HOW RASPUTIN DIED
Looking at these exiles, these wrecks of humanity done to death in the
name of the state, and reflecting that their number was so great that
months had to elapse before they could all be located and brought back
to life, it is not to be wondered at that most Russians believed the
autocracy a thing too strong to be shaken. But the February revolution
revealed that the autocracy was a tree rotten at the roots. At a touch
it collapsed.
The Russian autocracy went down like a house of cards, and within an
incredibly short time the whole horde of ignorant and reactionary
ministers, grafting generals, corrupt officials, court parasites,
vagrant monks, mystics and fortune tellers went down with it and
were buried in its ruins. The Czar--a reed shaken in the wind. The
Czarina, the Empress Dowager, the poor little Czarevitch, Rasputin,
Anna Virubova, his sponsor at the court--leaves in the current. They
all went. In the dead of night a group of determined men, led by a
nephew-in-law of the Czar, murdered a monk, and almost the next day
the whole Protopopoff-Sturmer gang was in the fortress of Peter and
Paul and the Romanoff family was on its way to Siberia. Rasputin, it
is true, was killed in December, and the revolution did not actually
occur until February; but two months in the history of a nation is an
inconsiderable lapse of time. The story of the killing of Rasputin has
been published in this country, and, in its main facts, accurately. In
some of its important details the published stories are in error, and
I am glad to be able to tell the facts as they were related by Prince
Felix Yussupoff himself, the man who fired the shot that freed Russia.
Prince Yussupoff did not tell these facts directly to me. He told them
to Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragist, with whom he is
on terms of warm friendship, and gave her permission to repeat them
to me, which she did within an hour of hearing them. Prince Yussupoff
was willing that I should know the story, but our acquaintance was
brief, and I am sure that I heard a more detailed account through
Mrs. Pankhurst than I should have had had he talked directly to me, a
comparative stranger.
Prince Yussupoff did not kill Rasputin, as has been charged, because
the monk had cast lascivious eyes on his beautiful young wife, the
Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna. At least he said nothing about her in
connection with the affair, and it is certain that she took no active
part in it. She did not lure the monk to the Yussupoff palace on the
fatal night. She could not have done so because she was in the Crimea
at the time. Prince Yussupoff killed Rasputin because of the man’s evil
influence on the Czar, his wife’s uncle, and his worse influence on the
Czarina. The thing had got beyond scandal. It had become unbearable,
and when evidence was presented to him that Rasputin was trying to
influence the royal pair to force Russia into a separate peace with
Germany, Prince Yussupoff decided that the time for Rasputin’s death
had come. Rasputin had to die. He was invited to Yussupoff’s house and
he accepted. Then he died.
I have often walked past that great, beautiful, yellow palace on the
Moika canal, the Petrograd town house of the Yussupoff family, and
tried to reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that December
night. Snow burying the black ice of the canal, shrouding the street
and silent houses, dimming the street lights, and in a basement room,
a private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young man sweating from
every shivering pore, and watching the sinister monk eat and drink
deadly poison which affected him no more than water. They had fed one
of the poisoned cakes to a dog, just before they sent them downstairs
to be fed to Rasputin, and the dog died in a few seconds. Rasputin
ate one and lived. Explain it who can, but cease to wonder that the
Russians firmly believe that Rasputin was something more than human.
Excusing himself on some pretext Prince Yussupoff went upstairs, where
the others waited--young Grand Duke Dmitri and two or three other men,
and told them the incredible news. When he went back he had a revolver
in his pocket. He and the monk resumed their conversation, which was on
general topics. It was the first time Rasputin had visited Yussupoff or
had any particular conversation with him. The prince was not a favorite
at court, the empress especially disapproving of certain alleged
episodes in his youthful past. For this reason young Prince Felix and
the monk were on formal terms, and it took a great deal of diplomacy
to persuade Rasputin to make that midnight visit at all. They resumed
their interrupted conversation, and in the course of it the prince
invited Rasputin to cross the room and look at an ikon, or sacred
picture, which hung on the opposite wall. These ikons are frequently
rare objects of art, gold or silver, and incrusted with gems. The ikon,
which was to be the last on which Rasputin’s gaze was to rest, was an
antique of almost priceless value. He looked, and the next moment a
revolver shot tore through his side and he crumpled up on the floor
without a groan. Prince Yussupoff had shot him.
