The Rasputin File (76 page)

In any case, although Felix was evasive with the investigators about the number of his visits to Rasputin, he did talk about them in the plural: ‘During my last visits to Rasputin’. And Lili Dehn would testify in the File that according to the peasant, ‘the prince visited Rasputin often.’ And the tsarina would write to Nicky on 17 December, ‘Felix came often to him lately.’

Wishing to show the difficulties that they had overcome, the conspirators would afterwards refer to the fact that Rasputin ‘was guarded by plain-clothes agents from three organizations: the empress, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and spies from the banks’.

In fact, after Manasevich’s arrest and Komissarov’s departure, the only agents actually detailed to Rasputin were from the security branch. Moreover, after visiting Rasputin secretly at night, Felix would note with surprise that after midnight Rasputin wasn’t guarded by anyone.

That had been a secret order of Protopopov’s. As Beletsky testified, the pitiful minister would, ‘for especially important conversations, himself come to see Rasputin after 10 p.m.’ And not wishing to have any witnesses to those meetings with Rasputin, Protopopov, according to Beletsky, had ‘ordered the external surveillance agents removed after 10’. At the same time, he lied at Tsarskoe Selo and to Rasputin, assuring them that the security detail was still in place. But he said that after 10 p.m. ‘it was stationed not by the gate but across the street out of sight.’

The agents stationed right next to the apartment also left the building by midnight. Thus Felix learned that ‘after midnight Rasputin could be driven away without worrying about any agents at all.’ And the plan to assassinate Rasputin at night was based on that fact.

The Royal Lure

And so on 21 November Felix met with Purishkevich. Purishkevich recorded in his diary that ‘a young man in uniform [arrived] …I liked his appearance, in which an indescribable elegance and breeding and spiritual self-possession held sway. He was obviously a person of great will and restraint … qualities rarely characteristic of Russian people, especially those from the aristocratic milieu.’

Felix then set out the principal paradox to Purishkevich, who at the time was still intoxicated with his speech. ‘Your speech will not achieve the results you expect. Rasputin’s significance not only will not diminish, but on the contrary will grow stronger, thanks to his complete influence over Alexandra Fyodorovna, who effectively governs the entire state.’

Purishkevich was also sure of ‘Rasputin’s complete influence’. ‘What is to be done?’ he asked.

‘Remove Rasputin,’ said the tsar’s kinsman.

Purishkevich readily agreed to take part in the murder. And Felix suggested that he meet the other two participants.

‘On 22 November at 8 p.m. I was at the prince’s,’ Purishkevich recalled. There he met Lieutenant Sukhotin, a young officer of the Preobrazhensky regiment. And then ‘into the room came a handsome, stately young man in whom I recognized Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich.’ After that they introduced Purishkevich to the assassination plan.

Purishkevich described the plan in this way: ‘It became clear that Rasputin had long been seeking an occasion to meet a certain Countess N., a young Petrograd beauty who frequented the Yusupov home. But she was in the Crimea. On his last visit to Rasputin, Yusupov had told him that in a few days the countess would be coming back to Petrograd, where she would be spending several days, and…that he could introduce him to her at his home.’

And so the Countess N., a certain beauty then living in the Crimea, was supposed to become the decoy that would draw Rasputin in. Purishkevich’s memoir thus began with a necessary lie. For behind the identity ‘countess’ and ‘beauty’, he had decided to conceal Felix’s wife Irina. Yusupov himself would later write that Rasputin ‘had long wanted to meet my wife. Thinking that she was in Petrograd and my parents were in the Crimea, he agreed to come to my home.’ But the tsarina’s friend Lili Dehn gave an even more interesting account of the story of the ‘lure’.

The File, from the testimony of Lili Dehn: ‘In the last year of Rasputin’s life, the prince often visited Rasputin … and according to Rasputin told him some astonishing, much too intimate things about his wife. What kind
of things Rasputin didn’t say, but Rasputin was supposed to visit the prince in order to cure his wife.’

