The Rasputin File (78 page)

Badmaev’s testimony before the Extraordinary Commission was different: ‘Golovina confessed to her grief. She had known the day before that Rasputin intended to drink at Prince Yusupov’s.’

Vyrubova also dropped by. Beletsky testified that Vyrubova had been at Rasputin’s at 8:00 p.m., and that Rasputin had told her he was supposed to be going with young Prince Yusupov to treat his wife.

Vyrubova didn’t know that the prince’s wife wasn’t in Petrograd, but she advised Rasputin to turn down the invitation. She said it was degrading to him that they were ashamed to receive him openly in the daytime and chose night instead. And he gave her his promise he wouldn’t go.

So, having promised Felix to keep the trip a secret, the cunning peasant had not taken any chances and had told all his close friends where he was going. He believed that the agents would be accompanying him. But he was wrong about that, thanks to Protopopov’s lie. So even though he trusted Felix completely, he had still taken security measures.

Golovina left him at ten. After that a caller came by. From among those transitory women who made their appearances in the ‘little room with the sofa’ and then disappeared. As the building porter later testified, ‘A lady of about twenty-five was with him from 10:00 p.m. until 11:00.’ That was confirmed by his niece Anna, who at the time was staying at his apartment. ‘Around 10 p.m. a plump blonde arrived who was called “Sister Maria,” although she was no sister of mercy. For she helped him to remove the
tension that apparently took hold of him against his will.’ And to ‘refine his nerves’ before the night that promised him so much. His daughters returned around eleven.

The next day they both gave their accounts to the investigators.

Varvara: ‘Matryona and I had been visiting someone and went to bed at 11:00, and I did not see how, where, or with whom he left. Father didn’t say anything to me…about planning to go anywhere.’ But, on the other hand, her older sister Matryona testified, ‘After I got back and was going off to bed, Father told me that he was going to visit the Little One.’

And to complete the night, Protopopov arrived around midnight.

‘I stopped by to see Rasputin the night he was murdered…around 12 after seeing Voskoboinikova off at the station,’ Protopopov testified before the Extraordinary Commission. (He supposedly arrived at that time because he knew that the agents directly guarding the apartment would have left the building around 11:30.) ‘I…saw him for about ten minutes and saw only him, since he opened the door himself. He didn’t say anything to me about intending to go out.’ Rasputin, who was expecting Yusupov, hastened to curtail his conversation with the minister.

It was after twelve when Rasputin started to get dressed. As his maid testified, he put on a light blue shirt embroidered with cornflowers, but ‘he couldn’t button the collar and I buttoned it for him.’ He continued to be agitated. After dressing, he lay down on his bed to wait for Felix. His daughters were already asleep. But his niece and his maid, Katya Pechyorkina, still hadn’t gone to bed. The niece told the investigator, ‘Uncle lay down on his bed just after twelve in his clothing,’ and in reply to her and Pechyorkina’s puzzled questions, he said, ‘“I’m going …to visit the Little One tonight.” The “Little One” was what Uncle called Yusupov.’

After that the niece went to bed in the daughters’ room, and Pechyorkina went into the kitchen and lay down behind the partition set aside for the maid. Apparently her master’s suspicious preparations had aroused her curiosity, and she did not sleep but waited to see who would be coming for him. Finally, ‘the bell rang at the back door.’ And parting the curtains that shielded her bed, she saw Rasputin with the person who had rung. It was the ‘Little One’ — Prince Yusupov.

A Chronicle Of The Morning

At 8:00 a.m. on 17 December, Rasputin’s niece, Anna, telephoned Munya Golovina and said her uncle had left the night before with the Little One but still hadn’t returned.

Early the same morning Protopopov was awakened by a phone call. The mayor of Petrograd, Alexander Balk, informed him in a very worried voice that a constable standing on the Moika Canal had heard shots coming from the Yusupov palace. After which the constable had been called into the building and told by the Duma member Purishkevich, who was there, that Rasputin had been killed. Protopopov immediately called the building on Gorokhovaya Street and ascertained that Rasputin hadn’t spent the night there and still wasn’t back.

