At 12.30 am on the 16th of December 1916, Grigori Yefimomich Rasputin opened the door of his apartment on Gorojavaya St in Saint Petersburg on the way to his own death. The staircase of the building was dark, so he offered to guide his companion, Prince Felix Yusupov and Count Elston-Sumarokov, through the darkness. They went down the stairs holding each other by the arm. Rasputin knew the way by heart, but Yusupov thought to himself that the eyes of the peasant were capable of seeing. Everybody who had ever met him used to agree on the strange nature of his gaze, on its hypnotic power, on the disturbing depth of his sockets. In the pictures that have reached us he still looks at posterity with an outlandish look of diabolic madness. Nevertheless, misfortune’s gallows humour did not allow the clairvoyant, to whom many had attributed superhuman powers, to realise that he was beside his own murderer.
It was not too cold at that time (two or three degrees), and the snow was falling calmy, indifferently and quietly over the city. When they stepped out on the street the Prince’s car was already waiting for them, driven by Dr Lazavert disguised as a chauffeur –another person in the plot to put an end to the most influent Court advisor in the country, the man whom the Tsars considered holy and whom they received for hours both in the Winter Palace and their Tsarkoe Selo residence, the man they usually called Our Friend in the secret and affectionate way which the marriage of the Emperors of All the Russias was so fond of.
The domestic routine of Rasputin’s last night, together with a multitude of details related to his life in court and his activities, is known to us through the testimonies of his maid, his circle of followers and some politicians, who had to report to the authorities as a result of the later February Revolution. The reports were kept in the file of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime, Instruction Section [1]. Such commission was abolished by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and the file was not found until 1995 when the cello player Milan Rostropovich acquired it in a Sotheby’s auction, donating it afterwards to his writer friend Edvard Radzinsky, whose The Rasputin File constitutes one of the most important studies carried out on our character to date.
During that last night of his, Rasputin –also known as Grigori, Girshka, The Elder (in the traditional Russian sense of calling Elder to saints and wise men) and The Obscure One (as recorded in the police files from August 1914 onwards) received the visit of one of his frequent admirers. She was a chubby blonde of around 25, as per his niece’s, living at the time in the apartment, and the building caretaker’s report. She stayed with Rasputin in the famous sofa room, where damsels in distress, professional devout ladies and also curious women of doubtful reputation used to stop by every time they went to flutter around the enlightened man.
Alexander Protopopov, Home Secretary back then, an almost almighty position in 1916 Russia, showed up at the apartment at midnight. He stayed for ten minutes, but Grigori did not tell him he had planned to go out. Protopopov was one of the decisive pawns which fate used to direct Rasputin on the way to his own death. In the past the Secretary had ordered all daily surveillance over Rasputin [2] to be stopped from 10 pm onwards so that there would be no record of his frequent visits to the house in any official report. Rasputin was unaware of this, so when that night he went out to the street holding Felix Yusupov’s arm he was convinced that his guards would follow them closely. But the truth was that he was walking self-confidently and alone beside the person who had long ago organized a conspiracy to kill him.
The Yusupovs were the most important people in Russia after the Royal family, and as rich if not richer than the Emperors themselves. From the times of Ivan The Terrible they owned immense areas of land. They later went on to become great industrials. For 300 years the Yusupovs had become some sort of Royal shadow. Felix Yusupov was married to Tsar Alexander’s niece, the Great Duchess Irina. Although he carried the blood of the cruel and warlike Tatar people, Felix himself was more of a sissy. Curiously enough, he was denied to join the military service because he did not want to participate in any war that involved spilling blood. During his youth, long before his conspiring intrigues, he led a life of a well-off and dissolute pleasure taker. Together with his older brother Nicholas (killed on a duel by his lover’s husband later on) he enjoyed the voluptuous nightlife of Saint Petersburg and Paris, many times dressed like a woman, while he played with bi-sexuality, a hobby he kept for the rest of his life.
