The Rasputin File (82 page)

In fact, however, the presence of women was simply essential. When Irina refused to take part, it had been necessary to stage her presence in the house. And that was accomplished very convincingly. Everything had been thought of to create the impression of a soirée at which Irina was enjoying herself with guests who had arrived all of a sudden — from the gramophone to the pastries that her guests, scared away, had abandoned. Yet for some reason, the most important thing seems to have been forgotten — her voice. The woman’s voice that was supposed to be heard coming from upstairs. They had evidently failed to invite a woman to play the role of Irina. But, really, there had to be a woman’s voice coming from upstairs. Because ‘distant voices from upstairs’ had been heard downstairs — by Yusupov and by Rasputin. ‘On entering the house with Rasputin,’ Felix recalled, ‘I heard the voices of my friends.’ And later on, when they were sitting in the ‘dining room’, ‘the noise from upstairs grew louder and louder,’ Felix wrote. ‘What’s all that noise?’ Rasputin asked him. The alert Rasputin, who heard the ‘noise of voices’, would certainly have suspected something, had there been no woman’s voice in all that noise. And he didn’t suspect anything. And he didn’t do so for more than two hours. And that is possible only if he did hear a woman’s voice coming from upstairs.

‘Malanya’s Also Taking Part’

The murderers could not, of course, have failed to arrange for the participation of women. It was not for nothing that when the preparations for the murder were being made, Felix had written to Irina, ‘Malanya’s also taking part.’ It was not for nothing, either, that the police had information about the presence of women that night. And that Tsarskoe Selo had the information, too. And that in society they were talking about the same thing. The actress Vera Leonidovna Yureneva spoke of a certain ballerina, who was Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich’s lover. As we’ve already noted, Coco Chanel’s future boyfriend was liberal in love.

I easily found the ballerina’s name in the Department of Police case file. There are several whole reports about Vera Karalli, whom the police suspected of taking part in the murder night. ‘Vera Karalli, a performer with the ballet company of the Imperial Theatres, twenty-seven years old. During her stays in the capital, she was visited by Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich,’ an agent reported. Vera Karalli’s presence at the Yusupov palace on the night of the murder was also claimed by Simanovich, who went to the police station on the Moika canal on 17 December with Bishop Isidor. After looking into it, however, the security branch agents reported that ‘there was no note of her being absent [from her hotel].’ ‘There was no note of her being absent.’ But that was the very reason for the cunning ‘rehearsals’: the sly substitution of another woman at the hotel for Vera Karalli on the night of the murder in order to give the latter an ‘alibi’ — not a complicated thing.

But Vera Karalli was apparently not the only woman at the Yusupov palace that night. They knew in Tsarskoe Selo of the participation of another lady, a much more important one. Vyrubova names her straight out: Marianna Derfelden, née Pistolkors, daughter of Grand Duke Pavel’s wife Olga by her first marriage and sister of Alexander Pistolkors. But if her brother and his wife were among the most dazzling of Rasputin’s devotees, Marianna had taken Dmitry’s side. And she hated the peasant for the servile devotion of her weak-willed brother and for the disgrace of her brother’s wife, about whose relations with Rasputin the most shameful rumours had been circulating. The police evidence against Marianna was so serious that she, the stepdaughter of a grand duke, was arrested!

But into what did her arrest turn! As her mother recalled, ‘When we arrived at 8 Theatre Square, where Marianna lived, we were stopped by two soldiers who let us through only after taking down our names. All the highest society was at Marianna’s! Some ladies she barely knew arrived in order to express their sympathy with her. Officers came up to kiss her
hand.’ It was then that the brakes were put on the murder case. The tsar did not want all those public displays of affection for the perpetrators. Moreover, Grand Duke Pavel was taking his son’s involvement very hard. So the tsar did not want to finish off his ailing uncle by prolonging the arrest of the stepdaughter.

She was called Marianna, but her sarcastic friends had mockingly twisted that French name into the simple peasant name ‘Malanya’. There had been women there. But to protect them from the police and to preserve their honour, the participants had not identified them.

Were The Pastries Poisoned?

