Transcript
Start with a peasant from Siberia. A mystic, a wanderer, a man with strange eyes and a stranger reputation. By the winter of 1916 he has done something almost no one in Russia has done. He has walked into the palace of the Tsar and made himself indispensable. The Tsar and the Tsarina hang on his word. Ministers rise and fall at his say. Or so it is whispered, in every salon and every barracks in the empire.
His name is Grigori Rasputin, and Russia is losing a war.
The story goes that a circle of conservatives decided he had to go. They believed he was poisoning the monarchy from within. There was Prince Felix Yusupov, young, rich, married to the Tsar's niece. There was Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Duma, loud and fierce. And there was Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the Tsar's own cousin. Three men of the old order. They would kill the mystic, and in doing so, save the throne.
The place was the Moika Palace, Yusupov's home in St Petersburg. The night was the sixteenth of December, Old Style. By our calendar, the seventeenth.
Yusupov did the luring. He knew what drew Rasputin. Women, and a little danger. So he spoke of his wife, the lovely Irina. She would be coming down to meet him, he said. She was just upstairs, finishing with some guests.
And upstairs, a phonograph played. Music, voices, the murmur of a party. A trick of sound to make a quiet house feel alive.
Rasputin went down to the cellar to wait.
The cellar had been dressed for the evening. A table, a samovar, a plate of little cakes. A bottle of Madeira, and glasses. Everything laid out, as the story tells it, to look like ordinary hospitality.
The cakes had been laced with cyanide. So had the wine.
Yusupov offered the cakes. Rasputin refused at first. Then he took one. Then, the legend says, a second. Yusupov watched. He waited for the choking, the clutch at the throat, the fall.
Nothing happened.
So the prince poured the Madeira. Rasputin drank it, they say, like a connoisseur. Glass after glass, savouring it. Enough poison, in the telling, to fell a roomful of men. And he sat there, calm, chatting, asking again when Irina would come.
Yusupov could bear it no longer. He went upstairs, and came back with a revolver.
He found Rasputin before a cabinet, admiring a crucifix. And he fired. In the back, or the chest, the accounts differ. Rasputin cried out and fell. Dr Lazovert, one of the conspirators, bent over him and pronounced him dead.
The men went upstairs to wait. But Yusupov grew uneasy. He went back down to look at the body once more.
And here, in the version that has been told for a century, the dead man opened an eye.
Rasputin lunged to his feet. He made a sound, an animalistic roar. He seized at Yusupov, going for the prince's throat. Yusupov tore free and fled up the stairs, retching with fear, and behind him came the thing that would not die.
Rasputin burst out into the courtyard. Snow lay deep on the ground. He staggered toward the gate, toward the street, toward escape.
Purishkevich was waiting. He raised his pistol, a Savage, and cocked it. He fired at the dark figure running through the snow. And missed. He fired again, and missed again. The shape was still moving, still lurching toward the gate.
The third shot struck him in the back.
He fell. But he did not stay down. He was crawling now, dragging himself through the snow toward the street. And Purishkevich stepped close and fired a fourth time. This one hit him in the forehead.
At last he lay still.
Then came the disposal. The legend turns dark here, and the details multiply with every teller. The body was beaten, clubbed, to be sure. Some versions go further and say Yusupov mutilated it, castrated it. It was wrapped in a heavy curtain and bound. And it was carried to the Petrovsky Bridge, and dropped through a hole in the ice, into the black river.
And the final detail is the one that has chilled readers for a hundred years. When they found the body, they say, the lungs were full of water. A man with poison in his blood. A man with bullets in his body. A man clubbed, bound, and thrown under the ice. And he had died of drowning.
Think about what that means. Somewhere in the dark, under the ice, he was still breathing. After all of it, he was still alive.
Some who tell it go further still. They say it proves what his followers always claimed. That he was no ordinary man. That something held him to life, something the poison could not kill and the bullets could not stop.
Others tell of a curse, laid on the family that killed him. Others, of a man whose body simply refused to give in.
Could any human being take all that? Is this what really happened in that cellar?
There is a record of that night. Not a memoir, not a legend. An examination of the body, by a man who was there when it was taken from the water.
