Authors: Edvard Radzinsky
Nicholas didn’t answer her letter. And then measures were taken. Felix was treated remarkably leniently. ‘The chief culprit, Felix Yusupov,’ Dmitry’s
stepmother Olga said in bewilderment, ‘got off with exile to the country. Whereas Grand Duke Dmitry was ordered to leave for Persia.’ He was sent into combat, to a field army in a terrible climate ruinous to the health. Evidently, it wasn’t the murderers’ story that Nicholas believed but the secret reports of his policemen. Obviously, he knew who had shot Rasputin. The whole numerous imperial family was outraged at the tsar’s decision. ‘I myself composed the text of the petition,’ recalled Dmitry’s stepmother. ‘ The exile seemed to us the limit of cruelty. The petition was signed by all the members of the imperial family.’
That petition has survived in the archive. With the tsar’s appended response: ‘No one has the right to commit murder. I know that the consciences of many are not clear, since Dmitry Pavlovich is not the only one involved in this. I am amazed that you have appealed to me.’ And the grand duke, his favourite, was sent to Persia, despite all the pleas.
I held it in my hand, that letter from the Romanov family with its numerous signatures. So many of those who signed that document would perish, caught unawares by the revolution. But Dmitry, thanks to the cruel exile from which they had so pleaded he be delivered, would survive intact.
Once in Persia Dmitry did not forget his beloved friend. ‘My dear, much-loved, true friend,’ he wrote to Felix. ‘I can say, without fear of going to extremes, my dearest friend!’
And Felix honourably and faithfully continued to hold to the story they had agreed.
But shortly after the new year, the dangerous Felix wrote a letter to his mother-in-law, Nicholas’s sister Xenia — an odd letter that sounds like a letter about Dmitry:
2 January…I’m much tormented by the idea that the Empress Marie Fyodorovna and you will regard the person who did it as a murderer and a criminal. However you view the rightness of that action and the reasons that prompted its doing, there will be a feeling deep in your heart that he is still a murderer. Knowing everything that person did before, during, and after, I can say with complete certainty that he is not a murderer but merely an instrument of Providence, which helped him to carry out his duty before his motherland and tsar by destroying an evil, diabolical force that had disgraced Russia.
‘An End Must Without Fail Be Put To… Alexandra Fyodorovna’
Hiding out in Tsarskoe Selo, the tsarina and Vyrubova waited for a continuation of the bloodshed — the further revenge of the grand dukes. Were
they groundless fears? The diary of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich contains an answer:
Everything they [Rasputin’s murderers] have done is without question a half-measure, since an end must without fail be put to both Alexandra Fyodorovna and Protopopov. So you see, murder plans have occurred to me again, still vague but logically necessary, as otherwise it may be worse than it was … [enough] to make your head spin. The Countess Bobrinskaya, Misha Shakhovskoy [Prince Mikhail Shakhovskoy], and I have been scared into taking action, and prodded, and pleaded with, but how? With whom? To act alone would be pointless! Meanwhile, the time passes, and with their departure and Purishkevich’s, I see hardly any others capable of action. But really and truly I’m not of the breed of aesthetes and even less of murderers. I need to get out into the fresh air, best of all on a hunting trip in the forest, for here, living in a state of excitement, I’ll talk and do such nonsense.
So it was ‘logically necessary’ to kill the Tsarina of All Russia. This was written by a grand duke! Who regretted seeing no ‘others capable of action’ after the exile of Rasputin’s murderers, who regretted not knowing ‘how and with whom’ to achieve it!
So thoughts about a continuation of the bloodshed, about a new conspiracy, were fermenting in highly placed minds. It was no coincidence that Nikolai Mikhailovich was exiled to the ‘fresh air’ of his estate just before the new year. And it was with good reason that Alix begged the tsar to return, telling him that she had found a safe place for the Friend in her palace.
As he was departing for exile around the new year, Nikolai Mikhailovich met on the train (and surely not by accident) two prominent members of the Duma opposition, the monarchist Shulgin (who would subsequently accept Nicholas’s abdication) and the manufacturer Tereschenko (who would become a minister in the Provisional Government after the February Revolution). And Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote, ‘Tereschenko’s certain everything will come apart in a month’s time and I’ll return from exile. God grant that it be so! But what malice there was in those two men. Both spoke in one voice of the possibility of regicide! What times we live in, what a curse has befallen Russia.’ Such was their thinking: the grand duke about murdering the tsarina, the Duma leaders about a possible assassination of the tsar. It was in the air.
