Even princes can write trashy books. Felix Yusupov proved that back in the 1920s and then, again, in the 1950s. He was a scion of the House of Yusupov, one of the wealthiest families in 18th- and 19th-century Russia, who nevertheless managed to marry up: to Princess Irina Alexandrovna, niece of Tsar Nicholas II.
Oh, and he also participated in the murder of Grigori Rasputin, the wild-eyed and wilder-bearded holy man who befriended the tsar, his wife and their children in that shimmering, simmering decade before the 1917 revolution. We know this because Yusupov told absolutely everyone about it. Rather than keep schtum about Rasputin’s killing, he gave all the gory details—and then added some even gorier ones for good measure—in a pair of memoirs called, in their English translations, Rasputin: His Malignant Influence and his Assassination (published in 1927, 11 years after the assassination itself) and Lost Splendour (1954).
Both are currently out of print, though there was a combined edition a few years back that you might still be able to track down. But to spare Prospect readers that effort, I recently spent some time with them in a library and decided to pull out some of the juicier parts. Here goes.
If the cakes don’t work, perhaps a bullet will
In the first of his books, Yusupov takes 158 pages to get to the murder in question, in a chapter called “The night of the 16th December”. In the lead-up to that night, he and a band of co-conspirators had come up with a plan to entice Rasputin—with, in part, the promise of meeting Princess Irina—to Moika Palace, the Yusupovs’ grand riverfront residence in Saint Petersburg. On the night itself, according to Yusupov, they prepared several poisoned cakes and sprinkled cyanide into a number of wine glasses. Then Rasputin arrived.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the book’s telling of the murder is its conveniently thriller-ish—practically cinematic—pacing. These killers didn’t just kill; they also built tension. Yusupov writes of how, at first, he presented unpoisoned cakes and wine glasses to Rasputin (“I am at a loss to explain…”); and then, when the poisoned versions are finally in position, there’s some will-he-won’t-he hijinks before Rasputin finally tucks in:
I stood in front of him and followed each movement he made, expecting every movement to be his last.
But he drank slowly, taking small sips at a time, just as if he had been a connoisseur.
His face did not change; but from time to time he put his hand to his throat as if he found slight difficulty in swallowing. He got up and moved about the room and when I asked him whether anything was the matter, ‘Oh, nothing much,’ he said, ‘just an irritation in the throat.’
There was a nerve-wracking pause.
‘That’s very good madeira. Give me some more,’ said Rasputin, holding out his glass.
The poison still had no effect. The [mystic] continued to walk about the room.
I took no notice of the glass which he held out to me, but seized another poisoned one from the tray. I poured wine into it, and passed it to him.
He drained it: and still the poison had no effect.
So Yusupov & co. decide to take a more direct approach: gunfire. A pistol is secreted into the room, and the prince directs Rasputin towards a bejewelled crucifix:
‘God give me strength to end it all,’ I thought, and I slowly brought the revolver from behind my back. Rasputin was still standing motionless before me, his head turned to the right, and his eyes on the crucifix.
‘Where shall I shoot?’ I thought. ‘Through the temple or through the heart?’
A streak of lightning seemed to run through my body. I fired.
There was a roar as from a wild beast, and Rasputin fell heavily backwards on the bear-skin rug….
We examined the wound. The bullet had passed through the region of the heart. There could be no doubt about it; he was dead.
Strangely, considering that Yusupov wrote this book to correct, as he puts it in a preface, “misleading and calumnious articles on this subject”, there are quite a few, well, improbabilities in his account. We’ll get on to that.
The devil himself! And more bullets
But first: the absolute historic fact that Rasputin didn’t actually die after the first bullet-strike, just as he didn’t die after all that cyanide, but instead used his satanic powers to come back to life. Here’s Yusupov’s description:
I stood over him for a little time longer, and was on the point of going away when my attention was arrested by a slight trembling of his left eyelid… I bent down over him, and attentively examined his face…. It began to twitch convulsively. The movements became more and more pronounced. Suddenly the left eye half-opened… An instant later the right lid trembled and lifted…. And both eyes… eyes of Rasputin – fixed themselves upon me with an expression of devilish hatred.
My blood froze in speechless horror. I was petrified… I wanted to run, to call for help; but my feet would not move, and no sound came from me.
I stood riveted to the floor as if in a nightmare.
Then the incredible happened…. With a violent movement Rasputin jumped to his feet. I was horror-stricken. The room resounded with a wild roar. His fingers, convulsively knotted, flashed through the air…. Like red-hot iron they grasped my shoulder and tried to grip me by the throat. His eyes were crossed, and obtruded terribly; he was foaming at the mouth.
And in a hoarse whisper he constantly repeated my name.
