BORN IN 1869, Grigori Rasputin was a charismatic and Machiavellian machinator popularly believed to have been able to control the Tsarevich’s haemophilia by hypnosis. By 1905, this placed Rasputin in the Russian Tsar’s inner circle, a position he abused by using that same hypnotic power allegedly to seduce the Tsarina, a scandal which led to his death at the hands of Russian nobility. Likewise, the nightmarish account of that assassination has provided the content of many a film in which the dishevelled mystic is poisoned, repeatedly shot and stabbed, and hit with everything but the kitchen sink, yet is still alive when he is rolled up in a carpet and dumped in the freezing Neva river. All such melodrama appears to be lurid invention; indications are that in fact Rasputin was assassinated in 1916 by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). But how did such a malodorous peasant insinuate himself into the upper echelons of the grandest royal court of the day?
The Russian royal court of Nicholas II and Alexandra was opulent beyond imagination but much of the country was locked in a sort of medieval culture long abandoned by the rest of Europe, with serfdom not completely abolished until 1892. Many at court were obsessed with the occult and constantly on the search for the next prophet to act as their hotline to God. Nicholas certainly believed that God spoke through the mouths of simpletons and the demented, prompting him to welcome into his court a succession of lunatics – and charlatans acting the part – to be consulted on matters of domestic or foreign policy. In 1903 Eric Weiss, aka Harry Houdini, was invited to perform for the court. Nicholas went into raptures and, ignoring Houdini’s insistence that all was smoke and mirrors, proclaimed him to the court to be the genuine Volshebnik (Wizard or Miracle Man) for whom they had all been waiting. Politely turning down the Tsar’s pleadings for him to remain at court in such a capacity and later explaining his very real fears that the court might hold him captive, like some performing animal, Houdini fled the city just as Rasputin arrived in St Petersburg to find the stage set and the role of Volshebnik open for the taking.
Having heard of Rasputin’s alleged healing powers, Alexandra sent for him to see if he could do anything about her son’s haemophilia. He did seem to have a positive effect on reducing the severity of the distressing bouts of both internal and external bleeding. Some have suggested that he used hypnosis to calm the boy and slow down his heart rate but there is no evidence that Rasputin was skilled in Mesmer’s art. More likely, his intervention kept at bay the court doctors with their leeches, coupled with their use of a new wonder drug called aspirin, now recognized as an extraordinarily efficient anti-clotting agent, so not the best treatment for a haemophiliac. Something about Rasputin’s presence seemed to work for the child so the Tsar and Tsarina were from then on in thrall to him.
To keep the royals compliant, Rasputin encouraged their experimental drug-taking until Alexandra was hopelessly addicted to barbiturates, cocaine and morphine while Nicholas was endlessly puffing on marijuana joints laced with psychotropic henbane. Now believing himself to be in a position to influence foreign policy, Rasputin started to pressure the Tsar into withdrawing from the First World War. But this was to prove his undoing. Well aware of the extent of Rasputin’s influence over the Tsar, alarm bells started ringing in the British Secret Intelligence Service, which also suspected, quite rightly, that he had opened up lines of communication to German intelligence by presenting himself as a peace broker. Russia’s withdrawal from the war would result in 350,000 German troops making a U-turn for the Western Front where such numbers would tip the balance in favour of Berlin. Rasputin had to go.
With the machinations of a secret service being, by their very nature, secret, we will never be sure of the details but the following is what most consider to be the likely chain of events leading up to the death of Rasputin. Towards the close of 1916, Captain Oswald Rayner of the SIS was ordered to re-establish contact with his one-time lover, Prince Felix Yusupov; the pair had studied together at Oxford and Yusupov, a flamboyant transvestite, was but one of many courtiers anxious to be rid of Rasputin. Already based in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was named from the beginning of the First World War), Rayner, his deputy Stephen Alley (who had been born at the Yusupov palace as his father had been a tutor to the young Felix) and another SIS officer called John Scale, started to lay their plans. Rayner contacted Yusupov and the pair met frequently in the days leading up to the assassination; this is borne out by the log of Rayner’s driver, which details the visits to the Yusupov Moika Palace, the penultimate visit on the day before the killing and the last the day after. It was agreed that Yusupov would lure Rasputin to the Moika on 30 December 1916 (17 December on the Old Style Russian calendar then in use) with the promise of a night of drunken debauchery. After a fairly brutal struggle involving Yusupov and a couple of other Russian nobles, during which Rasputin took a hit from a small-calibre bullet, Rayner stepped in and shot Rasputin point-blank in the middle of the forehead with his Webley .445 service revolver. No slavering demon refusing to die: down he went like a sack of potatoes. As the Russian contingent struggled to compose themselves, Rayner and associates trussed up the body, rolled it up in a carpet and, under cover of dark, dumped it in the nearby freezing river.
