To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (26 page)

Yusupov pulled himself together and offered Rasputin a cup of tea;Rasputin accepted, saying he was thirsty. Then he asked Yusupov to play his guitar and sing, which he did… and another song, and another. Soon ‘The hands of the clock pointed to half past two’. And there was a lot of noise from upstairs. Yusupov went up to investigate.

Meanwhile, the others had been eavesdropping (we revert to Purishkevich’s point of view). No sooner had Lazovert the ‘chauffeur’ crept upstairs to remove his uniform than the whole party, under cover of the gramophone music, crept out and down towards the dog-leg landing and listened for noises from the basement dining room. As Purishkevich described it,

We stood bunched together: I was first on the staircase, the brass knuckles in my hand; behind me was the Grand Duke; behind him Lt Sukhotin; and last was Dr Lazovert.

They stood on the stairs for about half an hour, putting the needle back and furiously rewinding ‘Yankee Doodle’ so that it boomed faster through the great brass horn whenever it threatened to slow down. From below, they heard nothing but a quiet murmur of conversation. Then they heard the door below opening, and scampered back to the study like mice.

Yusupov came in and told them that Rasputin would not eat or drink. What should he do? Dmitri Pavlovich told him to go back downstairs at once, in case Rasputin came up after him, saw the assembled company, and got suspicious – ‘and then we would either have to let him go in peace or finish him off noisily – this could be fraught with consequences’. Felix returned to the basement. The others returned to their previous positions on the stairs. Half an hour later they heard a cork popping and the tinkle of glasses. (Through the solid walls, the curtains and the door with its thick
portière
, that is.) Then silence. Dmitri thought they would not have long to wait. They returned to the study.

Fifteen minutes passed and Yusupov came upstairs, pale-faced. Rasputin had eaten all the cakes and drunk two glasses of poisoned wine and ‘nothing has happened, absolutely nothing’ – Rasputin was belching and dribbling, but that was about it. And he was worried about why Irina didn’t come. Yusupov had told him she would be down in ten minutes.

Again they told him to go downstairs and wait five more minutes for the poison to take effect. When he had gone, Purishkevich noticed that Lazovert, who had proved brave and imperturbable when in the battle zone and under fire, was having a
crise de nerfs
. He was ‘beet-red from apoplexy’, and went missing. After an unspecified time, he returned, ‘pale and haggard’, and said he had felt ill, had gone down to the car, and had fallen face forward into the snow. The cold had revived him.

Yusupov came back; it was hopeless. Dmitri Pavlovich said they must abandon the plan and let the man go. But Purishkevich was resolute.

‘Never!’ I exclaimed. ‘Your Highness, don’t you understand that if he gets away today, he will have slipped away forever? Do you think that he will come to Yusupov’s tomorrow once he realises that he was tricked? Rasputin cannot,’ I continued in a half-whisper, stressing each word, ‘must not, and will not leave here alive… If poison doesn’t work… then we must show our hand. Either we must all go downstairs together, or you can leave it to me alone. I will lay him out, either with my Savage or I’ll smash his skull in with the brass knuckles. What do you say to that?’

They began to creep downstairs in single file behind Purishkevich with the knuckleduster. Lazovert had been given the truncheon, despite his protests that he was feeling too ill to use it. But Purishkevich had descended only a step or two when Dmitri Pavlovich told him to stop, and took Yusupov aside. The others returned to the study. When Dmitri Pavlovich and Yusupov came in, they had agreed that Yusupov would shoot Rasputin. ‘It will be quicker and simpler’, the Prince said, and took a Browning from his desk drawer and went downstairs.

Five minutes later they heard a shot, a cry, and a body hitting the floor. They rushed downstairs and plunged headlong through the basement door, and one of them got caught somehow on the light switch, plunging them into pitch darkness.

They groped for the switch and turned it on, only to find Rasputin dying on the bearskin rug and Yusupov standing over him, holding the revolver behind his back. There was no blood. ‘Evidently it was an internal haemorrhage – the bullet had entered Rasputin’s chest and had not come out.’