The night of the 16th of December the car driven by Dr Lazavert came to a halt at a lateral courtyard of the Yusupov Palace, on the Moïka canal. Felix and Irina inhabited one of the building’s wings, and they were refurbishing it to their taste. That rehabilitation included the basement where the murder of Rasputin was staged. It featured thick walls and small windows at ground level. (As Radzinsky indicates in his study, history mirrored that event with the location of the Ipatiev House where the Royal family was killed soon after, in the middle of the Yekaterinburg night, which was chillingly similar.) The basement had been re-decorated in the classic style of a Russian dining/living-room. We know the exact details of the scene, described in Felix’s memoirs many years later and published in Paris. The ceiling was vault-shaped and an arch divided the two sections of the basement: one of them had been turned into a small dining-room, and the other one into a small living-room. There were niches in the walls with housed Chinese porcelain vases. They had brought down from the attic some old chairs of carved wood and leather upholstery, ivory chalices, a larder from the times of Catherine The Great with ebony inlays and a labyrinth of bronze and glass columns which hid small drawers. A Persian rug covered the floor, and in front of the larder an enormous Polar bear’s skin was spread. The guest dining-room table was in the centre of the room. A spiral staircase communicated the basement with Felix’s rooms. Half-way through the staircase there was a door that gave access to the courtyard, through which Felix and Rasputin entered the basement as soon as the car stopped.
The bait used to take Rasputin to that lair has never been precisely known. The most probable thing is that it was a mixture of several excuses. On the one hand, it was a flattering invitation, as it came from one of the most powerful persons in the country. On the other hand, as indicated by the close and astute witness the Great Duke Nikolai Mijailovich in his diary, Felix had used his erotic charms in that self-seeking friendship, and Rasputin was not alien to male love because it was easy for him to reconcile the basics of masculinity and femininity. And last, but not least, Rasputin longed to meet the beautiful Irina, used as bait by Felix, and for whom The Elder lusted for. The ruse required that Irina be treated from an illness of a supposedly spiritual origin. As we shall see, Rasputin often expelled the demons of lust through the use of lust itself, he internalized alien sin by committing the sin himself. That way the later repentance would free both healer and patient. Everything seems to indicate that during the last days of the conspiracy Felix was being treated from the same condition. In theory, Irina had to be cured that night -saved from perdition by Grigory Yefimovich, the peasant who came from Siberia and who, back then and during the drunken stupor of 1916, had boasted of having Russia “in the palm of his hand”.
Nevertheless, that night Irina was not in the Yusupov palace. Eventhough she had initially agreed to take part on the conspiracy, she soon repented and on her letters to her husband she pleaded him to abandon the assassination plan. She stayed in her Crimea residence, suffering of a hyperaesthesia crisis which prostrated her in bed with a fever, surrounded by strange ill-fated premonitions which predicted war, blood and suffering for the country –as it eventually happened.
But when Rasputin walked down the stairs and entered the basement he was convinced that the niece of the Tsar Alexander II was at home, in the upstairs quarter, from where voices and gramophone music with the melody of the American song “Yankee Doodle” could be heard. The music brought about a slight inappropriate frivolity to the events surrounding a crime.
Once he parked the car, Dr Lazavert got rid of his chauffeur disguise and joined the rest of conspirators in the first floor rooms. Vladimir Purishkevich was also there, a monarchical and anti-semitic politician, member of the Duma [3] and who had already delivered controversial speeches against both Rasputin and the Tsarina Alexandra Fiodorovna, calling her a German in Russia’s throne, alien to the country and its people. Together with Purishkevich were the lieutenant Sujotin (a young officer who was in [Yevgeni] Preobrazhensky’s regiment) and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, cousin of Tsar Nicholas II and another character to play a main role in the conspiracy.
Dimitri was a tall, hefty and handsome Imperial Guard officer. An athlete who took part in the Olympic Games, he was a scrounger and a member of the exclusive Yacht Club -back in those days a main place where seditious conspiracies were forged under the country’s growing instability. Without a shadow of a doubt he was Nicholas’ favourite, who probably saw and admired in his libertine relative everything that fate had denied him, making him first a hypochondriac with an extreme lack of will power and then loading him with duties in a time of serious internal and international conflicts. Dimitri had been engaged to Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, the Tsar’s eldest daughter, but the engagement had been called off at the Tsarina’s and Rasputin’s urges. Tsarina Alexandra was aware of the fact that Nicholas’ cousin despised The Elder, so she uncovered the scandal of Dimitri’s homosexual indiscretions with Felix Yusupov. She also reported his hardened drinker’s temper, him being a duel provoker hooked on never-ending wild parties. Rasputin predicted that Dimitri would soon contract a skin condition as a result of his licentious life, and thus Coco Chanel’s lover saw himself being put aside from his grand wedding, already announced in society.