To cure ‘intimate things’, that is, to exorcise the demon of lechery. Presumably, by the usual Rasputinian method. But Purishkevich simply could not write that they had decided to employ the tsar’s niece as a sexual lure to trap the debauched peasant. His monarchist convictions required him to conceal a part of the truth. That will have to be kept in mind in the reconstruction of that Petrograd night, the night of the murder. And if Nikolai Mikhailovich’s conjectures about Rasputin’s and Felix’s relationship are correct, then Rasputin had been fraudulently promised more ‘healing’ at the Yusupov palace. After casting lechery out of the prince, he was supposed to cast it out of his wife, too. The niece’s body had been promised to the peasant that night. It made him lose his head. The cunning peasant was turned into a black grouse singing his mating call. Primeval forest (paganism) and lechery had overcome his reason.

Towards the end of November, however, the conspirators were faced with complications. Felix received Irina’s reply written in Alix’s own peremptory style. Irina called the plan ‘savage’ and a ‘dirty business’.

25 November 1916 … Thanks for your insane letter. I didn’t understand half of it. I see that you’re planning to do something wild. Please, be careful and don’t stick your nose into all that dirty business. The dirtiest thing is that you have decided to do it all without me. I don’t see how I can take part in it now, since it’s all arranged. Who is ‘M. Gol.’? I just realized what that means and who they are while writing this! In a word, be careful. I see from your letter that you’re in a state of wild enthusiasm and ready to climb a wall… I’ll be in Petrograd on the 12th or 13th, so don’t dare do anything without me, or else I won’t come at all. Love and kisses. May the Lord protect you.

But the main thing was unclear: had she agreed to participate?

On 27 November Felix wrote back to her:

What happiness your long letter was. You simply don’t realize how much I need you, especially now when my whole head is exploding into pieces from all my thoughts and plans, etc. I so want to tell you all about it. Your presence by the middle of December is essential. The plan I’m writing to you about has been worked out in detail and is three quarters done, and only the finale is left, and for that your arrival is awaited. It [the murder] is the only way of saving a situation that is almost hopeless … You will serve as the lure…Of course, not a word to anyone.

At the end of the letter (presumably to persuade her) he added the enigmatic phrase, ‘Malanya’s also taking part.’

And so, in addition to Irina, a certain Malanya was also supposed to participate in the murder.

‘At Midnight A Friend Will Come To See Him ’

So Irina was supposed to arrive in Petrograd in the middle of December. And the murder was planned for that time. Meanwhile, Felix informed Rasputin that Irina was on her way. As he recalled, Rasputin ‘agreed to the suggestion that he come and meet my wife…he did soon the condition that I pick him up myself and bring him back home. At the same time he asked me to use the back stairs. I noted with surprise and horror how simply Rasputin agreed to it all…removing all the obstacles himself.’

I think that Felix is dissembling here. He himself proposed coming by the back entrance after explaining the ticklishness of the situation. And Rasputin agreed. He thought that the agents guarding his building would still see them as they left the courtyard. And would follow them. And if something did happen, he thought it would be possible to flee the building the same way that he had fled the soirée at Belling’s. And the agents would protect him. He didn’t realize that he was no longer being guarded after 10 p.m.

The ‘rehearsals’ had ended, as Felix put it in his letter to Irina about the preparations for the murder. The Yusupov palace had been selected as the murder scene. But the palace was on the Moika Canal. And it was across from a police station, and that, as Purishkevich wrote, ‘excluded a pistol shot’. For that reason they decided ‘to finish Rasputin off with poison’.

At first they thought that it would just be the four of them — the grand duke, Purishkevich, Lieutenant Sukhotin, and Felix. But Purishkevich properly asked for a fifth, since a driver would be needed to take away the corpse. Purishkevich suggested for this a certain Dr Lazavert, a physician whom he knew well from the hospital train that he himself was in charge of.

The murder was planned for the night of 16–17 December. As Purishkevich wrote, ‘We settled on that day, since Dmitry Pavlovich was busy every evening until the 16th.’ Doing the murder on the night of 16–17 December also suited Purishkevich very well. His hospital train was supposed to leave for the front on the 17th, so that after the murder he could disappear from the capital.