But it is, of course, Yusupov’s nightmarish account of the event which, delivered up for public consumption, was designed to obscure the fact that he had involved the agents of a foreign power in Russian internal affairs. It also made him look like the saviour of Mother Russia, ridding the country of a man seen by many as the devil incarnate. He claimed that in preparation for Rasputin’s visit he had laced all the miniature cakes and Madeira with copious amounts of cyanide but that his demonic visitor simply scoffed and swigged away like there was no tomorrow. So, he shot Rasputin twice through the heart at close range but this only made him angry. Now allegedly joined by the other nobles, the group collectively shot their victim a few more times, stabbed him, kicked him in the head and stamped on his throat. Yet when they left him for dead and returned with the carpet, Rasputin leapt up to attack them, which called for more shooting, stabbing, clubbing, etc., before they carried out the still-snarling Rasputin to drown him in the river.
THE REAL RASPUTIN
Born Grigori Yefimovich Novykh in Siberia in 1869, Rasputin was a troublesome teenager, much involved in anti-social behaviour and petty crime. In 1887 he was married to Praskovya Dubrovina, with whom he had seven children before having to go on the run in 1897 for horse rustling, but his abandoned wife remained devoted to Grigori to the end. Only three of their children, Maria, Dimitri and Vavara, survived into adulthood.
Once on the road, Grigori realized the profits to be had from becoming a peripatetic mystic and adopted the epithet of Rasputin, which means ‘the debauchee’, before coming up with the concept of salvation through sin. Needless to say, he had little trouble in attracting neophytes to that doctrinal banner.
By 1905 he was working his charms in St Petersburg, where he managed to enthral the Princesses Militsa and Anastasia of Montenegro, both married to cousins of the Tsar – and the rest, as they say, is history.
The first problem with the Yusupov account centres on his mention of Madeira wine and the petit-fours, both of which would have been agonizing for Rasputin to consume. On 29 June 1914 he had been attacked by a peasant woman called Khioniya Guseva who, after slicing open his abdomen, ran through the streets shrieking that she had killed the Anti-Christ. The damage left Rasputin with hyper-acidosis, making the ingestion of any sugar an extremely painful experience. Furthermore, the original autopsy performed by Professor Dmitry Kossorotov found no trace of poison in the body – and he was actively seeking it after hearing the Yusupov account – and the lungs contained no water, leaving cause of death to be a single shot to the forehead from a heavy-calibre pistol. This autopsy was reviewed in 1993 by Dr Vladimir Zharov and again in 2005 by the pre-eminent forensic pathologist Dr Derrick Pounder, with neither finding any fault with the original. Also involved in that review of 2005 was the Firearms Department of the Imperial War Museum, which, after studying the forensic photographs taken of Rasputin’s head at the time, commented that ‘the size and prominence of the abraded margin of the entry-point [of the kill-shot] indicated a large lead and unjacketed bullet’, which they suggested came from a Webley .445 British officer’s pistol. At the time, Britain was unique in that its service pistols still used the old-style unjacketed and heavy lead slug.
Fearing for her own life, Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, fled first to Bucharest to work as an ‘exotic’ dancer and then to the United States where she toured with Ringling Bros Circus as a lion tamer. The Yusupovs, too, ended up in the States where they sued MGM over Rasputin and the Empress (1932), a film which falsely depicted Irina Yusupov, thinly disguised as the Princess Natasha, as one of Rasputin’s sexual conquests. MGM had to stump up a large settlement plus costs, which prompted all film producers thenceforth to add the now familiar disclaimer stating that: ‘any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental’, etc.
As for Rasputin himself, he would prove more trouble dead than alive. In 1917 the Germans, still furious at the British for bumping off the man most likely to drag Russia out of the war, turned their attentions to Lenin, then sulking in exile in Switzerland, and to Trotsky, who languished in New York. Having filled the latter’s pockets with gold and sent him back to Russia, they also put Lenin on a sealed train with 50 million gold marks and likewise returned him to Russia to take control of the chaos and keep Russia far too busy with internal upheaval to be bothered with any war in Europe. And it was money well spent; Russia did withdraw from the First World War as the result of the capitalist-funded Communist revolution.