Thus, the four conspirators were listening by the staircase on the first floor to Rasputin and Felix’s voices coming from the basement. Down there they were sitting facing each other, talking lively by the fireplace. Grigori had walked the blurred, enigmatic and almost always inexplicable path of his own life and had ended up in that basement.
He was born in the village of Pokrovskoye, Tyumen (a district in the Tobolsk province), on the 10th of January 1869, St Gregory’s day. We know very little of his early years, apart from the fact that his life initially looked like one most of Siberian peasants were destined to: the routine of a drunken man. That was until he converted through pain and humiliation. His Dostoyevskian-type ecstasy was inflicted to him by a neighbour, who caught him stealing in his fields and thrashed him. From then onwards, he became a begging pilgrim with a strange nervous system. Some witnesses of the time recall that he looked like a retard, always fighting his inner demon. The origin of the legend that he had predictive powers, that he could make prophesies (some having to do with the fall of the Romanovs, others about the end of disastrous draughts), comes from this pre-history of his.
Rasputin was doubtless linked throughout his life to the teachings of the heretic Khlysty, flagellators who became living christs during delirious ceremonies of sexual promiscuity, which they called joys. The Khlysty used to practice a spiritual training which required three compulsory steps: sin, repentance and purification. Without this mystic heretic background Rasputin’s future behaviour towards matters of the flesh could never be understood.
The Tsars must have met him in November 1905, although introduced them remains unknown. The temper of the Tsars is as mysterious to us as Rasputin’s, for at the end of the day it was the Tsars themselves the ones to decide to believe in him –against the warnings of the rest of the Romanov family, the high aristocracy, the political class and other commoner witnesses. Nicholas, who had been born surrounded by blood –as was his dynasty’s story, was a taciturn and superstitious human being. Alexandra, despite her firm character and her interfering intents to become a great statistician was prone to all sorts of mysticisms. Apparently they took Rasputin as the reincarnation of a deceased old spiritual adviser, Monsieur Philippe, a French magician who had a therapeutical reputation. In their first meeting Rasputin showed to have the intuition of a cheat. He asked to see Alexei, the Tsarevich, whose ill health, caused by haemophilic crisis, had the Royal family upside down, which had desperately looked for an heir after the birth of four Grand Duchesses. Rasputin put his hands on him, stared at him, prayed out loud and the kid felt relieved instantly. Ever since then he became indispensable to the Tsars. Nobody ever found out whether Alexei’s improvements were more related to the old man’s hypnotic powers or to his knowledge of ancient pagan healing secrets, but the bottom line is that the improvements did take place.
In the meantime, Grigori Yefimovich, settling down in St Petersburg, started to climb up within the Palace’s hierarchy and winning the Royal Family’s trust completely. By 1910 he already allowed himself to deal with politics. He influenced Russia’s recognition of both the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the part of Austria-Hungary and in the Tsars’ warlike neutrality (interpreted by many as a betrayal to Serbian Orthodox brothers). Moreover, Rasputin treated the Head of the Holy Synod, Sabler, in order to earn himself a follower in the Tsarina’s clique. From then onwards Alexandra and Rasputin managed to reciprocally wish for the same: The Elder corroborated with God all the Empress’ political maneuvers.
At the same time, Rasputin’s circle of devoted admirers was growing. They were idle members of society, bourgeois ladies who had religious pretensions, but also simple commoners. They looked after him as devouts would have dotted over scarlet cardinals. Countesses and Duchesses used to visit him, kissed his hand, kneeled in front of him, showered him with gifts and, before they left, requested, as the highest favour, to be able to take his dirty clothes, with sweat if possible, in order to wash them.
