The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (16 page)

However, the shots had been heard, and a curious policeman arrived to find out the cause. Yusupov stood so that he could not see the body and told the policeman that there had been some ‘horseplay’ and a dog had been shot. The man went away, but returned after his superiors queried his explanation. This time, Purishkevich confronted him and boldly told him what had actually happened, but adding that ‘if you love your country and your Tsar, you will keep your mouth shut’
^.17

The man nodded, as if in promise, turned and went away. After he had gone, Dimitri and the others returned. Desperate to get rid of the body, they bundled it into Dimitri’s car, and raced off through the dark, early-morning streets to Petrovsky Island where they realised that in their haste they had forgotten the chains intended to weigh down the body. It was too late to do anything about that. At a bridge they took the body and threw it into the icy Neva below.

Two days later, on Monday December 19, searching police found the corpse, visible just below the ice, with one arm outstretched. A post-mortem examination found there was water in his lungs, suggesting that he was still alive when he was thrown into the river.
¹⁸
Nevertheless, poisoned, shot or drowned, it came to the same thing. The hated Rasputin was no more.

THERE was never any chance that the identity of those involved in the murder would remain unknown. The policeman who had spoken to Purishkevich filed a full report; two servants had seen the body in the courtyard; and at Tsarskoe Selo they knew that Rasputin was going to the Yusupov palace that Friday evening, because he had announced it. By early Saturday evening, hardly more than twelve hours after his body was dumped in the Neva, Petrograd was alive with rumours of his death — at seven p.m. the French ambassador Paléologue was noting the details of it all.
¹⁹

It was about that time that Dimitri went to the Michael Theatre, taking his place in a box as if nothing had happened. He would not be there long, fleeing to ‘escape the ovation of the audience.’ And when he got back to his palace on the Nevsky Prospekt it was to find ‘people kneeling in prayer’; he had become so much a hero that in churches across the country candles were being lit in his honour before icons of St. Dimitri.

This was not what he and Yusupov had intended. The murder planned to be kept secret for months had become public knowledge even before the discovery of the body. Yusupov, who had intended to go off to the Crimea to the house just vacated by Michael and Natasha, was ordered to stay in the capital; next day at lunchtime, Dimitri, who was about to leave to spend Christmas with Michael and Natasha at Brasova, found himself ‘under house arrest’. In both instances the order came from the Empress — as ever, assuming powers she did not properly have. Yusupov later claimed that Alexandra’s first instinct was to have Dimitri shot.
²⁰

Dimitri, in fact, was at risk of being killed in a revenge attack at his palace on the Nevsky Prospekt. At the beginning of the war he had given it over and it was now the Anglo-Russian hospital, staffed by British doctors and nurses; however he maintained an apartment on an upstairs floor. While he was there, a gang of armed men, probably sent by the interior minister Protopopov, arrived to hunt him down — but went away after the British staff convinced them that Dimitri was not in the building. Troops were then sent to guard the palace from any further threats.
²¹

Rasputin was buried in near-secrecy at Tsarskoe Selo on Friday, December 23, on a plot of land owned by Alexandra’s devoted companion Anna Vyrubova, four days after his corpse was pulled from the Neva, and with a grief-stricken Alexandra pinning a farewell note to his body.
²²

Afterwards the punishment Nicholas decreed for Dimitri was his immediate exile to Kasvin, on the Persian front. Yusupov was banished to his estate in Kursk. However, Purishkevich was deemed too powerful and escaped punishment entirely, as did the others in consequence.
²³

WAITING for Dimitri at Brasova, Michael and Natasha did not know that he had been arrested until the arrival from Petrograd of other guests joining them for Christmas. Michael had written in his diary on the day Rasputin’s body was found that ‘we read in the papers that Grigory Rasputin was assassinated in Petrograd’,
²⁴
though there were no details, and thereafter the newspapers were banned from reporting more. However, when their guests and staff arrived, they brought them all the rumours from the capital.

Natasha’s 13-year-old daughter Tata, whose schoolgirl crush on the handsome Dimitri remained as strong as the day he had first walked through the door of the Gatchina villa two years earlier, ‘was thrilled to the core’ on learning that ‘my darling Dimitri’ was among the plotters, though downcast when she realised that not only would he miss Christmas but that it might be years before any of them would see him again.
²⁵

Although Natasha had often talked to Dimitri about the need to get rid of Rasputin — as had Michael — neither were privy to the plot to murder him. But had Natasha, in particular, influenced his decision? Alexandra certainly thought so, believing that she and her ‘bad set’ bore some responsibility, hardly surprisingly since she included Dimitri among them. Five months earlier she had written to Nicholas about Dimitri: ‘Don’t let him go to that lady so often — such society is his ruin — nothing but flattery and he likes it...and don’t let him be too free with his tongue either.’
²⁶

What would have confirmed her suspicions about Natasha’s role was that as soon as he arrived in faraway Persia, to begin his exile, Dimitri wrote to her in Gatchina. ‘Natasha, dearest, how often I remember now our charming conversations, how much I miss them, be happy and do not forget me...’
²⁷
A second letter arrived a month later in the same terms. ‘We are so far apart, 2,500 miles separate us, my lot is a miserable one...please don’t forget your sincerely devoted and truly loving friend.’
²⁸

Both letters were opened and read by the
Okhrana
before delivery, as Dimitri knew they would be. But neither contained any clue to her prior knowledge of the murder or anything said by either Michael or Natasha about Rasputin. Dimitri was too careful to compromise them in that way; in any event, by then all the talk in Petrograd was no longer about the dead and gone Rasputin, but what now should be done about Nicholas and Alexandra.