Dmitri Pavlovich foresaw a nasty stain, so they moved Rasputin onto the tiled part of the floor, ‘with his feet towards the window facing the street and his head toward the staircase from which we had come’. There was no blood on the rug. They stood around the body, overawed by the oddity of the situation and of the influence of the man who lay before them in his cream embroidered shirt, velvet trousers and magnificent boots. Then they trooped out, ‘turning out the light and leaving the door slightly ajar’.

Yusupov’s account, published nine years later than Purishkevich’s, is a little different. When he went upstairs for the first time, Dmitri Pavlovich, Sukhotin and Purishkevich rushed towards him with revolvers, asking what had happened. He told them that Rasputin was unharmed, and they decided to go downstairs together and strangle him. Once they had set off, Yusupov called them back to the study; he was not at all confident that Rasputin, who was no ordinary man, might not overcome them all. Instead, he persuaded them, with difficulty, that he personally should shoot him.

He took Dmitri’s revolver and went downstairs.

Rasputin was sitting at the table, looking a little off-colour. Yusupov sat down beside him. Rasputin asked for more wine and suggested a visit to the gypsies. Yusupov poured him some more. He was hiding the revolver behind his back. He got up and went over to the crystal crucifix, and stood admiring it.

In due course Rasputin followed him. He said he preferred the labyrinth cupboard, and began opening its little doors and drawers.

‘Grigori Efimovich, you had better look at the crucifix, and say a prayer before it.’

Rasputin looked at me in amazement, and with a trace of fear… He came right up to me, looking me full in the face, and he seemed to read in my glance something which he was not expecting. I realised the supreme moment was at hand. ‘God give me strength to end it all,’ I thought, and I slowly brought the revolver from behind my back. Rasputin was still standing motionless before me, his head turned to the right, and his eyes on the crucifix.

‘Where shall I shoot?’ I thought. ‘Through the temple or through the heart?’A streak of lightning seemed to run through my body. I fired. There was a roar as from a wild beast, and Rasputin fell heavily backwards on the bearskin rug.

The others rushed downstairs, plunging everything into darkness. When the light was switched on again, there lay Rasputin, twitching, with his eyes shut. ‘There was a small red spot on his silk blouse.’ He became still. The bullet had gone through the heart; he was dead. Dmitri Pavlovich removed the body from the rug, they switched off the light, left the room and locked the door, and went upstairs.

They now had to dispose of the victim. Lazovert as chauffeur, Dmitri Pavlovich, and Sukhotin wearing Rasputin’s coat, were to leave, as planned, in the general direction of Gorokhovaya Street to convince any pursuant Okhrana men that Rasputin had left for the night, but in fact to take some of Rasputin’s clothes for burning to the Warsaw Station. They would leave Purishkevich’s car there and proceed by cab to the Sergei Palace to pick up Dmitri Pavlovich’s car. In this they would return to the Moika to pick up the corpse.

They left;Yusupov and Purishkevich remained behind and exchanged views about the future of Russia, ‘now forever delivered from her evil genius’.

In the midst of our conversation I was suddenly seized by a vague feeling of alarm; I was overwhelmed by the desire to go downstairs to the dining-room. I went downstairs and unlocked the door.

Rasputin lay motionless, but on touching him I discovered that he was still warm. I felt his pulse. There was no beat.

From his wound drops of blood trickled, and fell on the granite floor.

On an impulse, Yusupov seized the corpse and shook it; it dropped back lifeless. He stood over it a little longer, and was about to leave when

my attention was arrested by a slight trembling of his left eyelid. I bent down over him, and attentively examined his face. It began to twitch convulsively. The movements became more and more pronounced. Suddenly the left eye half-opened. An instant later the right lid trembled and lifted. And both eyes – the eyes of Rasputin – fixed themselves on me with an expression of devilish hatred.

Yusupov was rooted to the spot. Rasputin leapt to his feet, roaring, and grabbed him ‘like red-hot iron’ by the shoulder and ‘Tried to grip me by the throat’, all the time repeating the Prince’s name in ‘a hoarse whisper’. But ‘with a supreme effort I tore myself free’.

Rasputin fell back to the ground. Yusupov dashed upstairs yelling for Purishkevich. He had given his own revolver to Dmitri Pavlovich, so he was unarmed, and as Purishkevich took his revolver from its holster they were alerted by a noise on the stairs. Yusupov dashed into the study, grabbed the truncheon, and returned to the staircase. Rasputin was clambering up to them on all fours, ‘bellowing and snorting like a wounded animal’. With a superhuman effort, he rose to his feet and lunged towards the door into the courtyard.