His name was Dr Dmitry Kosorotov. He was the chief autopsy surgeon of the city. And he did not come to the body by chance. He was ordered to it, on the specific instructions of the Tsar.
So what did he find?
Three gunshot wounds. One in the left chest. One in the back. One in the head. Three. Not four, and not scattered across a courtyard chase in the snow.
And then he looked for the poison. Cyanide, enough to fell a roomful of men, in the cakes and in the wine. His report says: "the examination reveals no trace of poison." He found alcohol. Only alcohol.
Now, a daughter of Rasputin said he disliked sweets. He would never have eaten those cakes in the first place. And there is something stranger still. Dr Lazovert, the man who pronounced him dead in the legend, said himself that he had second thoughts about the poison. He said he swapped the cyanide for something harmless. So the poison that supposedly failed to kill Rasputin may never have been in the cakes at all.
Then the question of the river. The autopsy reports do not mention poison, and they do not mention drowning. They conclude that he was shot in the head, at close range. A modern biography, by Smith, says he simply died of his wounds.
But the most unsettling piece of evidence is a photograph. Police found it two months after the murder. It is a post-mortem image, and it shows a wound in the middle of the forehead. Around it, a muzzle imprint, a ring of abrasion, where the barrel of a gun was pressed against the skin. And no stippling, none of the tiny burns that powder leaves when a gun is fired from a distance.
A forensic pathologist named Byard studied it. His reading is that the gun was against the forehead when it fired. Kosorotov's own findings point the same way, a weapon pressed to the head. If that is right, this was no shot at a man crawling through the snow, fired by Purishkevich from across a courtyard. This was an execution. And Byard argues it means Rasputin was dead before he ever entered the water.
National Geographic adds a detail. The three wounds, it reports, came from different-calibre revolvers. The fatal shot to the head, it says, possibly from a .455 Webley.
So where did the legend come from?
Largely, from one man. Yusupov published his account in the late 1920s, first as a book in French, later in his memoirs. By then he had lost his fortune, and the murder was something he could sell. Byard suggests the aim was an epic struggle of good against evil, and that it helped book sales. Another writer, Smith, adds something quieter. A killing by men that high in society seemed to confirm every wild tale about Rasputin. And neither the Provisional Government nor the communists had any reason to dispel them. A demon in the palace served everyone's story.
Now comes the part that makes the legend harder to hold. In 2006, a book called To Kill Rasputin by Andrew Cook put the autopsy materials in front of Professor Derrick Pounder, a forensic expert. His conclusion, released through the University of Dundee, was that the forehead shot came from a different weapon than the chest and abdomen shots, a larger calibre. And that the largest-calibre gun at the scene was carried by a British agent. The motive, in this view, was Rasputin's opposition to the war with Germany.
If that is true, the story of Russian aristocrats alone, Purishkevich firing the last shots, is not the whole story.
But hold that carefully. The Dundee release names no agent. Pounder said the bullet itself would have proved it, and the bullet appears to have been removed. And Byard says the photograph in no way proves who did the actual shooting, even if the weapon was one carried by British officers.
So what is left, when you lay the record beside the legend?
No one was ever arrested. No one was ever charged. We do not know who fired the shot to the forehead. The accusation against a British agent rests on a calibre, a missing bullet, and an expert's reading of old materials.
The contact wound rests on a single photograph, and Byard accepts it only if it shows Rasputin.
We are not told the calibres of the other two wounds. Even the Webley is only a possibly.
Whether he drowned is not settled either. Byard says drowning can happen without any diagnostic marker, so no water in the airways does not close the question, though for him the head wound makes it moot.
Was the body clubbed? Was it mutilated? The sources give no autopsy statement that confirms it or refutes it. The castration is called, only, alleged.
And why did Yusupov embellish? The reasons remain unclear. Byard offers a suggestion, nothing more.
One last thing. Britannica tells it as legend, and says the autopsy largely refutes it. Yet a school history page still lists poisoned cakes and drowning in the Neva as how he died. The story is stronger than the record.
A man was killed in a cellar on a winter night. The legend says nothing could kill him. The record says three bullets could, and one of them pressed against his forehead. Who held that gun, we still do not know.