Blood was in the offing. And the tsar was warned of it.
On 0 February before his departure for Headquarters, the tsar received Nikolai Mikhailovich’s brother, the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich
(Sandro), a friend of his childhood and youth. And Sandro said, ‘Events have shown that your advisers are bent on leading Russia and, it follows, you to inevitable destruction and death.’
On 22 February the emperor left his beloved Tsarskoe Selo for the last time.
‘Always Together, Never Alone’
As usual, there was a letter from Alix waiting for Nicky on the train: ‘22 Feb. 1917 … such terrible times for us now! — and even harder apart, I can’t stroke you so tired & worried.’ As before, she lived by her meetings with Our Friend, only now they were meetings at his grave: ‘I can do nothing but pray & pray & Our dear Friend does so in yonder world for you — there is yet nearer to us — Tho’ one longs to hear his voice of comfort and encouragement … Holy angels guard you, Christ be near you & the sweet Virgin never fail you — Our Friend left us to [join] her.’
Now they often went to his grave — the Tsarina, the Friend, and the grand duchesses. And the church’s newly constructed walls shielded them from the eyes of strangers.
‘26 Feb. 1917 …Went to our Friend’s grave. Now the church [being built over Rasputin’s burial place] is so high that I could kneel & pray there calmly for you all without being seen by the orderly.’ And in her letter of 22 February: ‘Feel my arms hold you, feel my lips press tenderly upon yours — always together, never alone.’
The revolution had already begun in Petrograd. Just as Our Friend had prophesied in his ‘serious’ 1914 telegram to the tsar.
And on 2 March 1917, when Petrograd was already full of raging mobs, when the tsarina’s palace was already surrounded by mutinous soldiers, when the train with the helpless tsar was already blocked at the station in Dno and all the army commanders were demanding his abdication, and when Guchkov, whom Alix hated so much, and Shulgin had already left the Duma to receive that abdication, she sent Nicky a letter from Tsarskoe Selo with an important postscript: ‘Wear his cross, even if it is uncomfortable, for my peace of mind.’
EPILOGUE
An Excursion To The Murder Scene
Another world had begun. After their house arrest, the tsar and tsarina continued to live in Tsarskoe Selo, where ‘Citizen Romanov’ conscientiously cleared his garden, went for walks in the park, read books out loud to his family in the evenings, and was perhaps for the first time secretly happy. Alix, however, was exhausted by the humiliation. She would subsequently write in a letter how she had withered and turned grey. The Friend was taken away to Petrograd to the Peter and Paul Fortress.
As Tereschenko had predicted to Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, everything rapidly ‘came apart’, and the grand duke returned from exile. By then the grand dukes’ automobiles had been appropriated. And in the middle of March, Nikolai Mikhailovich went by horse cab to the Yusupov palace on the Moika canal. The historian had decided to take a look at the murder scene that the young Yusupov had told him so much about. Felix and Irina had also recently returned from exile. And Rasputin’s murderer took pleasure in the general attention. Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote in his diary: ‘16 March 1917 …Irina and Felix are in enthusiastic spirits … I visited them, [and] examined the place of drama in detail. It’s incredible, but they calmly have their dinner in the same dining room.’ In the end, nothing special had happened — a nobleman had merely shot an insolent peasant. How many others had been flogged to death in the stable at the orders of his ancestors in the Yusupov family history.
Missing Money And People
By then the hunt for Rasputin’s wealth was starting to heat up. Simanovich added fuel to the fire. Beletsky testified that Simanovich told him in secret ‘that the deceased had left very good resources … up to 300,000 roubles’.