Yusupov was sure the door was locked and Dmitri Pavlovich and the others had the key. He was mistaken. Rasputin vanished through it into the darkness outside. Purishkevich raced after him and fired twice.

Yusupov thought:
Rasputin will escape through the gate
. So:

I rushed to the main entrance…

That is, he rushed through his study, out of his bachelor apartments, through the apartment that was being refurbished for himself and Irina and the baby; past Irina’s silver boudoir, with its exquisite silver alcove with a marble Diana on a plinth and vaulted ceiling painted with birds of Paradise; past his own sunken marble bathing pool and private sitting room with silk-upholstered art nouveau chairs and canapé; past his drawing room with its ornate plaster door-cases, white marble fireplace and Carelian birch parquet floor; past the Winter Garden with its ferns and tall, green marble pilasters; past the small ballroom with its pillars and an inlaid design on the parquet, and into the main house. Breathlessly, he raced along hundreds of feet of mahogany beneath gilded ceilings above which ran the great
enfilade
of drawing rooms on the first floor – the Red, the Green, the Blue, the large Rotunda, the small Rotunda – towards the picture galleries with their Canovas shrouded in dust sheets and their Rubens and Rembrandts mutely staring; past the Moorish room with its fretwork lanterns and glowing lacquerwork; past the unseeing eyes of a hundred onyx nymphs and naiads, towards the banqueting hall, the ballroom, the antique room, the Roman room and the theatre; on and on he ran, and through the colossal baroque marble foyer, and out of the great oak doors, and

…ran along the Moika quayside, towards the courtyard, hoping, in case Purishkevich had missed him, to stop Rasputin at the gates.

He heard two more shots. Rasputin fell near a snow-heap. Purishkevich stood over him for a minute and then turned and went back into the house.

Yusupov, ‘after looking around, and finding that the streets were empty, and that the shots had not attracted attention’, crossed to the snow-heap and saw that Rasputin was dead. ‘On his left temple gaped a large wound which, as I afterwards learned, was caused by Purishkevich’s heel’.

But people were approaching from two sides.

Purishkevich tells a less flattering story. Having seen the corpse and gone upstairs with the others, leaving the door ajar, he noted that it was now after three o’clock in the morning and they must hurry. Sukhotin put on Rasputin’s fur coat and galoshes, and carried his gloves. Lazovert once again dressed as the chauffeur. They left in Purishkevich’s car, with Dmitri Pavlovich, bound for the Warsaw Station, as planned, to burn Rasputin’s clothes in his train’s passenger coach, ‘where by then the stove should have been hot’.

Yusupov left Purishkevich in the study and went out of his own apartments, into the lobby, and into his parents’ apartments, empty at the time because they were out of town. In his absence, Purishkevich smoked a cigar and paced about. Then, compelled by an ‘inner force’, he picked up his Savage and put it into his trouser pocket, and

…under pressure of that same mysterious force, I left the study, whose hall door had been closed, and found myself in the corridor for no particular purpose.

I had hardly entered the hallway when I heard footsteps below near the staircase, then the sound of the door – which opened into the dining room where Rasputin lay – which the person entering evidently had not closed.

A moment later, he heard Yusupov’s wild cry below – ‘Purishkevich, shoot! Shoot! He’s alive! He’s escaping!’ – and Yusupov ‘rushed headlong, screaming’ upstairs, white as a sheet with bulging eyes, past Purishkevich and through the door to the main lobby and through to his parents’ apartments (where Purishkevich had thought he was all along). Purishkevich, momentarily dumbfounded, now heard

…rapid, heavy footsteps making their way to the door leading to the courtyard… There was not a moment to lose so, without losing my head, I pulled my Savage from my pocket, set it at
feu,
and ran down the stairs.

Outside, he spotted Rasputin, running swiftly on snow alongside the fence. Rasputin yelled ‘Felix, Felix, I will tell the Tsarina everything’ and, sure now that ‘he might, given his phenomenal vitality, get away… I rushed after him and fired’.