To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (30 page)

Scale left Petrograd for Romania on 11 November (24 November in the British calendar), so he cannot have been present for the last two meetings, or on the night of the murder. There is no doubt about this: his written record of the journey, and of his actions when in Romania, is vivid and indubitably true. The blown-up factories and burning oil fields that met the German invaders bear witness to the success of his dangerous mission. He received a DSO.

Captain Stephen Alley was also involved in the planning of Rasputin’s murder. As we have already noted, he and his family had a close and longstanding personal relationship with the Yusupov family. Like Rayner, Alley was a fluent Russian speaker. Did he accompany Rayner (with whom he shared an apartment) to the Yusupov Palace that night? Speaking fluent Russian and wearing Russian field coats, the pair would have been indistinguishable from any other Russian soldiers so far as Purishkevich, or indeed anyone else who might have met them that night, was concerned.

A British presence was, if anything, originally intended to be a token one, to discreetly observe that the job had been satisfactorily carried out. It is highly unlikely there was ever any anticipation that an active part would be taken in the proceedings. Further evidence of Alley and Rayner’s complicity is found in a letter Alley wrote to Scale eight days after the murder. Scale, who had just been ordered to return to Petrograd from Romania, had voiced the opinion that merely blowing up oil fields was not sufficient. He therefore proposed that RFC planes should follow up the sabotage with regular raids to ensure that the Germans were unable to get the wells back in production.
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London, it seemed, was a little apprehensive about the idea.

7th January, 1917

Dear Scale,

No response has thus far been received from London in respect to your oilfields proposal.

Although matters here have not proceeded entirely to plan, our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of ‘Dark Forces’ has been well received by all, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement.

Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you on your return.

Yours,

Stephen Alley, Capt.
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There is also reason to believe that Rasputin’s body was photographed at some point in the night, as evidence that he was indeed dead, prior to the disposal of the body (which it was hoped would never be discovered). Two months after the murder, these photographs were apparently discovered by the police and referred to in a report.

SECRET

To the Chief of the Public Security Department
Petrograd

February 22nd, 1917

No 5698

Fifth Section

By order of the Chief of the Counter-Intelligence Department of the Petrograd Military District Headquarters dated February 18th, Ref 3641, a search was made on February 19th at the apartment of Prince Yusupov Count Sumarokov-Elston’s secretary, Lieutenant of the 308th Petrograd druzhina, Leonid Rambur, residing at Ofitserskaya 36. As a result of the search, two photographs have been discovered of Grigori Rasputin’s dead body along with a key to deposit box No 912 at the Azovsko-Donskoy Bank. Rambur, who is not registered in our records as politically disloyal, has been released.
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This is one of a number of police and Okhrana documents that raise more questions than answers concerning an investigation which can retrospectively be seen as inept and ineffective. While appreciating that the investigation was still in its infancy when word came from on high to close it down, the omissions are astonishing. The bloodstains that were seen, and have been marked on the police scene of crime photographs, seem to have trailed from the door to a snow-heap by the second gate. The Police Report does not say the body was wrapped up or that the car drove into the courtyard. It seems that the body was picked up in the courtyard and carried across the pavement to the car.

According to the plan, this was supposed to be Dmitri Pavlovich’s car, with Dmitri driving, accompanied by Lazovert, Sukhotin, and Purishkevich.

The other omission has an internal political cause. Stepan Beletski later testified to the Extraordinary Commission that, because Protopopov was unwilling to have it known that he visited Rasputin, he had ‘ordered the external surveillance agents removed after 10.00p.m.’
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He told the Tsarina and Rasputin that the guard was on, but (Beletski said) ‘it was stationed not by the gate but across the street out of sight’. In other words, there was no Okhrana man stationed within sight of whoever visited. Popov may have heard from the yard superintendent in Gorokhovaya Street that Protopopov himself had dropped by late on the night of Rasputin’s death. If he did, either he judged it wiser to leave the information out, or he was told to. A number of writers and researchers, including Oleg Shishkin
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and Phil Tomaselli,
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have implied that Rasputin’s bodyguard was somehow withdrawn by a sinister hidden hand acting on behalf of the conspirators. In fact, all that was necessary for the assassination plans to progress was the acquisition of the knowledge that the guard was withdrawn at ten o’clock.

Building on the fault lines of the haphazard and incomplete contemporary investigations, Purishkevich, Yusupov and Lazovert published their own accounts with ulterior motives. Purishkevich was used to the adulation of the crowd, and in 1918, after the revolution, he wanted to regain popular attention. By 1927, Yusupov needed the money. He had also remained in touch with Oswald Rayner. Lazovert, too, used his short 1923 account to boost his own modest role in events and was no doubt well paid for his trouble.

The three stories are similar in key respects: the poison failed; Rasputin did not die of the first lethal gunshot wound; he got out of the house and ran across the yard;he was hit by two more bullets; he was kicked in the head and he was beaten frenziedly by Yusupov. In that order.

The details vary. The poison is crystals or shavings;it’s in either the chocolate cakes or the pink ones; the gang stay upstairs or don’t… Neither of them has Rasputin wearing a blue embroidered silk smock – in both accounts it is white, and embroidered. It is odd that a scene that would have been imprinted on most minds was wrong in this respect. They both get the colour of the cord right.

The major difference between the accounts is the key protagonist. The eager reader of Purishkevich finds that he was the dynamic one: some kind of supernatural force flooded through him and he saved the day by shooting Rasputin. In Yusupov’s story, he tries to be the hero, but ends up the victim of Rasputin’s superhuman powers. Lazovert, too, casts himself in a central, proactive role.