The sexual favours he received from women were already legendary back then. He went to bath houses surrounded by devout ladies, he administered his disciples –his fools, in the mystic sense of kind purity, private healings from the devil of lubricity in his office’s sofa, and he chased any stranger who crossed his way. In the police reports of those years, policemen recorded his visits to brothels, which took place several times a day. Sometimes he fell into a fit, kidnapped a street prostitute, disappeared into an apartment and came out shortly after, talking loudly and making strange gestures. The rumour in the capital was that his cock was as big as a horse’s. The Tsarevic’s nanny, Mary Vishnyakova, accused him of having thrown himself on her and stealing her virginity in a joyful ritual.
In those days Rasputin had also accomplished a sociological kind of feat: he managed to unite everybody in the common task of loathing him. The [political] left took him for a reactionary and anti-Semitic person; the right and the Monarchy feared his preferences towards characters they detested; the Court despised him as a peasant; the Orthodox Church was suspicious of his airs of heretic Khlysty; the Prime Minister back then, Stolypin, did not understand the power Rasputin had over the Tsars; the Romanovs were scandalized by his influence; the military high command complained about his opposition to war. All things considered, what is it surprising is not that there was a conspiracy against his life but that dozens of them had not been carried out already.
In much the same way, it is nothing but a mystery the fact that the Tsars not only turned a deaf ear to all the accusations that reached them –which came from their family circle, from the members of the Duma and from the regime’s secret police informants, but that they systematically went on destituting and putting aside any person who tried to set them against The Elder.
The only likely explanation lies once again in the Emperors’ extraordinary supersticious religiousness: it is not that they were blind but that they were convinced they could see the hereafter. They believed they could see what others were incapable to understand. Alexandra and Nicholas thought Rasputin had the gift of the iurodstvo, the holy foolishness [4] . In the Russian mystic tradition, mad saints have a great historical importance. St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square is devoted to one of them. They were usually beggars who went around naked and weighed themselves down with chains, screaming oracles and prophecies. They pretended they were mad in order to suffer humiliations and to experiment pain and prosecution, like Christ. They mocked conventions and wordly vices as a way to become mirrors for hypocritical sinners. They harassed women, fornicated in public. Such were the exploits of the iurodstvo.
Alexandra’s private library contained the volume Holy Fools of the Russian Church, with margin notes, including a chapter on the sexual libertinage of ascetics. That is why the Tsars knew how to interpret Rasputin’s behaviour like nobody else.
Before the beginning of The Great War, an unknown woman inspired by Iliodor –a religious enemy of The Elder stabs Rasputin in Pokrovskoye. For days, Grigory is on the brink of dying. When he returns to St Petersburg he is another man: he drinks desperately, dances in circles kicking his boots for hours without feeling dizzy, and he turns more prone to obscure predictions: Angels in the ranks of our warriors, the salvation of our fearless heroes with delight and victory…Nevertheless, whenever he was called to Tsarkoe Selo in the middle of his drinking binges in order to treat Alexei he surprisingly managed to clear up and became suddenly sober.
When the war begins to go astray Nicholas dismisses the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich Romanov [5] as Commander in Chief of the Russian Army. At Alexandra and Rasputin’s request the Tsar himself takes charge of military operations. The Tsarina then takes charge of the Government and organizes a true coup d’état with the help of her main advisers: Anna Vyrubova and Grigori Yefimovich. The Home Secretary, the Holy Synod’s General Agent and the Head of Police are also dismissed and substituted by more trusted people. The indignation felt towards the role of the Tsarina could not be greater. She was thought to have bewitched Nicholas, to be hastening the fall of the Monarchy and to be secretly working in the signing (after ordering the dissolution of the Duma) of a unilateral peace treaty with her country of origin, Germany, which would be considered as a national embarrassment.
When Felix Yusupov heard about such rumours he decided he had to kill Rasputin at any cost and as soon as possible. All the Elder’s steps had taken since his early wandering times around Siberia like a feverish visionary brought him to that basement in the Moïka canal. Thus, when Prince Yusupov had him sitting in front of him, he offered him a few pink creamy tea cakes poisoned with potassium cyanide crystals.
