Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

CHAPTER XIII MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT

In an even, passionless voice Anna Virubova went on to tell me the story of the murder in the Yussupoff palace, as it had appeared to the slain man’s devotees in Tsarskoe Selo.

“We knew that certain people were plotting to kill Rasputin. His life was attempted, you may know, at least three times. But it never entered our minds that Prince Yussupoff was in the plot. He was not a favorite with the Empress, who thought him a very dissolute young man. Still, he was in Tsarskoe once in a while, because his wife, who is a lovely girl, often came, and sometimes he came with her. On one of his last visits he saw the Empress. I was in the room and I heard him say, quite casually, that he had invited Rasputin to come to his house. ‘My wife wants to meet him,’ he said.

“We thought no more about it, but on the morning after the dreadful thing happened one of Rasputin’s daughters called me on the telephone and asked me if I knew where her father was, and if not would I telephone the palace and find out if he was there. Some intuition seemed to tell me that something terribly wrong had occurred.

“Trying not to let my voice tremble, I asked the girl when her father had left the house and with whom. ‘He left about midnight,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know whose motor car it was that came for him, but he told us he was going to call on Prince Yussupoff.’ I did not telephone the palace to ask about Rasputin. I went there as quickly as I could and told the Empress my news. ‘He went to see Felix?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why should he have gone there now, when Irene is in the Crimea?’ We looked at each other and the same kind of awful fear looked out of her eyes that had gathered in my heart. ‘Send for the chief of police at once,’ said the Empress. ‘Tell him to come as fast as he possibly can.’ It is almost too terrible for me to tell you. The police found the Yussupoff house in the most ghastly state of blood and—ugh!” she exclaimed, “it made me sick to hear them describe it, and it makes me sick just to remember it.” After a moment she continued, real feeling in her voice. “The thing was not difficult to trace. The Yussupoff boy denied everything at first, made up a silly story about a dog that had to be killed.”

When Mme. Virubova said this I admit I shuddered. It was evident that she did not grasp the subtlety of that “silly story about a dog that had to be killed.”

“While Prince Felix was still insisting that no crime had been committed the police found the hole in the ice, and around it, on the snow, many bloodstains. And then they found the poor corpse. They had killed him, first by shooting and then by every horrible means in their power. He was shot in the head and in the body, crushed and mangled almost beyond recognition. There was one frightful, ragged wound across his stomach which could only have been made with a spur, the doctors told us. When he had been beaten until he was helpless those men tied him up with meters of rope and threw him in the river to drown. He must have regained consciousness at the end, because he had dragged one arm partially free and by his hand we knew that he tried to make the sign of the cross. Yussupoff persisted in his denials until Grand Duke Michael and his son drove to the palace and told the Czar that they were all more or less in it, and that it had been a good thing to do. A good thing to murder and mutilate a defenseless man! Well, you asked me what a court was like.

“There was a terrific time at the palace. The Emperor was horrified, and the Empress, I think, was nearer the insanity they accused her of than she had ever been before. They demanded the name of every man and woman connected with the plot, and promised that every one of them should be brought to sternest justice. But what power had they, after all? The grand dukes and the whole family stood as one against the Emperor and Empress. They declared that no one should be punished for that atrocious crime. I cannot tell you all they said and did, because that would be revealing confidences. But they held a strong enough club over the poor Emperor when they threatened to desert him in a troubled and uncertain time. He was absolutely forced to agree that only the principal plotters should be banished to their estates, and the others should be left unpunished. Afterward, when we could talk about it at all,” Mme. Virubova resumed, “I reminded the Empress that the day before Rasputin was murdered that Yussupoff boy had telephoned to me asking me to arrange for him to see the Empress. She had declined to see him, and we both believe that if she had received him he would have killed her and then, very likely, me also. We are convinced that there was a great assassination plot all laid. But there is no proof.”

This, then, is how the Rasputin murder appears in the reverse. Prince Felix Yussupoff did not look like a wholesale assassin to me, but, then, neither did Anna Virubova look like a poison plotter. Evidently you have to be accustomed to the atmosphere of courts to judge these things. I don’t judge anybody in this grewsome drama. I leave that to history.

I asked Mme. Virubova why the court cliques plotted against the Empress. “It was inevitable,” she replied. “The Empress came there, a stranger, a poor, beautiful, painfully shy young girl. She did not know how to flatter or win favor. She was studious, and she was devoted to her husband and children. They needed her devotion—oh, far more than the ordinary family needs that of the mother. You have heard, I suppose, some of the atrocious slanders that have been circulated about the Empress. One of these had it that she encouraged the Emperor in his weakness for alcohol because she wanted to keep him in a muddled state of mind and herself be the real ruler of Russia. The exact opposite is true. The poor Emperor did drink too much sometimes, but it was not her fault. There were others at that court who were vitally interested in keeping their Emperor in a muddled state of mind, and they constantly played on his weakness. His wife fought for him desperately, did everything in her power to save him from these men.