Yusupov does not claim to have delivered the final shot and Purishkevich’s story does not match the forensic evidence. Many at the time expected Dmitri Pavlovich to take the blame. Within thirty-six hours it became apparent that he was not going to admit a thing. Lazovert and Sukhotin are equally improbable candidates. So who did kill Rasputin?

He was strong and healthy, and harder to kill than they had expected. The poison failed. He was stabbed with a sword and left for dead. He escaped when the others were upstairs and they heard him opening the door. One of the party fired at him through the window, maybe another went out into the yard to have a look. Further firing was impossible. Reinforcements arrived.

As soon as the police had gone away, they dragged him back into the house. They did not want to shoot him because of the police. They tied him up and waited for him to die before taking him out to the Petrovski Bridge. But he did not die.

In desperation, two of them shot him outside in the yard. As they were carrying him out to the car, a third man checked, found that he still had a pulse, and put a bullet through his brain.

With the exception of Oswald Rayner’s involvement with the production of Yusupov’s Rasputin book in 1927, no one else in British circles wrote an account about Rasputin’s murder. Sir Samuel Hoare and Sir George Buchanan wrote memoirs which included brief references to background events. Albert Stopford’s diary likewise gives a commentator’s account rather than a participant’s.

However, a rich seam of oral history has survived through the children and grandchildren of the British officers who were involved in the planning of Rasputin’s death. The family of William Compton, the chauffeur, have recollections of stories about his time in Petrograd, the terrible conditions, the Red Cross Hospital and the murder of Rasputin. According to Compton, it was ‘a little known fact’that Rasputin had been shot not by a Russian but by ‘an Englishman’ whom he had known in Russia.
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He said nothing more about the man other than that he was a lawyer and was from the same part of the country as Compton himself. This story was never taken seriously by Compton’s family, who assumed that it was nothing more than a tale the old man told to add some colour to an otherwise uneventful and bleak period in his life.

According to the Compton family, William had been born not far from Birmingham. A search for his birth records reveals that he was born on 27 January 1881 in Kempsey, Worcestershire, some ten miles from where Oswald Rayner had been born and brought up.
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On all official documents, right up to his death in 1961, Rayner described himself as a ‘Barrister at Law’.
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He had not only confided in his cousin, Rose Jones, that he had been at the Yusupov Palace when the murder took place, but he also showed close members of the family a bullet which he claimed he had acquired from the murder scene.
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We also know that Rayner carried a .455 Webley service revolver, which, according to Professor Derrick Pounder, is the handgun that corresponds to the bullet that caused the fatal forehead wound.

The mysterious Englishman that the Tsar referred to during his conversation with Sir George Buchanan, whom he suspected of involvement in the murder, was certainly not Sir Samuel Hoare, who, as we have already seen, was not a college contemporary of Yusupov. Rayner was clearly the man whose identity Buchanan so carefully shielded when he came to relate the story in his memoirs.

On the afternoon following the murder, Yusupov met Rayner at the palace of his father-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.
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Together they had dinner with Irina’s three elder brothers, Prince Andrew, Prince Fyodor and Prince Nikita, their tutor Mr Stuart and Mlle Evreinova, a lady-in-waiting to Irina’s mother. Following the meal, Rayner, Yusupov, his three brothers-in-law and Mr Stuart took a car to the railway station in order to catch the nine o’clock train to the Crimea. At the station they found a large force of Palace Police on the steps of the main entrance. On getting out of the car, Yusupov was informed by a colonel that on the orders of the Tsarina he was forbidden to leave Petrograd and was to be placed under house arrest. Prince Nikita decided to proceed to the Crimea with Mr Stuart. Everyone else got back into the car and returned to the palace. Rayner, we are told, remained there with Yusupov. Although his escape had been foiled, Yusupov would survive to tell his story. After a brief appearance in the limelight of Yusupov’s book, Rayner melted back into the milieu as unobtrusively as he had made his entrance.

O
ut of the chaos, an aim was achieved: Rasputin died. Nobody was arrested for the crime and no charges were ever brought. When the Tsar realised the extent of his own family’s involvement, the investigations were effectively closed. Despite Dmitri Pavlovich’s request to be tried before a courtmartial, Nicholas decided to exile Yusupov to his Rakitnoe estate near Kursk and exile Dmitri Pavlovich to Persia. No action was taken against anyone else allegedly involved in the murder. A court-martial would have made Dmitri a hero and given him a public platform. Nicholas’s response was therefore a reluctantly practical one while at the same time typically weak and lenient.

Rasputin’s body did not lie in peace for very long. In March 1917, a group of soldiers guarding the palace apparently dug up the body, soaked it in petrol and set fire to it in a nearby forest. This story is not wholly substantiated, however, and other evidence suggests that the body was exhumed on the orders of Alexander Kerenski and taken away to be secretly cremated.
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Many Rasputin biographers have, over the years, maintained that he foresaw his own death, alluding to a letter Rasputin apparently wrote to the Tsar, the contents of which Simanovich made public.

Russian Tsar! I have a presentiment that I shall leave this world by 1st January. If I am killed by hired assassins, then you Tsar will have no one to fear. Remain on your throne and rule. But if the murder is carried out by your own kinsmen, then not one member of your family will survive more than two years.
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However, the original copy of this letter in Rasputin’s own handwriting has never been found (if indeed it ever existed). Those who have, in recent years, made a study of Rasputin’s writings have concluded that the construction of the prose has no similarity with Rasputin’s own uneducated but highly poetic written style and grammatical conventions.
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The language in the passage bears all the hallmarks of Simanovich himself, who published it after the execution of the Tsar and his family, adding further to the myths surrounding Rasputin.