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.