December 1916: killing Rasputin

The infamous ‘mad monk’ Grigori Rasputin was murdered 100 years ago this December, slaughtered in a wine cellar when poisoned booze failed to do the job.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin is one of the most colourful, malevolent and infamous characters in Russian history.

Monk, healer, occultist, fraud, drunkard, philanderer, he was many things to many people and the popular version passed down to us is certainly lurid.

In truth quite what is true in his life and what is legend is still much disputed. So detested was he by certain members of the upper class, government and priesthood that they quite openly fabricated reports in order to discredit him in the eyes of Tsar Nicholas II.

One such example is the Yar Restaurant incident in 1915. The Okhrana (secret police) report states that in the restaurant Rasputin became inebriated and exposed himself to the Gypsy chorus girls that were a popular entertainment at the venue. It has since been shown to be at most a complete lie and at best hearsay reported as fact.

What is apparent, however, is that Rasputin had the ear of the strong-willed but silly, nervous and hysterical Tsarina Alexandra, because of his apparent ability to control her son, Alexis’, haemophilia, and that this influence contributed to the unpopularity of the Romanovs and their eventual decline.

It is also true that Rasputin liked to drink, a habit no doubt picked up in the crushingly dull backwater of his hometown of Pokrovskoe in Siberia. He apparently had a particular taste for sweet Georgian and Crimean wines.

Eventually, the resentment towards Rasputin spilled over into an act of incredible violence, made even more fantastic by his apparent prediction of it some months before.

The leader of the plotters to kill Rasputin was Prince Felix Yusupov – who was married to the Tsar’s niece, Princess Irina – as well as the Tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Vladimir Purishkevich.

It is thought that Yusupov, over some weeks or months, got to know Rasputin and eventually intimated to him that either he or his wife required the monk’s services.

Rasputin was invited to Yusupov’s family home in St Petersburg, the Moika Palace, where the prince had converted part of the wine cellar into a small dining room.

On the night of the 29/30 December Rasputin went round to the palace and was met by Felix in the cellar. The palace was undergoing a refurbishment and the conspirators had laid out the table to look as though dinner had been going on in this temporary dining room. There were napkins scrunched up on the table and bottles of wine stood around. Yusupov told Rasputin to sit down and said Irina would join them shortly. He offered his guest some cakes and a glass of his favourite sweet wine. Both items were laced with, “enough cyanide to kill several men instantly”. It was the start of the most infamous Rasputin legend of all – his death.

To begin with, the poisoned wine and food had absolutely no effect on him. An hour later he was still drinking, now quite drunk.

Yusupov was understandably concerned that such a powerful poison had failed to kill Rasputin who was now beginning to grow suspicious that Irina had not appeared. Perhaps this wild man really was in league with the devil? Yusupov began to panic and nipped upstairs to ask his co-conspirators what to do. They handed him a pistol, so Yusupov went back downstairs and shot Rasputin in the chest.

Yusupov went to report the deed but while there was relief from his fellows, Rasputin’s uncanny ability to ignore the effect of the poison had made Yusupov uneasy. He returned to the basement to examine the body. As the prince crouched down beside him Rasputin’s eyes, “greenish and snakelike” as Yusupov later described them, snapped open and he lunged at the prince. Screaming in terror, Yusupov fled upstairs.

In the accepted version of events as a group the assassins went back to the cellar but found no body. Rasputin was found to have made his way up another flight of stairs and opened a door to the snow-covered courtyard, across which he was now crawling. The conspirators then shot and clubbed him to death.

In another version, as Rasputin struggled to his feet after attacking Yusupov, another assassin arrived in the cellar and shot him again. As they dragged his body across the courtyard he moved or groaned at which point a coup de grace was then delivered through Rasputin’s forehead – very possibly by a British secret agent.*

Whatever transpired exactly, Rasputin was bundled into a car and driven to a bridge on the outskirts of St Petersburg where the assassins dropped his body through a hole in the ice. Having hoped it would wash out to sea, the grisly corpse was in fact fished out of the river two days later.

Yusupov and Pavlovich were both exiled, an act which ultimately saved them from the fate that consumed so many of their family and friends less than a year after the murder when revolution broke out in Russia. As the country imploded into civil war and anarchy the Tsar and his family were wiped out. His niece and cousin meanwhile, far away from the centres of revolution in urban areas were able to get away; the Yusupovs, ultimately, to New York and Pavlovich and his sisters to Paris.

While in Paris, despite his rather more impoverished straits, the Grand Duke kept up the life of a dashing playboy émigré, rekindling a relationship with the famous ballerina Vera Karalli and even becoming one of Coco Chanel’s lovers in around 1921. In fact, Chanel even helped find him a new career as a Champagne salesman.

The seemingly never-ending murder-assassination of Rasputin has only added to the aura of demonic evil with which he was supposedly possessed.

The fact he had to be poisoned, shot, clubbed and then dumped in a frozen lake before dying has made him the perfect, undying horror villain for films and graphic novels galore – and of course the subject of a Boney M song.

But was his ability to survive the poison really an indication he was protected by the devil? The truth is rather more scientific but no less intriguing.

A short study by the Royal Society of Chemists suggests that if the cyanide had been kept in a damp place – such as the Moika Palace wine cellar, which was situated right next to the Moika River – it would have become less toxic due to the atmospheric conditions.

As the report lays out: “Atmospheric carbon dioxide reacts with moisture to form the weak acid carbonic acid:

CO2(g) + H2O(l) → H2CO3(aq)

“This is a weak acid (pKa 6.3) but it is strong enough to react with potassium cyanide to form hydrocyanic acid (pKa 9.3) and potassium hydrogencarbonate.

H2CO3(aq) + KCN(s) → KHCO3(s) + HCN(g)

“Hydrocyanic acid (hydrogen cyanide) is covalently bonded and the molecule is a gas at room temperature. The gaseous hydrocyanic acid would have escaped into the air leaving behind the harmless potassium hydrogencarbonate. This is a white powder and would be visually indistinguishable from the potassium cyanide.”

When the conspirators were liberally lacing the cakes and wine with cyanide therefore, they might as well have been dusting them with icing sugar for all the damage they were going to cause; not that that detracts from the drama, intrigue and viciousness of the final moments of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.

*Tentatively identified as Oswald Rayner an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (the forerunner of MI6). The theory that there was British involvement in Rasputin’s murder has gained greater credence in recent years. Inconsistencies in the conspirators’ accounts, examination of the calibres of the pistol ammunition that caused the bullet wounds and mention of Rayner in Yusupov’s memoirs – the pair were also at Oxford together – have given credence to the idea. Rasputin was also stridently anti-war and his influence over the Tsarina led to the appointment of numerous other anti-war government ministers. The fear that peace with Russia would allow Germany to transfer hundreds of divisions to he Western Front may have driven the British to help arrange or even participate in Rasputin’s removal. In the end, the Russian Revolution would allow the Germans to do precisely that.

Rayner burnt his papers long before his death and rarely if ever spoke about his time in Russia. An obituary written by a relative in the local paper after his death in the arly 1960s mentioned he was in the Yusupov Palace at the time of the murder, while official memos in the National Archive show that Rayner’s superior in Russia, Captain John Scale was in touch with the SIS in London with regards Rasputin who is referred to throughout as ‘Dark Forces’. After Rasputin’s death Scales is informed that Rayner was “tying up loose ends”.