The prince had never killed a man before, and it was natural that, in
his revulsion of nerves after the deed, he should have rushed from
the room. He fled upstairs and gasped out that it was over, the thing
they had sworn to do was done, Rasputin was dead. The next thing was
to get the body out of the house, and this task was rendered the more
difficult because a policeman who had passed the house at the moment
when the shot was fired, rang a doorbell and insisted on knowing what
had occurred. He was pacified somehow, and one of the men went out
to get a motor car. Prince Yussupoff went downstairs to guard the
body until the car came. Rasputin lay motionless on the floor beneath
the jeweled ikon, but as his slayer reached the spot where he lay,
the monk’s body shot up, the monk’s long arms darted forward and his
powerful hands reached and clawed for Yussupoff’s throat. Half mad
with amazement and horror, the young man tore himself loose, leaving
one of the epaulets from his uniform in the clawing hands. Rushing with
all his might to the room upstairs, he shrieked: “He lives yet! He is
the devil himself! We cannot kill him!”
“We must kill him!” they shrieked in return, and the whole band rushed
for the stairs. When they opened the door Rasputin was crawling on
hands and knees up the stairs. His face was diabolic. What followed
does not make pleasant reading. They tried to kill him, crawling toward
them, using every weapon they could grasp--revolvers, swords, daggers,
clubs, heavy chairs, even their boots. They shot and beat him until
he was senseless, but even then he did not die. They tied his hands
and feet and regardless of possible risk of detection they loaded the
senseless body into a motor car, drove to the Neva, a considerable
distance, and threw the still breathing thing through a hole in the
ice. There Rasputin died.
That is the way Prince Yussupoff tells it. The world knows how the Czar
had the body embalmed and buried, and how he and all the royal family
walked in the funeral procession. It was the intention of the Empress
to build a costly tomb over his grave, perhaps a church. They usually
built a church to commemorate assassinations of royalty, and the poor,
half-demented Empress of Russia regarded Rasputin as greater than
royalty. Perhaps if the revolution of February had not succeeded the
church would have been built, loaded with gold and art treasures, as
those Russian churches are, and might in time have become a shrine in
which the superstitious would pray for miracles. But the revolution did
succeed, and one of the first things they did was to unearth the corpse
of Rasputin and give it another burial. I heard several accounts of
that burial, all of them horrible. One account has it that the body was
burned. It doesn’t make any real difference. Rasputin had to be killed,
and he was. The burial was nothing unless you find something symbolic
in the uneasy character of the man even after he was dead. It does
indicate, strangely, the sinister nature of the whole Rasputin episode.
No arrests followed the killing of Rasputin, although the men who did
it were known almost from the first. Rasputin’s family, with whom he
lived in Petrograd, knew where he went on his death night, and when
he did not return they telephoned Tsarskoe Selo to ask if he was
there. The royal family lived in the Alexander palace at Tsarskoe, and
Rasputin often visited them there. But he did not live at court, as
many people seem to think. The Czarina, frightened half to death, sent
for the Petrograd chief of police and the dragnet immediately thrown
out drew in the policeman who had heard a revolver shot from the yellow
palace on the Moika canal. The chief of police went in person to the
Yussupoff palace and found it a shambles. Prince Felix had been so
nearly prostrated by the events of the night--he is really little more
than a boy--that he had not even had the place cleaned. The prince at
first refused to tell anything of the affair and he steadfastly refused
to divulge the names of the men who had helped him do the deed. But
little by little the police unearthed the whole story, and the frantic
Czarina learned that at least two of the assassins were of the blood
royal. She demanded their punishment, and the Czar joined with her in
the demand.