Maria Golovina arrived at Gorokhovaya Street around eleven. She told Rasputin’s daughters that she had called the prince, but ‘they were still asleep there.’ Afterwards Munya testified that at the time she wasn’t concerned, since ‘Rasputin had asked the prince in my presence to take him to the Gypsies, and so knowing he had gone with him, I didn’t worry.’ Finally, around noon, Felix himself called her. And she reassured the daughters by telling them that Felix had given his word that he had not seen their father. What was her horror when the maid Katya swore to her that this was a lie! That Felix had come by for Rasputin during the night, and that she herself had seen him in the apartment.

Golovina immediately called Vyrubova at her little house in Tsarskoe Selo.

The File, from the testimony of the medical orderly Zhuk: ‘They called around 12:00 p.m. and said that Rasputin had left and not come back. Vyrubova immediately informed the palace, and there was a great deal of anxiety and constant discussion with Petrograd.’

Protopopov was in continuous contact with Tsarskoe Selo at the time. He passed on to the empress and Vyrubova the information given to him by the constable about the events at the Yusupov palace. Then on the morning of 17 December Protopopov summoned General Popov and ordered him to open an investigation at once. So under the number 573 an order was issued to General Popov ‘to conduct an inquiry into the matter of the disappearance of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin’, and to do so, moreover, in absolute secret.

The Impatient Visitors

Early that same morning visitors appeared at Rasputin’s apartment, visitors who were very interested in the papers left behind by their vanished owner.

From the interrogation of Manasevich by the Extraordinary Commission:

‘Were you at Rasputin’s apartment the night he disappeared?’

‘I was there in the morning … I arrived…and there was a commotion. Simanovich had arrived with Bishop Isidor and said they had been to the police chief, where everything had taken place.’

‘Did you go through his papers?’

‘They weren’t my concern,’ Manasevich naturally testified.

‘Did Protopopov visit Rasputin’s apartment while you were there?’

‘Not while I was there.’

(Protopopov had evidently been there before Manasevich and the others.) From Protopopov’s interrogation:

‘There is a rumour that you were at his apartment immediately after the murder.’

‘Never… after all, the police were there.’

But the minister of internal affairs, taking into account Rasputin’s relations with him and the ‘tsars’, had simply had no choice but to get there ahead of the police and everyone else. As soon as he had learned of Rasputin’s disappearance. So that after the visits to the apartment of all those inquisitive guests, no important papers whatever could have remained to be found.

Events had meanwhile taken a turn. At 2:00 p.m. General Popov received information that there were bloodstains on Great Petrovsky Bridge over the Malaya Nevka river, and that a brown boot had been found lodged in a wall of the bridge’s foundation. At 3:00 p.m. the same afternoon, the boot was shown to Rasputin’s daughters, and they ‘recognized it as belonging to their father’.

‘I Cannot And Won’t Believe He Has Been Killed ’

By then rumours had already begun to spread through the city. The presumed death of the favourite excited all of high society. Grand dukes, ambassadors, ministers, the royal family at Tsarskoe Selo — all were passionately discussing the rumours of the death of the semi-literate peasant from the Siberian village.

From the diary of the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich:

17 December … At 5:30, two phone calls — one from Princess Trubetskaya, the other from the British ambassador Buchanan…They told me that Grigory Rasputin was killed last night. The unexpected news stunned me, and I rushed by automobile to my brother Alexander’s home on the Moika Canal in order to find out what was going on [so evidently he had been told not only about the murder, but also about the fact that Felix, who was living at his brother Alexander’s at the time, was suspected of it]. A servant informed me that Felix would be coming back late.

But the grand duke knew where to get information. He went to the seditious Yacht Club. That day the club was packed. Numerous carriages and automobiles were waiting by the entrance. And that whole aristocratic anthill was anxiously buzzing.

‘I went to dine at the club, where the only thing being talked about was Grishka’s disappearance,’ he recorded.

‘Towards the end of dinner, Dmitry Pavlovich came in, pale as death, although I didn’t talk to him, since he sat down at another table … [Prime Minister] Trepov was arguing for everyone to hear that it was all nonsense… But Dmitry Pavlovich declared to others that, in his opinion, Rasputin had either gone off somewhere or been killed … We sat down to cards, while Dmitry Pavlovich went to the French-language Mikhailov Theatre.’ So everyone got the required information. For somehow they all knew that Dmitry was somehow involved.