WHEN Michael and Natasha returned to Gatchina at the New Year of 1917 it was to find that the death of Rasputin had done nothing to ease tension, for it had provided drama but no other tangible improvement in political conditions. The government had not fallen, the hated Protopopov was still interior minister, claiming that he was now guided by Rasputin’s ghost,
¹
and Alexandra was still effectively Regent, grieving but otherwise unchanged in her purpose. The only desperate action had come from an officer who attempted to assassinate her on December 28
en route
between the palace and her hospital in Tsarskoe Selo. Caught, he was hanged next morning, although his arrest and execution were kept ‘absolutely secret’.
²

Nevertheless, there was still hopes of a palace coup, as there had been before Christmas when there had been hot-headed talk by the three Vladimirovich brothers — Grand Dukes Kirill, Boris and Andrew — of a night march on Tsarskoe Selo by four Guards regiments. This excited plot, aimed at the seizure of Alexandra and her despatch to some faraway convent, came to nothing since only the three brothers believed it to be possible. Even so, they continued to press the case for it.

At one champagne supper party, Boris was reported to have been discussing the timing and the regiments which could be used, seemingly indifferent to the fact that the whole conversation could be overheard by servants, gypsy singers and with ‘harlots looking on and listening’, noted Paléologue in his diary for January 9.
³

Nicholas made clear that he was prepared to face any family challenge head on. After Dimitri’s departure, a letter from his father Grand Duke Paul, asking the Tsar to revoke his order, was returned to him with a note scribbled in the margin: ‘No one has the right to kill...’
⁴
Bimbo, who had added his name to the letter, was banished to his remote estate on New Year’s Day and it was enough to stop any family rebellion in its tracks.

By January 15, Paléologue judged that Nicholas ‘obviously intended to frighten the imperial family. He has succeeded. They are terror-stricken.’
⁵

A week later, the Tsar told Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna that ‘in their own interests’ it would be best if her sons Kirill and Andrew should depart the capital for a few weeks.
⁶
They went quietly, leaving their mother to scurry around for other allies, in vain.

Grand Duke Paul recognised that they had failed when he admitted to Paléologue that ‘the Emperor is more under the Empress’s thumb than ever. She has persuaded him that the hostile movement against her is...nothing more than a conspiracy of the Grand Dukes and a drawing room revolt’.
⁷

She was deluding herself. There were more serious plots afoot. All were intended to bring about the abdication of the Tsar and thereby Alexandra’s removal from the political scene, and the substitution of twelve-year-old Alexis as Emperor, under the Regency of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich. The question in January 1917 was no longer whether this should be done, but when and by whom.

MICHAEL had returned to Gatchina too late to be consulted about the family petition on behalf of Dimitri, but there was never any doubt about where his sympathy lay. Alexandra had to be removed from any further influence on affairs. Early in the New Year he drove to Tsarskoe Selo to meet his brother, and to press the case for a change of course — as indeed he had pressed him in his warning letter to Nicholas eight weeks earlier and before the crisis which now engulfed him. Nicholas did not attempt to browbeat him, as he had done in dealing with the other members of the family. Instead, he was clearly rattled, not least by the intervention a few days earlier of the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan, speaking informally on behalf of the British government which had given him permission to talk personally to the Tsar, albeit not officially on behalf of London or King George V. Even so, Nicholas was well aware that what Buchanan was saying was what London believed to be the truth. It did not make for a happy interview, as he now confessed to Michael.

Alarmed by the open talk in the capital of an impending palace coup, Buchanan told him that interior minister Protopopov ‘is bringing Russia to the verge of ruin’, that in the event of a revolution, ‘only a small part of the army can be counted on to defend the dynasty’, and that the only safe course now was for the Tsar to ‘break down the barrier that separates you from your people and to regain their confidence.’

Nicholas’s face hardened at that. ‘You tell me that I must regain the confidence of the people. Isn’t it rather for my people to regain my confidence?’
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Buchanan departed in despair. However, the meeting had shaken Nicholas, despite his outward show of disdain. A government minister who met him immediately afterwards found him ‘trembling and distrait’.
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He was still clearly troubled by it all when Michael arrived, for he recounted to him everything that Buchanan had said to him — its own admission that he was not as confident as he pretended to be, though too proud to admit that to anyone other than his brother.

How could Michael help? The answer to that came when he unexpectedly turned up shortly afterwards at the apartment of Mikhail Rodzyanko, the president of the state Duma, on Furshtadtskaya, near the Tauride Palace, home of the Duma.

Rodzyanko was surprised to see him. When they sat down, Michael came straight to the point. ‘I should like to talk to you about what is going on, and to consult you as to what should be done. We understand the situation perfectly.’ In saying ‘we’ he made clear that he meant the Tsar, who did not understand at all, but that in talking to Rodzyanko he was not going behind his back.

Rodzyanko’s response was as frank as the question invited him to be. ‘The entire policy of the government must undergo a radical change. Ministers must be appointed whom the country trusts, not men whose very presence in the government is an insult to public feeling. I am sorry to tell you that this can only be done on condition that the Empress is removed. She exercises a deplorable influence on all appointments, even those in the army. Alexandra Fedorovna is fiercely and universally hated and all circles are clamouring for her removal. While she remains in power, we shall continue on the road to ruin.’

‘Buchanan said the same thing to my brother,’ replied Michael ‘The whole family is aware of her evil influence. She and my brother are surrounded by traitors. All decent people have gone. But things being so, what is to be done?’