I cannot convey in words the fear which possessed me.
I tried to tear myself away, but his iron clutch held me with incredible strength. A terrible struggle ensued.
This dying, poisoned, and shot-ridden creature raised by the powers of darkness to avenge his destruction, inspired me with a feeling so terrifying, so ghastly, that the memory of it haunts me to this day.
At that moment I understood and felt in the fullest degree the real power of Rasputin. It seemed that the devil himself, incarnate in this [peasant], was holding me in vice-like fingers, never to let me go.
But Rasputin does let Yusupov go, to run outside, where he is shot a further two times by another of the conspirators. Once again, “he showed no signs of life”—and, this time, that really does appear to have been that. The gang bundle Rasputin’s body into a car, before hurling it into the waters around Petrovsky Island. For his part, Yusupov remains at Moika Palace, where he gets a servant to commit another crime—killing a dog—to excuse away the gunshots and the blood.
The motives for the crime
Why, though? Why did Yusupov decide to murder Rasputin, a man so closely connected with Russia’s ruling family? Here, to some extent, we can actually take the text at face value.
In the 157 pages of Rasputin: His Malignant Influence and his Assassination before we get to the actual assassination, there’s a whole lot of wordage expended on the first half of the subtitle: the “malignant influence”. Yusupov, like many Russians at the time, believed that Rasputin was truly in control of the state—using his close friendship with Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra to subvert everything from ministerial appointments to national policy. Scurrilous cartoons were widely available showing the royal couple as puppets on the holy man’s hands. There were rumours that those hands got up to even more with Alexandra.
But if many Russians believed all this gross innuendo, Yusupov seemed to really believe it—to the point of mania. Both books dwell on descriptions of Rasputin trying to hypnotise members of Saint Petersburg’s aristo-political class, including Yusupov himself (“I knew that I was preventing him from getting complete mastery over me”). The prince sees foreign powers in the shadows, and Rasputin helping them to overthrow Russia. There is a large dose of antisemitism in his conspiracy-mongering, more poisonous than anything he may or may not have put in those wine glasses.
Whatever became of the prince?
In a word, exile. Rasputin was too close to the royal family for his murder to go unpunished. But, perversely, Yusupov was also too close to them—himself part of Russia’s ruling elite—to be punished with the same degree of finality as any other killer. He was dispatched to his family estate in Rakitnoye, on the western edge of Russia.
This period is described in Lost Splendour, which is the better—if less schlocky—of Yusupov’s two books precisely because it’s not just about Rasputin and his murder. (In fact, Lost Splendour received the honour of a Folio Society edition in the 1990s, with an introduction by Count Nikolai Tolstoy, which gloriously claims that the account of the murder “appears to be essentially truthful”.)
And it might have been this exile that saved Yusupov from a brutal end during the revolution of 1917. The prince wasn’t around Saint Petersburg during the violence that year, and while he returned to Moika Palace to retrieve various jewels and two Rembrandt paintings that were removed from their frames and folded into his luggage, he and his family were able to make an escape from Russia through Crimea.
What followed was Paris, the sale of the Rembrandts, bad business decisions, less money and comfort. Somewhat ironically, in 1932, Yusupov did manage to make a large lump sum—£25,000—by suing MGM over its film Rasputin and the Empress, which contained a character based on Princess Irina and put that character in the arms of Rasputin. How dare Hollywood create wrong impressions!
The truth emerges from frozen waters
A prince in need of some ready cash. A pair of books that reveal his side of the Rasputin killing. Cyanide, resurrection, the devil himself… it doesn’t take a detective to figure out what’s probably going on here. You might already be thinking that Yusupov sensationalised his tale to earn a quick buck.
And supplementary evidence would appear to support that view. When Rasputin’s body was hacked from the ice of Saint Petersburg’s converging rivers in 1916, the autopsy recorded only three bullet wounds—with no mention of poisoning. The murder may have been as unglamorous as a few trigger pulls and then a hastily dumped body.
Even Yusupov’s claims of authorship might not have been wholly honest. Andrew Cook, in his book To Kill Rasputin, describes the first of the two memoirs as “translated by” and “essentially co-written with” one of Yusupov’s friends from Oxford University, Oswald Rayner, who also has a cameo appearance in the second book. (Friendly advice: do not go down the rabbit holes leading to speculation about Rayner killing Rasputin for MI6.)
There are even echoes, albeit quiet and distorted ones, of another author who also lived Saint Petersburg—Fyodor Dostoevsky. His most famous killer, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, pauses after axing down the pawnbroker. Why? “He had a sudden fancy that the old woman might still be alive and might still come around.”
But let us end specifically with Yusupov’s books and the lesson they teach. Always be wary of one person’s account of events—even if that one person is a prince.