At the time the Friend had moved to the palace at the tsarina’s demand.

From Zhuk’s testimony in the File: ‘Vyrubova started staying overnight at the palace at the empress’s orders. They were afraid she too might be killed, since she…had begun receiving threatening letters a year before Rasputin’s murder … They were especially … afraid of the young grand dukes. I was ordered not to admit any of the grand dukes…The inside shutters in Vyrubova’s apartment were changed.’

Alix suspected that it was only the beginning of a reprisal against ‘ours’ by the Romanov youth. And on the afternoon of the 17th, she wrote to the tsar:

We are sitting together — can imagine our feelings — thoughts — our Friend has disappeared. Yesterday A[nya] saw him & he said Felix asked him to come in the night, a motor wld. fetch him to see Irina…

This night big scandal at Yusupov’s house — big meeting, Dmitri, Purishkevitch etc. all drunk, Police heard shots, Purishkevitch ran out screaming to the Police that our Friend was killed.

Police searching…

Felix wished to leave tonight for Crimea, begged Kalinin [Protopopov] to stop him

Felix pretends He never came to the house & never asked him. Seems like quite a paw [a trap]. I still trust in God’s mercy that one has only driven Him off somewhere…

I cannot & won’t believe He has been killed. God have mercy…

… come quickly — nobody will dare to touch her [Anya] or do anything when you are here.

Felix came often to him lately…

From her telegram of 17 December 1916: ‘We still hope in God’s mercy. Felix and Dmitri implicated ’

Tsarskoe Selo knew by evening that both men were implicated.

From the memoirs of Princess Olga, Dmitry’s stepmother:

On Saturday evening, December 17/30, a concert was given in Tsarskoe Selo … Around eight o’clock the phone rang. An instant later Vladimir [her son from her marriage to the grand duke] ran into my room: ‘It’s the end of the elder. They just called me. Lord, now we can breathe easier. The details still aren’t known. He did in any case disappear twenty-four hours ago. It may be we’ll find out something at the concert’ … I shall never forget that evening. No one listened either to the concert or to the performers. During the intermission, I noticed that the gazes directed at us were especially intent. But at the time I still hadn’t guessed why.

Finally, one of her friends told her. ‘ “It appears those responsible for the affair are from the highest aristocracy. Felix Yusupov, Purishkevich, and the grand duke have been named” My heart stopped. By evening’s end Dmitry’s name was on everyone’s lips.’

The Case Of The Missing Peasant Grigory Rasputin

The morning of the 18th came and Rasputin still had not been found. Felix was unable to leave for the Crimea that day. He had been invited to give testimony in the case of ‘the missing peasant Rasputin’ under General Popov’s charge. For three days beginning on 17 December General Popov conducted continuous interrogations along with Colonel Popel. Among the interrogated were the two constables who had been standing that night near the Yusupov palace, Rasputin’s two daughters, the maid, Rasputin’s niece, and Maria Golovina.

And Felix himself was interrogated on 18 December by Minister of
Justice Makarov. Felix’s testimony is especially interesting, since it was given while the trail was still warm — the day after.

But on 19 December, the third day of the inquiry, Protopopov suddenly issued an order immediately terminating the case and he appropriated all the depositions. After the fall of the Romanovs, the case file lay in the archive, and then it vanished. In 1928 a certain Vasiliev died in Paris in great poverty. He had been the last director of the Department of Police. Surviving him and published soon afterwards was the manuscript of a book he had written about the tsarist secret police. And in the book he quoted (with errors) certain documents from the missing file. The documents (together with the errors) from his book thereafter made their way into many of the works about Rasputin.

It turns out, however, that the case file itself was published. Immediately after the February Revolution, the magazine
Times Past
printed the file in an issue devoted to the most sensational documents of the fallen regime.

We shall compare the testimony in the case file with the story of the murder created by the murderers Purishkevich and Yusupov. A story that has generally been accepted.