Purishkevich and Yusupov’s account of what took place was dictated by noble considerations in other ways, as well. And here’s the most interesting and mysterious part: just what did in fact happen between Felix and Rasputin in the charming basement ‘dining room’?

And, above all, what about the mysterious story of the poisoning?

‘Protopopov passed on to me,’ Beletsky testified, ‘that Rasputin was still alive when they threw his body into the hole in the ice. That was shown by the autopsy.’

First they poisoned him, but he was still alive. And then they shot him, but he was still alive. A story of the devil. And Felix stresses this in a number of ways: ‘his diabolical malice’, ‘he was foaming at the mouth’ — all that is repeated in Yusupov’s memoirs.

But Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, that ‘Voltairean’ who did not put much stock in demons, would write in his diary, ‘The fact that the potassium cyanide had no effect I explain very simply … having often resorted to it in the past to poison insects. The solution was too weak.’ He may well be right about that: in their haste and anxiety, they made too weak a solution for the wine glasses. But there was still the poison that they had ‘chipped into the pastries’ — enough to kill an ox. Does this mean Rasputin really was a superman? But then how was it that he behaved like a very ordinary person, when he was seriously injured and almost died after the inexperienced Guseva stabbed him just once with a knife in 1914 with her weak woman’s hand? And when a surgeon was dispatched from Petrograd to save him? Why is that? His daughter Matryona raises the same question in her memoirs. And she offers an explanation.

Rasputin could not have eaten any of the poisoned pastries. He followed a special diet. His daughter reports that ‘Father never ate sweets, meat, or pastries.’ This is confirmed by the many various descriptions of him.
Simanovich writes that Rasputin did not eat sweets. And Beletsky and Khvostov report in their testimony that Rasputin kept to a strict diet. Rasputin, as his friend Filippov explained, linked that diet to his abilities as a healer. Fish and the avoidance of sweets. And he did not break that diet even when drunk. Although his devotees gave him boxes of candies, he himself never ate them. Konstantin Chikhachev, deputy chief of the Saratov Judicial Chamber, spoke about that in the File, as we shall recall: ‘In the compartment lay boxes of candy, which he shared but did not touch, expressing himself vulgarly that he didn’t eat that “scum”!’ ‘Scum’ was what he called sweets. And Felix himself wrote about it: ‘A moment later, I passed him the plate with the poisoned pastries. At first he refused. “I don’t want any; they’re too sweet.”’

But then, Felix declares, he ate them. How could he agree to do what he had never done? And why would he? No, he could not have eaten the pastries. Rasputin’s daughter was right: it was another lie. He only drank the poison dissolved in the wine. Which, it may be, was too weak a solution. Felix made up the story about the pastries later as part of his fable about a devil whom ordinary people had heroically destroyed.

And so, Rasputin never did eat the pastries. And he evidently didn’t drink much, either. What then did take place in the room where Rasputin, according to Felix’s own account, spent more than two hours? Or, as the meticulous historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich would write in his diary, ‘around three hours’? And why did he forget the reason for his visit? Or, more accurately, forget all about it, since only that way can we explain the normally nervous and impatient Rasputin waiting almost three hours for Irina to show up. Felix could hardly with ballads alone have caused Rasputin to forget all about the reason for his visit. And, essentially, have put his intuition completely to sleep.

An Erotic Version

It may be that Felix — that exquisitely corrupt child of the century — was aroused by the sense of danger and imminent bloodshed. And that in the dining room there took place an encounter of the kind that so exercised Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich’s imagination. Which is why Rasputin had been willing to wait, and as long as you like, for Irina’s appearance, which promised him a continuation of a remarkable interlude that had captivated Felix, too. And it was only ‘when they started to express their impatience upstairs’ that Felix had been forced to act. And then he went upstairs and informed his confederates that Rasputin was taking neither
pastries nor wine. And after obtaining the grand duke’s pistol, he went back downstairs to the dining room. And it is why, given all that had just passed between them, Rasputin failed to notice the pistol in Felix’s hand. And why his intuition was fast asleep. And why Felix succeeded in shooting him. But Felix was no murderer. He, who hated military service, was naturally not the best of shots. And he was agitated besides! So all he could do was gravely wound Rasputin. The record of the autopsy on Rasputin’s body unfortunately disappeared after the revolution. But one thing is indisputable: Felix did not kill him then. Rasputin was simply unconscious. Although the murderers did bring on a death agony in him and an apparent cessation of his pulse. (The regicides would establish the death of the entire royal family in the Ipatiev basement in exactly the same way — by pulse. After which the grand duchesses would begin to revive.) But Rasputin revived! Or, more accurately, he merely regained consciousness.

