The Rasputin File (92 page)
Authors: Edvard Radzinsky
The tsar, who has assumed the role of Commander-in-Chief, with Alexei at the front in 1916. ‘Since [Nicholas] had started taking the heir to headquarters, loneliness and homesickness no longer tormented him so sharply. And [the tsarina] suddenly began to worry that the trips would disrupt the heir’s studies. And it at once became clear that Our Friend no longer approved of the trips, either.’
Nicholas with his younger brother Mikhail (centre) and his cousin Dmitry. Mikhail shocked his family by marrying a divorcee and living abroad, but on the outbreak of war he returned to Russia and became a noted military commander. On Nicholas’s abdication in 1917, Mikhail briefly succeeded him. ‘Dmitry was the tsar’s favourite. His letters to Nicholas have survived, the scoffing letters of a rake. A duelist and hard drinker, tall and well-built like most of the Romanovs, a favourite of the Guards — but Alix did not like him. For the youth did not hide his disdain for the peasant.’
Autumn 1914 and Russia is at war. Alix and her daughters Olga and Tatyana graduated from a nursing course and received their International Red Cross Certificates. ‘The tsarina gave herself up to the cause of mercy with all the strength of her boundless energy. She organized her own hospital train and set up a hospital in Tsarskoe Selo in the great palace. She and the grand duchesses became sisters of mercy.’
Anna Vyrubova followed the example of the tsarina and helped nurse the wounded. Here she is in an officers’ carriage of a hospital train.
The tsar’s niece Irina with her husband Felix Yusupov, a rake and bisexual. Since relations between Felix’s mother Zinaida and the tsarina were ‘strained, the wedding took place on what was for Alix “enemy territory”— the Anichkov Palace of the dowager empress. The couple were married in the palace church. On 9 February 1914 Nicky entered in his diary, “Everything went well. There were lots of people”.’
The decision to kill Rasputin ‘most likely originated with Dmitry’— here seen with one of his cars for which he had an enormous passion — ‘that gallant guardsman, an athlete, and a one-time participant in the Olympic games, who, as Felix Yusupov correctly noted, “hated the elder”.’
Felix Yusupov. The location is unknown, although it may be upstairs at the Yusupov Palace, where the attempted poisoning and shooting of Rasputin took place.
The yard at the Yusupov Palace, with the doorway clearly visible on the left, across which Rasputin ran on a December night in 1916 while trying to save himself from his murderers. To the right, out of shot, is the Moika Canal.
‘Early on the morning of 19 December, a corpse was found floating in the Malay Nevka river near Great Petrovsky Bridge. It had surfaced in a frightening way: the shirt frozen to the corpse was pulled up, exposing a bullet wound. There was another bullet mark on the victim’s forehead and a bruise on his face from a kick to the temple.’
After the full story of Rasputin’s murder began to leak out, cartoonists had a field day.
Copyright © 2000 by Edvard Radzinsky
Translation copyright © 2000 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc
.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Published in the Russian Federation in the Russian language as
Rasputin: ‘ZHIZN’ I SMERT’ I SMERT
by Publishing House Vagrius in 2000.
Copyright © 2000 by Edvard Radzinsky.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Edition as follows:
Radzinsky, Edvard.
The Rasputin file / Edvard Radzinsky; translated from the Russian by Judson Rosengrant.
New York : Nan A. Talese, 2000
p. cm.
I. Rasputin, Grigori Efimovich, ca. 1870–1916. 2. Russia—Courts and courtiers—Biography. 3. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894–1917 [reign].
DK254.R3 R28 2000
947.08’3’092 B21
eISBN: 978-0-307-75466-0
Author photograph © Sergey Bermeniev