The Poison

On 24 November one of the conspirators’ last meetings took place in Purishkevich’s car on the hospital train. Yusupov came with the grand duke, and Purishkevich introduced them to Dr Lazavert. Yusupov showed the others the potassium cyanide that he had obtained from Maklakov, the Constitutional Democratic leader who had given the speech about the horror of ‘Rasputinism’. The poison was both in crystalline form and dissolved in liquid in a small vial. It was decided to use it to poison the pastries and wine for Rasputin. Not wishing to be party to a murder, Maklakov afterwards informed them that he had given the others a harmless powder. But Dr Lazavert knew how to tell potassium cyanide from mere powder. No, Maklakov became a humanist much later. At the time he took a great deal of trouble to see Rasputin killed. Maklakov even provided Felix with a rubber-coated dumbbell handle, in case it should be necessary to finish the peasant off. But he himself didn’t take part in the murder, pleading a trip to Moscow. He had decided to skip it. It was murder, after all.

It was then on the train that they agreed on the final plan. They would gather at midnight. And by twelve-thirty prepare for the murder by sprinkling the poison in the pastries and the wine. At twelve-thirty (as Felix had agreed with Rasputin) Felix and Dr Lazavert, disguised as a chauffeur, would set out to collect the peasant and bring him back to the Yusupov palace. Not to the front entrance, however, but a doorway off the yard. So that the silhouettes of those getting out of the car would not be visible through the cast-iron grating of the gate. And through the little door from the courtyard they would take the peasant inside.

That door opened onto a narrow winding staircase by which Rasputin would be led down to the basement. By 16 December, the basement would be turned into a charming dining room, old-Russian style. Once in the basement, Felix would explain to Rasputin that he would have to wait a little while to make his desired acquaintance with Irina. For there were unexpected guests upstairs who would soon be leaving. And in the meantime Felix would treat Rasputin in that basement dining room to the poisoned pastries and the poisoned wine.

And the other four would await the denouement on the stairway leading down to the basement. To be ready ‘to burst in and render assistance’ in case anything happened.

A Mystic Rehearsal

On 28 November Purishkevich arrived to look over the murder scene. ‘I passed through to Felix’s study with anxiety upon viewing the array of servants crowding the entryway with a blackamoor in livery at their head. Felix reassured me, explaining that all the servants would be off duty, with only two people on duty at the main entrance.’

The dining room they were going to set up in the basement for the reception of their dear guest had, Purishkevich wrote, ‘a dishevelled look, since a complete remodelling was in progress and they were installing electrical wiring’. But the room seemed extremely suitable to Purishkevich for what they had in mind: the walls were thick, and the two little windows looking out onto the courtyard were small and at pavement level. So that it would even be possible to shoot.

At the time Felix himself was staying with his father-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. But more and more frequently he would drop in at the Yusupov palace to supervise the furnishing of the murder scene. An arch divided the vaulted basement into two parts, one meant as a small dining room, the other as a tiny living room.

Felix recalled:

Three vases of Chinese porcelain already adorned niches in the walls … Old chairs of carved wood upholstered in leather had been brought from the storerooms… along with precious chalices made of ivory… There was a cabinet of the period of Catherine the Great of inlaid ebony with a whole maze of cut glass and bronze columns behind which drawers were concealed. Placed on the cabinet was a crucifix of sixteenth-century Italian work made of rock crystal and chased with silver … The large fireplace was decorated with gilt bowls, majolica earthenware, and a sculpture group of ivory. Spread on the floor was a Persian carpet, and in front of the cabinet lay an enormous polar bear skin … Positioned in the centre of the room was the table at which Rasputin was supposed to drink his final cup of tea.

The basement was joined to Felix’s rooms by a winding staircase. And halfway down that staircase was the little door through which they were to bring Rasputin.

The murderers spent the entire morning of 26 November searching the outskirts of Petrograd by car for the best location to dispose of the future corpse through a hole in the ice. They found a suitable, poorly lit place on the Malaya Nevka river well out of town.

As I was reading Yusupov’s and Purishkevich’s memoirs about the preparations for the murder, it seemed to me that I was already familiar with it. How in anticipation of the murder they carefully searched for a place to take the corpse. For one way or another, the killing wasn’t the hard part. The important thing was concealing the corpse well. And how they talked about where to do the killing and then decided to do it in the basement, so that any pistol shots wouldn’t be heard. Yes, and the basement itself — small, divided in two, with its small windows at pavement level. The preparations for the murder of the royal family in a very similar basement in the Ipatiev House would closely resemble the preparations for Rasputin’s murder. As if the night that their beloved peasant was killed was a dress rehearsal for the future murder of the royal family. As if the Yusupov night was a rehearsal for the Ipatiev night.