The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (51 page)

remove them all – and her!’82 ‘If the Emperor appeared on Red

Square today,’ predicted Ambassador Paléologue in his diary on 16

December 1916, ‘he would be booed. The Empress would be torn

to pieces.’83 Elizaveta Naryshkina agreed with him: ‘What a multi-

tude of things are coming to an end, Ambassador! And such a bad

end.’84 To the superstitious Russian people the imperial family

seemed increasingly shackled to the mystical chains of fate. It was

a uniquely Russian view and one that had long dictated that every-

thing about to be unleashed in Russia was a matter of God’s inexor-

able will.

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IN ST PETERSBURG

N

‘Father Grigory went missing last night. They are looking for him

everywhere – it’s absolutely dreadful.’ Such was the state of fore-

boding at the Alexander Palace on 17 December 1916 that even

Anastasia noted Rasputin’s disappearance. The girls and their mother

had sat up until midnight, ‘all the time waiting for a telephone call’; it never came. So anxious were they that in the end ‘the four of us

slept together. God help us.’1 The following day there was still no

news, but word was already out, as Maria wrote in her diary, that

‘they suspect Dmitri and Felix’.2 ‘We are sitting together – can

imagine our feelings – thoughts’, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas in

her characteristic staccato style, adding that they knew this much:

Grigory had been invited to Felix Yusupov’s palace on the evening

of the 16th. ‘There had been a ‘big scandal . . . big meeting, Dmitri, Purishkevitch
*
etc. all drunk. Police heard shots, Purishkevitch ran out screaming to the Police that our Friend was killed.’ The police

were out searching for Grigory now but Alexandra was already

utterly distraught: ‘I cannot and won’t believe that he has been

killed. God have mercy.’3

If the story was true, then all the tsaritsa’s hopes for the family’s

* Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich was a reactionary and monarchist, a member of an extremist group known as the Black Hundreds that sought to save the autocracy from ruination by Rasputin.

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continuing protection from harm were shipwrecked. Only a month

previously she had written to Nicholas reiterating her absolute faith in Grigory’s help and guidance during these difficult years:

Remember that for your reign, Baby, and us you
need
the strength prayers and advice of our Friend . . . Ah Lovy, I pray so hard to

God to make you feel and realize, that He is our caring, were

He not here, I don’t know what might not have happened. He

saves us by His prayers and wise counsils [
sic
] and is our rock of faith and help.4

Final confirmation of Rasputin’s death, when it came, could not

have been altogether unexpected, even for Alexandra, for gossip in

the capital about his rise from messianic faith healer to meddler in

affairs of state, and now a morose drunk, had long since reached

boiling point. Demoralized by Nicholas’s decision to enter the war,

which he had predicted would be disastrous for Russia, Rasputin

had allowed his life to fall into disarray. He saw nothing but doom

hanging over Russia as the war dragged on and sought refuge in an

almost permanent state of alcoholic oblivion.5 Stories of his

debauched late-night drinking sessions at Donon’s Restaurant and

a string of fashionable hotels – the Astoria, the Rossiya and the

Europe – or hanging out with the Massalsky’s Gypsy Chorus at the

Samarkand, were legion.6 In his cups, Rasputin had loudly boasted

of his influence over the tsaritsa: ‘I can make her do anything’, he

was said to have bragged earlier that year. In response Nicholas had

summoned Rasputin to Tsarskoe Selo and reprimanded him.

Rasputin admitted that he had indeed been ‘sinful’, but it was clear

that he was now out of control. The gossip of ‘magic cures and gay

carousals’ that had first greeted his arrival in St Petersburg had now turned into a ‘conflagration of rumour’ in which he and the empress

were seen as representing ‘Dark Forces’ that were threatening to

engulf Russia.7 Alexandra was talked of as being ‘a go-between in

traitorous intrigues with the Germans’ and Rasputin accused of

being a German spy ‘who had wormed his way into the confidence

of the Tsarina for the purpose of obtaining military secrets’.8 Such

was the level of seething resentment levelled at the empress by the

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end of 1916 that members of the imperial family were openly

suggesting she be sent to a remote convent for the sake of the

country – and her own sanity. But first and foremost Rasputin had

to be got rid of.

As they waited for news at the Alexander Palace, the girls and

Alexandra’s two closest friends – Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn –

gathered round the despairing empress. The following night Tatiana

and Olga slept in their mother’s room. And then, on the 19th, they

had ‘confirmation that Father Grigory has been murdered, most

probably by Dmitri, and thrown from the Krestovsky bridge’, as

Olga wrote in her diary. ‘They found him in the water. So awful

and can’t bear to write about it. We sat drinking tea with Lili and

Anna and the whole time felt Father Grigory among us.’9

One of the ADCs on duty at the time recalled the impact of the

news on the grand duchesses:

There, upstairs, in one of their modest bedrooms, the four of

them sat on the sofa, huddled up closely together. They were

cold and visibly terribly upset, but for the whole of that long

evening, the name of Rasputin was never uttered in front of

me . . .