They would have sent all the men to the farthest Siberian mine if they
had had their way. But there was a meeting of the Romanoff clan in
the Tsarskoe palace, probably more than one meeting. The grand dukes
were all there, and the Empress Dowager. They told the royal pair
that nobody must suffer for the deed. Horrible as it was, it had to
happen some time, because assassination was the certain end of men like
Rasputin. They told the Emperor and Empress plainly that they were
fortunate that only one assassination had taken place. Nobody at that
time knew that the revolution was close at hand. None of the Romanoff
family believed that the revolution would ever come. But they knew--all
of them except the Czar and his wife--that the house of Romanoff was
due to have a thorough cleaning, and they were thankful at heart that
Prince Felix and young Grand Duke Dmitri had had the nerve to begin the
work. The young grand duke was sent to the Caucasus and Prince Felix
was banished to his estates. I don’t know where the lesser lights were
sent, but certainly they were not arrested. The grand duke is still in
the Caucasus, the provisional government wisely considering him well
off out there on the Persian border.
Prince Yussupoff is not only free but he is something of a popular
hero still. He is very democratic, is openly sympathetic with the
revolution, although he detests the Bolsheviki, who have turned
revolution into riot. The constitutional democrats and other
conservative revolutionists admire the young man, and there is even
a group, I don’t know how large, which would like to see him the
constitutional monarch of Russia. He is not a Romanoff, but his wife
is. She is young, rarely beautiful and a great favorite in society.
As for Prince Felix, he belongs if not to royalty, to a family which
has intermarried more than once with royalty. On his father’s side
he is Count Sumarokoff-Elston, the latter name indicating British
descent, the original Elston coming over from Scotland during the reign
of the Empress Catherine. He gained her favor and secured the title
and estates of Sumarokoff. The father of Prince Felix assumed, by
Imperial decree, the title of Prince Yussupoff on his marriage with the
beautiful Princess Yusupova, the last of her line, who thus perpetuated
the family name. The Yussupoffs are one of the oldest and wealthiest
families in Russia. Their origin runs back into the half-fabulous days
of Tartar domination, the name Yussupoff being Tartar, and not Russian
at all. It means Joseph’s son. The title, however, dates back only
about a century. Prince Felix is the head of the family, his elder
brother having been killed in a duel some years ago on French soil.
He is barely thirty years old, and looks much younger. Nobody would
be likely to pick out this man in a crowd for an assassin. He is tall
and slender, and almost too handsome. With his fine features, dark,
melancholy eyes and ivory skin he might almost be called effeminate in
appearance. One sees such men only in very old families where the vigor
has begun to run low. There is plenty of vigor left in Prince Felix,
however. He has an Oxford education, and speaks English perfectly. He
speaks many other languages besides, as the highly educated Russians
are all supposed to do, but which they frequently do not. French is
commonly spoken, of course.
I had a long talk with Prince Felix Yussupoff in Moscow, and we
talked, most of the time, about the American public school system. He
wanted to know what the Gary system was, and fortunately I was able
to tell him. As I described the schools, where children spent their
days, working, studying, playing, being wholly educated and trained
to think as well as to work, the prince’s eyes glowed and his face
shone with interest and amazement. “It’s the finest thing I ever heard
of,” he exclaimed. “It is exactly what we ought to have in Russia.”
And then he went on to say thoughtfully: “Mrs. Dorr, my wife and I
want to do something for Russia, something really worth while. I
don’t want to be forever remembered for--for just one thing. I want
to do something constructive. Of course, as things are now, there is
nothing constructive to be done. Besides, my wife is a Romanoff, and,
naturally----” He paused with a graceful little gesture of the hand.
Naturally a Romanoff couldn’t be conspicuous in any way just then. “But
when the time comes, if it ever does, when Russia is normal again, why
shouldn’t the contribution I make be to the education of children?”
“The salvation of your country lies in the education of its children,
all of them, not just the children of the rich,” I replied.
“I believe it,” was the earnest response. “And I want to help establish
the best public school system in the world in Russia. How can I do it?”
I told him, to the best of my ability. And he promised me that he would
carry out my suggestions. Prince Felix Yussupoff means to spend the
next year or two studying the American public school, and especially
the Gary system. He doesn’t want to be remembered for just one thing.