According to the legend, Rasputin refused them together with the Madeira wine, also laced with cyanide. When Felix Yusupov started to run out of conversation topics and suspect signs of his victim’s premonitions, Grigori decided to eat and drink. Felix later wrote that that night The Dark One drank enough glasses of Madeira wine and tea cakes to kill a regiment of Cossacks, but that he did not show any symptom of poisoning, apart from an incresase in salivation and a constant yawning. Desperate, he left the basement, checked with the rest of conspirators and asked Dimitri Pavlovich his regulation weapon. He went back to where Rasputin was with the gun behind his back and shot him in the chest. The mythological tale states that he fell on the polar bear’s skin, and that the rest hurried to move him so as to avoid it to get soaked with blood.
They left him in the basement, in the dark, on the naked floor, and went upstairs. In his memoirs Felix recounted that shortly after he could not resist the need to see the corpse again. They went back to the crime scene, shook the body and felt it was still warm. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes and stared at his assassin’s face. Next he stood up and grabbed Felix powerfully by the neck. When the Prince managed to let go, Rasputin, who was repeating Felix’s name without stopping, escaped towards the garden through the staircase. Purishkevich caught up with him in the backyard and shot him four times with his Savage revolver in two rounds of shots. He missed the first two. The third one, he later wrote, hit Rasputin in the back as he was running, and the fourth one hit him in the head. The servants in the Yusupov Palace dragged the corpse back into the house through the snow. Once there Felix suffered a hysteria crisis and started to hit Rasputin’s head with an iron bar covered with rubber until he fell exhausted, drenched by the splattered blood.
Just then two police officers on duty in the Moïka canal precinct knocked on the Palace’s doors. They thought they had heard some shooting. The nervous Purishkevich identified himself as a member of the Duma, confessed to the murder and appealed to the policemen’s patriotism in order to keep silent –for Mother Russia’s benefit. Nevertherless, early next morning St Petersburg’s Mayor Alexander Balk reported to Protopov –Minister of Home Affairs the unbelievable conversation that had taken place between one of the murderers and the two accidental witnesses of the shooting. The rumour of Rasputin’s murder spread all over the city until it reached the Tsarkoe Selo and the Tsars’ ears.
Although we will never know exactly what happened in that basement, Radzinsky’s doubt on both Yusupov’s and Purishkevich’s written accounts do make sense. Rasputin’s amazing resistance to arsenic can be explained by two reasons. First, the wine’s dissolution was not appropriate and the arsenic dose was insufficient. As far as the tea cakes, Rasputin did not eat them: he never skipped his diet, which prescribed to abstain from meat and sweets because they darkened one’s halo. The most probable explanation is that Felix, who hated weapons and was of an apprehensive nature, wounded him only slightly. Thus his resurrection. As far as Purishkevich is concerned, it is not credible that a civilian missed the first two shots and then managed to hit him later, when he was further away, with two precise shots in the back and head. The Duma’s member took some trouble during the following days in trying to acquit Dimitri Pavlovich in as far as possible. He said many times that the Royal hands were not blood-stained. But it had to be Dimitri, a courageous soldier and elite shooter the one to strike Rasputin in the yard. The second round, the mortal shots, came from the Tsar’s cousin’s pistol. That is why Nicholas imposed Dimitri, his favourite, the most severe punishment and sent him to the front in Persia. He did not have any doubt about who had taken Rasputin down.
The floating corpse showed up in the freezing waters of the Neva River with a naked torso on the morning of the 19th of December. The face was disfigured; there were bullet holes in the thorax, back and head. It was strange: its arms were up. According to the doctors in their autopsy report, Rasputin was still alive and trying to break his ties when he was thrown by his murderers into a hole dug in the ice under the Great Petrovsky Bridge.
Soon after that Nicholas would abdicate and a cloud of blood would rain over Russia.
Translated from “El místico depravado”, by Carlos Marzal in El País Semanal, published on the 12th February 2006 (available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/mistico/depravado/elpeputec/20060212elpepspor_8/Tes)
by CARLOS MARZAL
EL PAIS SEMANAL – 12-02-2006