As Nikolai Mikhailovich would later write, using Felix’s own words, after coming to, Rasputin ‘tore his epaulette off’. For Felix was not worthy of an officer’s epaulettes! Felix, the Little One, who had deceived him with love! That is why, reproaching him, the duped peasant had familiarly cried, ‘Felix, Felix!’ And it is why Felix would not be able to forget that cry or forgive those words. And why the disgraceful scene would take place in which Felix suddenly started flailing at the dying Rasputin with the dumbbell handle. Repeating during it, ‘Felix, Felix,’ the words with which the humble peasant had dared denounce him, a nobleman! The peasant who had torn off his epaulette.

A Realistic Version

The most plausible version of what happened is much more boring, however. Most likely, it all took place very quickly. When Rasputin declined to eat the pastries and drink the wine, Felix left as if to find out when the guests upstairs would be leaving. And after conferring with the other murderers, he proposed shooting the peasant. And then Felix returned with the pistol. And shot Rasputin at once. After that, the others ran downstairs. After deciding that Rasputin was dead, they then went back upstairs to celebrate their successful deliverance from the dangerous peasant. All the notions about the poison and the wine that had not affected Rasputin were invented after the fact as proof of what Felix would write: ‘It should be remembered that we were dealing with an extraordinary person.’ The man-devil they had defeated!

And then they had something to drink upstairs while they waited for the
city to go to sleep and the streets to empty completely. So the corpse could be taken away without witnesses. During that time Rasputin recovered his strength and regained consciousness. And as he had done once before when Guseva stabbed him, the peasant attempted to save himself by fleeing. But, as Felix and Purishkevich claim, he was shot right next to the gate by Purishkevich.

That claim is the third and biggest of the fabrications.

Who Killed Him?

While filming my television programme at the Yusupov palace, I followed the path of the injured Rasputin up the steep staircase. And emerged outside by the same door through which he had tried to escape.

Looking around, I could still imagine Rasputin fleeing across this small unfenced area next to the house. And Purishkevich running after the gravely wounded Rasputin and missing him at an effective distance of two or three paces. Which is entirely understandable, since Purishkevich was a civilian, a historian and philologist by training, who had worked in the executive office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. When he wishes to prove in his memoirs that he was a good shot, the only thing he can say is that he ‘shot well at — ‘!

And it will have to be proved. For after the first wild shots at Rasputin, who was after all not very far from the gunman (Purishkevich explains the misses as nervousness), two masterful shots followed when Rasputin was already quite far away — by the gate. One ‘in the back’, as Purishkevich writes. And the second, precisely aimed, in the head. No, nervousness had nothing to do with it. It was simply that the second two shots were of another class, as if belonging to a completely different marksman. An excellent and cold-blooded one. So, who among the accomplices fits the role of that kind of marksman? Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich above all. A brilliant Guards officer, an athlete, and a one-time participant in the Olympic Games. It was he who gave Felix the pistol with which he shot Rasputin. And it was no coincidence that Dmitry had come with a revolver. For if anyone had personal reasons to do the peasant in, Dmitry did. It was Rasputin who had wrecked his betrothal; it was Rasputin who had told the scurrilous tales about him and his fiancée; it was Rasputin who had disgraced the royal family in which Dmitry had been raised; and it was Rasputin who had caused the schism in the great Romanov family, not to mention in his father’s immediate family. And it was no accident that the woman who did not become his wife, the tsar’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, had thought
of that at once. And had written it down in her diary in advance of all the official inquiries: ‘18 December …we have learned that Father Grigory has definitely been killed, it must have been by Dmitry.’