansfield Cumming — Known as ‘C’, Head of MI1c, the British Secret Service.
Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna — Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s surrogate mother.
David Lloyd George — Britain’s Secretary of State for War after Kitchener’s death in June 1916.
Maria (Mounya) Golovina — Mutual friend of Rasputin and Prince Yusupov.
Sir Samuel Hoare — Head of the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd.
Bishop Iliodor — See Sergei Trufanov.
Lord Kitchener — Britain’s Secretary of State for War 1914–16.
Vera Koralli — Celebrated Russian ballerina and mistress of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.
Professor Kossorotov — Russian pathologist who undertook the original post mortem of Rasputin’s body.
Stanislaus Lazovert — The medical doctor of Purish-kevich’s military detachment, recruited by Purishkevich to drive on the night of Rasputin’s murder.
Robert H. Bruce Lockhart — British consular officer in Moscow.
A.A. Makarov — Minister of Justice, formerly Minister of the Interior.
Ivan Manasevich Manuilov — Jewish journalist, spy and double agent, ‘secretary’ to Rasputin.
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich — Princess Irina Yusupova’s father and Prince Yusupov’s father-in-law. Also a relative of Dmitri Pavlovich.
Ivan Nefedov — Prince Yusupov’s batman.
Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaivich — Tsar Nicholas’s uncle and Supreme Commander of the Russian Armies until relieved of his post.
Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich — Tsar Nicholas’s second cousin and one-time protégé; friend of Prince Yusupov who was present at the murder of Rasputin.
Lt-Col. Popel — Officer of the Detached Gendarme Corps and General Popov’s right-hand man.
General Popov — Commander-in-Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes and chief investigator of Rasputin’s disappearance.
Alexander Protopopov — Russian Minister of the Interior.
Vladimir Purishkevich — Monarchist and well-known Member of the Duma. An enemy of Rasputin and present at his murder.
Maria Rasputina — Rasputin’s elder daughter.
Varvara Rasputina — Rasputin’s younger daughter.
Oswald Rayner — Member of the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd.
Mikhail Rodzyanko — Speaker of the Third and Fourth Dumas.
John Scale — Member of the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd.
Aron Simanovich — Rasputin’s close friend, secretary and agent.
Hon. Albert Stopford — British businessman and diplomat.
Sergei Sukhotin — Military lieutenant and friend of Yusupov. Present on the night of the murder.
Sergei Trufanov — Also known as Bishop Iliodor. Notorious Orthodox preacher, anti-Semite and former friend of Rasputin who stole letters from the monk’s home in Siberia.
Alexis Vasiliev — Chief of Police in Petrograd.
Anna Vyrubova — Lady-in-waiting and close friend of the Tsarina.
Robert Wilton — The Times’s correspondent in Petrograd at the time of the murder.
Grand Duchess Xenia — Princess Irina Yusupova’s mother and Prince Yusupov’s mother-in-law.
Prince Felix Yusupov — Also Count Sumarokov-Elston, Russian aristocrat and self-confessed assassin of Rasputin.
Princess Irina Yusupova — Prince Yusupov’s wife.
ONE
MANHUNT
Gorokhovaya Street was a sober sort of place – indeed, a household name for high-minded respectability because of its police station; the regulation coat worn by plainclothes men was popularly called a gorokhovayo.1 It was only a mile from the private palaces and vast public spaces of the fashionable centre of Petrograd (Russia’s capital city St Petersburg, until the war made German-sounding names anathema). If you lived there you were prosperous enough. The residential block at number 64, a warren of high-ceilinged apartments with a huge carriage entrance, was well supplied with heat and light, which was more than could be said for a lot of dwellings in Petrograd in the freezing winter of 1916. The war at this stage had left even the middle classes short of essential supplies and most heads of household were struggling to provide their families with coal, lamp oil, food and clothing.
The head of the household at Apartment 20, 64 Gorokhovaya Street was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the tall, bearded spiritual advisor to Her Majesty the Tsarina, and he was a good provider. The flat was solidly furnished and even had a telephone. Rasputin himself had a motor car at his command. Wherever he went he was received with awe, and his supporters (though not his opponents) were convinced that he was a starets or holy man. Early on this Saturday morning, 17 December 1916, with the city still dark and blanketed with snow, the maid Katya Petyorkina was already up, had lit the lamps and was busying herself with the stove and the samovar when somebody knocked at the door.
The two visitors were officers of the Okhrana, the political police. The Okhrana was just one of nine separate forces working for the Tsar through Minister of the Interior Alexander Protopopov and Chief of Police Alexis Vasiliev, but it was the most feared. The Tsar, and the Tsarina in particular, insisted that the starets be protected, for they clung to him for emotional support as they struggled with their young son’s bouts of ill-ness. The boy had haemophilia, an incurable disease inherited through the female line by some of the descendants of Britain’s Queen Victoria. The Tsarina, who was Victoria’s granddaughter, had acted as a carrier of the disease, and now lived in superstitious dread that if anything befell Rasputin her son’s life would be at risk.
All the same, Katya Petyorkina, Rasputin’s two teenage daughters, Maria and Varvara, and his niece Anya who also lived in the apartment, knew they should mind what they said around these people. Everything got back to the Tsar in the end and there were things he was better off not knowing.