CHAPTER XI 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!”