The ‘best of Jews’ knew where to send them to look for the funds. And the Extraordinary Commission conscientiously searched the banks for Rasputin’s money. Preserved in the File are the Commission’s endless inquiries to all the great banks — the Union of Provincial Commercial Banks, the Bank of the Caucasus, the Petrograd Municipal Credit Association, the Russian-Asiatic Bank, the Moscow Merchants Bank, and so on. But the replies of the numerous banks surviving in the File are all the same: ‘The bank has the honour of informing the Extraordinary Commission that there are no deposits, securities, or safety deposit boxes in the bank in the name of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, his wife, Praskovia Fyodorovna Rasputina-Novaya, his children, Varvara, Matryona, and Dmitry Rasputin, or his niece, Anna Nikolaevna Rasputina.’ Rasputin’s wealth had vanished and evaporated. For no wealth at all survived him. Grand Duchess Olga had been right when she wrote in her memoirs, ‘He left nothing behind, and the empress gave his orphans money.’ The hundreds of thousands of roubles that had passed through Rasputin’s hands were left in the restaurants where he drank to suppress his fear of death; they were left with the Gypsy choruses and in the hands of the endless petitioners and, more often, beggars to whom he gave countless sums. Sums that he treated with contempt. And, of course, some of the money was left in the hospital train and in Vyrubova’s and the tsarina’s infirmaries. But mainly, as Filippov accurately testified, it wound up in the hands of his secretaries, above all Simanovich’s. And, of course, in those of the elusive Akilina Laptinskaya. Not only did she lay out Rasputin for his final journey, but, it would appear, had the remaining money in the house under her disposal.
Yet no sooner had the February Revolution begun than Akilina, who knew all that mysterious person’s secrets and who had followed him all the way from the chapel under the stable to the empress’s palace, vanished from Petrograd, slipping away into the chaos of the new life. And ‘Voskoboinikova, as soon as she heard about the abdication, immediately left Tsarskoe Selo’, as Vyrubova’s maid, Feodosia Voino, testified. ‘Voskoboinikova left the infirmary on 3 March and never returned.’
Rasputin’s family met the revolution in Petrograd. His wife, Praskovia, went back to Pokrovskoe to claim their right to his legacy. The writ of distraint inventorying Rasputin’s property and executed in her presence has survived. And the inventory is a pitiful one. Dmitry would return from the
war to Pokrovskoe after the Bolshevik coup. And then all of them — Praskovia, Dmitry, and the daughter Varvara — would be sent north by the Bolsheviks to the town of Salekhard. Praskovia would die there, as would Dmitry — of scurvy. Varvara would return to Pokrovskoe, where all trace of her would be lost for a long time. And then she would re-emerge in Leningrad, only to die in obscurity at the beginning of the 1960s.
But, to make up for all that, Matryona, Grigory’s elder daughter and his favourite, would prove worthy of him. She too would play a fateful role in the destiny of the royal family.
Life After Death
After her arrest in Tsarskoe Selo, Alix was no longer able to visit his grave. But Our Friend could now visit her in her dreams. One of them was terrifying.
She was standing in the Malachite Room at the Winter Palace. And he appeared by the window. His body was covered with terrible wounds. ‘ They will burn you at the stake,’ he cried, and the whole room burst into flames. He beckoned to her to run, and she rushed towards him. But it was too late — the whole room was on fire. And she woke up, stifling a scream.
Now she waited in fear of the inevitable. And it came. Captain Klimov and his detachment of soldiers stationed in Tsarskoe Selo managed to open Our Friend’s grave.
In January, ‘under the old regime’, Captain Klimov had noticed the daily guard placed at the construction site of the Serafim Chapel. And in the last months before the revolution, it was in fact to that place that the tsarina had frequently gone with Vyrubova and a guard of court police.
Along with his soldiers and a member of the State Duma, the journalist E. Lagansky, Captain Klimov decided to look for the grave of the elder in the unfinished chapel.
The work on ‘Anya’s church’ had been abandoned by the builders, and its entrance was boarded up. But by climbing along the rafters and beams, they managed to reach an opening on the second floor and through it to penetrate the unfinished chapel. Torches were lit. And Klimov’s soldiers set to work with picks.
The zinc-lined coffin lay deep in the earth. The soldiers, believing the stories about jewels placed in the coffin by the tsarina, hurriedly removed the coffin’s cover. In the dull light of the torches, they saw a head and arms folded crosswise.
They found no jewels, but on top of the folded arms they did discover a small wooden icon. On its back were the names of the tsarina, her daughters, and the Friend, written in their own hands in indelible ink.
How many jeers and curses there were in the papers! To place an icon in a coffin and moreover in the coffin of a fornicator! They spoke of sacrilege. But, as the File makes clear, the little icon had not been the tsarina’s doing at all. The tsarina’s friend Yulia Dehn testified that ‘The icon with the signatures that was written about so much was given to Rasputin while he was still alive, and Laptinskaya, who bathed and dressed Rasputin’s body, herself, on her own initiative, put the icon in Rasputin’s coffin.’