The Killing of Rasputin

The case

Two workmen crossing the Bolshoy Petrovsky Bridge in Petrograd noticed blood on the railing and a man's boot on the ice below. That was how the police, already looking for Grigori Rasputin, found where his killers had disposed of him. On 1 January 1917 (19 December in the Julian calendar Russia still used) police recovered his body from under the ice of the Little Nevka, some two hundred metres downstream. He had been missing since the small hours of 30 December.

Rasputin was a Siberian peasant from the village of Pokrovskoye who had become a wandering holy man and then, from 1905, an intimate of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. They believed he could ease the bleeding attacks of their only son, Alexei, who had haemophilia, and they protected him against a growing chorus of accusations: of drunkenness, sexual misconduct, bribe-taking and, once Nicholas left for army headquarters in 1915, of steering the appointment of ministers through the empress. With the war going badly, rumour turned him into the symbol of everything rotten at court. In 1914 a woman had already stabbed him outside his house in Siberia; he survived.

The men who finally killed him were not revolutionaries but monarchists who thought they were saving the dynasty. Prince Felix Yusupov, heir to one of Russia's largest fortunes and married to the tsar's niece, recruited the right-wing Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich and the tsar's cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, along with an army officer, Sergei Sukhotin, and a doctor, Stanislaus Lazovert. Yusupov invited Rasputin to the family's palace on the Moika canal late on the night of 29 December, where a basement room had been newly furnished for the purpose.

What happened in that room is known almost entirely from the killers. In Yusupov's version, published years later in exile and retold ever since, Rasputin ate cakes and drank Madeira laced with cyanide and showed no effect. Yusupov fetched a revolver and shot him in the chest. When he came back to check the body, Rasputin sprang up, seized him and staggered out into the courtyard, where Purishkevich fired several more shots and brought him down in the snow. The conspirators then drove the body to the bridge and pushed it through a hole in the ice. Purishkevich's own diary, published in emigration, tells a broadly similar story but differs in many details, and Yusupov changed his account more than once.

The physical evidence is less theatrical. The city's senior autopsy surgeon, Dmitry Kosorotov, found three gunshot wounds, including one fired at close range into the forehead that would have killed instantly, along with injuries he thought were inflicted after death. He found no trace of poison and no water in the lungs, which contradicts the familiar claim that Rasputin was still alive when he went into the river. Rasputin's daughter later said he avoided sweet things and would not have eaten cakes at all. Kosorotov's written report has been lost, so even his findings survive only as he later described them.

Nobody was ever tried. Purishkevich had boasted of the killing to a policeman that same night, and within hours much of the city knew who was responsible. But the suspects were a grand duke, a prince related to the imperial family and a prominent politician, and the public largely cheered them. Nicholas ordered Dmitri to the Persian front and confined Yusupov to his estate at Rakitnoye; Purishkevich left for the Romanian front. Rasputin was buried at Tsarskoye Selo on 2 January in the presence of the imperial family. Ten weeks later the monarchy fell, and in March 1917 soldiers dug up his body and burned it.