They were in pain, because the man was no longer among

the living, but also because they sensed that, with his murder,

something terrible and undeserved had started for their mother,

their father and themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly

towards them.10

At 6 p.m. on the evening of the 19th Nicholas arrived in haste

from Stavka with Alexey, prompted by an urgent telegram he had

received from his wife telling him that ‘There is danger that these

two boys are organizing something still worse’ – a
coup d’état
, with the connivance of others in the Romanov family and in tandem with

right-wing monarchists in the Duma.11 Rumour had been abroad

for some time that Dmitri Pavlovich and his clubbing crony Felix

Yusupov were involved. English nurse Dorothy Seymour, at the

Anglo-Russian Hospital, had met Dmitri several times socially and

remembered him as ‘beautiful to behold, vastly conceited, but superb

in glorious youth and dash’. On the evening of 13 December, Dmitri

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had talked to Dorothy over dinner ‘of many intrigues’ and she had

gathered that ‘something was afoot’.12
*

Details soon emerged that Dmitri, Yusupov and fellow conspir-

ator Purishkevich had lured Rasputin to Felix’s palace on the Moika

at around midnight on the evening of Friday 16 December. Yusupov

had picked Rasputin up from his flat on Gorokhovaya Ulitsa and

driven him there. In a basement dining room, he had plied Rasputin

with booze and cream cakes sprinkled with cyanide. Incredulous

that the poison failed to do its work and increasingly frantic that

their assassination plot would fail, Yusupov had then shot Rasputin

in the back with Dmitri Pavlovich’s Browning revolver. But Rasputin

still refused to die; it took two more bullets from Purishkevich (the first missed, the second hit Rasputin in the torso) before a fourth

and fatal shot to the forehead finished him off.13 Rasputin’s body

was then bundled into a piece of cloth, tied up with rope and taken

in Dmitri Pavlovich’s car to Petrovsky Island, where it was consigned to the Malaya Nevka through a gap in the ice.14 At 6 that morning

Dorothy Seymour recalled that Dmitri Pavlovich ‘in mad spirits’

had rushed into the Anglo-Russian Hospital with Yusupov to have

a wound dressed in Yusupov’s neck.15

After the frozen, mangled body was hauled out of the river and

an autopsy performed it was reclaimed by the Romanovs. It was

taken for burial in secret in the Alexander Park, close by the partially constructed northern wall of the new Church of St Serafim, which

Anna Vyrubova was funding with the compensation moneys from

her accident. When Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughters arrived

for the funeral at 9 a.m. on the morning of 21 December, Rasputin’s

zinc coffin had already been closed and lowered into the grave.16
†

After joining the officiating priest in prayers, each of them dropped white flowers on the coffin and then silently departed.17 In Petrograd

* The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue noted at the time that several of the grand dukes, including Grand Duchess Vladimir’s three sons and Nikolay Nikolaevich (whom Nicholas had deposed as Commander-in-Chief) were ‘talking of nothing less than saving tsarism by a change of sovereign’. The plan as he heard it was that Nicholas would be forced to abdicate in favour of Alexey with Nikolay Nikolaevich as regent. And Alexandra would be ‘shut up in a nunnery’.

† Alexey was confined to bed at the time with stomach pains and did not attend.

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meanwhile people were rejoicing on the streets. ‘A dog’s death for

a dog’, they shouted and – hailing Dmitri Pavlovich as a national

hero – lit candles before the icons of St Dimitri in all the churches to give thanks for his gallant act of patriotism. Before Nicholas had even arrived back from Stavka, Alexandra had had Dmitri illegally

placed under house arrest; her husband maintained this tough line,

rejecting pleas of leniency from his royal relatives. ‘No one has the right to murder’, he responded fiercely to their plea for leniency. ‘I know that many will have this on their conscience, as Dmitri

Pavlovich is not the only one involved. I am astonished at your

appeal to me.’18 He immediately ordered Dmitri back to the army

– at Qazvin on the Persian front.19 Felix Yusupov was exiled to his

estate 800 miles (1,300 km) south in the province of Kursk.

Alexandra’s response to the savage murder of her wise counsellor

was plain for all to see. ‘Her agonized features betrayed, in spite of all her efforts, how terribly she was suffering’, remembered Pierre

Gilliard. ‘Her grief was inconsolable. Her idol had been shattered.

He who alone could save her son had been slain. Now that he was

gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe was possible.’20 Anna Vyrubova

later described the empress’s state of mind at that time as ‘nearer

the insanity they accused her of than she had ever been before’.21

‘My heart is broken’, Alexandra told Lili Dehn. ‘Veronal
*
is keeping me up. I’m literally saturated with it.’22

Rasputin’s death cast its terrible pall over the whole family. Olga

was profoundly disturbed by it, as she told Valentina Chebotareva

not long afterwards: ‘Maybe it was necessary to kill him, but not in

such a terrible way’, a remark that suggests she had by now realized

the full extent of his baleful influence over their mother. Olga was

appalled that two members of her own close family were involved:

‘one is ashamed to admit they are relatives’, she said; Dmitri’s role must have been particularly wounding for all of them.23 General

Spiridovich later claimed that Olga had always ‘instinctively sensed

there was something bad in Rasputin’.24 But what troubled her even

more was this: ‘why has the feeling in the country changed against

my father?’ No one could give her an adequate explanation and she

continued to appear ‘filled with a growing anxiety’.25

* A popular and widely available barbiturate, used for insomnia.

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Tatiana also took Rasputin’s death very hard but kept her feelings

to herself, treasuring the notebook in which she had written down

extracts from his letters and telegrams as well as his pronouncements on various religious topics.26 Her mother meanwhile clung to the

bloodstained blue satin tunic that her beloved Grigory had been

wearing on the night of his ‘martyrdom’, ‘preserving it piously as a

relic, a
palladium
*
on which the fate of her dynasty hangs’.27 It was left to Dr Botkin to voice what many privately were thinking:

‘Rasputin dead will be worse than Rasputin alive’, he told his chil-

dren; adding prophetically that what Dmitri Pavlovich and Yusupov

had done was ‘to fire the first shot of the revolution’.28 ‘Lord have mercy and save us this New Year 1917’, was all Olga could think

of as that difficult year came to an end.29

*

January opened on a sombre note for the Romanov family and their

entourage. They attended a prayer service together at midnight and