Rasputin, ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’, was murdered here

It was an eerie experience to stand before the colossal Yusupov Palace, aka Moika Palace, in St. Petersburg. It was here, on the night of December 29, 1916, that Grigori Rasputin, the dreaded and hated ‘holy man’ who for nearly a decade held sway in the royal Czar household of the Russian empire, was murdered. As a reader of history, the mysterious, almost evil, figure of Rasputin – some called him the Mad Monk - had haunted me ever since I first read about him. The famous Boney M song described him as ‘lover of the Russian queen’ and ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’. There may be some truth in the first statement. But he would perhaps be best described as the Czar family’s monumental blunder.

After his death, Rasputin became a myth, an iconic villain, a symbol of spiritual fraud and corruption in high places. Hundreds of books have been written about him, and many films and television productions depict his bizarre life. His name entered global popularity charts when Boney M’s 1978 superhit song ‘Ra Ra Rasputin’ was released. Incidentally, it is amazing how the 30-odd simple lines of the song’s lyrics by Frank Farian and co nearly sum up Rasputin’s life.

At the time Rasputin became a feared extra-constitutional power in the Romanov-Czar household, Russia was the third-largest empire in the world, covering 22.8 million square kilometres across Eastern Europe, Northern Asia, and parts of Central Asia. It was this massive imperial territory spread over continents that an illiterate man, with claims of being a magical ‘healer’, had brought under his thumb, wielding almost unlimited power.

His flagrant abuse of power became, so to speak, the last nail driven into the coffin of the Russian Empire. Even as he lay dying a horrible death on 29 December 1916 in the Yusupov Palace, the Revolution was knocking on the doors. By March 1917, it had descended upon Russia. Fifteen months later, in July 1918, the Czar family, the emperor, the empress and their five young children, along with their four aides, were savagely murdered - said to be under Lenin’s orders. The Romanov line was wiped out.

St. Petersburg is a city that overwhelms you with memories of its tumultuous, bloody history and the sheer splendour of its architecture. For me, St. Petersburg is more magnificent than Paris or Rome. It is also a city of rivers and canals – somewhat like Venice, though this aspect seems hardly highlighted. There are around 100 waterways and over 300 bridges. The lifting of several giant drawbridges to let ships pass is a sight that attracts large crowds of tourists. The Yusupov Palace sits on the bank of the Moika River, which flows through the city.

The Palace is now a museum, its centrepiece being the mind-boggling opulence of its interior, typical of the aristocratic prodigality of those times. One almost feels surrounded by the ghosts of the men and women who wallowed in this sea of ill-got wealth, grabbed from Russia’s poor. But a more macabre sight awaits you in the basement: it is the Rasputin museum, where wax figures of Rasputin and his killers confront you in a recreation of the events of the night of the murder. It gives you a shock.

Rasputin’s story is yet another chilling example of the sordid phenomenon of ‘holy’ people influencing or controlling seats of power. Rasputin’s case is especially sinister because the consequences were monstrous and immensely tragic. Indians, of course, know the phenomenon only too well. It is omnipresent in their lives.

Rasputin came from a poor interior village in Siberia. A peasant with a family of wife and five children, he regularly went on pilgrimages. From one pilgrimage, he returned as a ‘spiritual’ person, began to wear priestly robes, and to gather villagers together for prayer meetings. He also came to be known as a ‘healer’. Beyond a rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet, he seems to have been illiterate.

Seeing how good he was at leading prayers, the priest of the local church took him to St. Petersburg, 3000 kilometres away, and presented him to the capital city’s aristocratic circles – his motives seem to be unknown. Anna Viruboa, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting to the Empress, happened to meet Rasputin, and she asked him to heal her of an illness. She came to believe that Rasputin had miraculously healed her.

The scene shifts to the Czar's household. Crown Prince Alexei, an infant and the only son of the royal couple and heir to the Russian throne, had been diagnosed with haemophilia, a deadly genetic disorder for which a cure does not exist even today. Anna Viruboa introduced Rasputin to the Czars as a healer with miraculous powers, and Rasputin promised to heal the prince. Thus began Rasputin’s association with the Czar family and his meteoric rise as the second most powerful figure in the Russian Empire.

Perhaps he was actually the first because even the emperor sought his advice on important matters. But let it be said to Rasputin’s credit - even though his critics generally do not dwell on this – that he had warned the emperor against going to war with Germany, saying it would bring a huge calamity upon Russia and cause even the destruction of the Romanov dynasty. His words came true.

But the irony was that Rasputin himself brought about much of the calamity. Czar Nicholas II was away at the war front in 1915-1917 for 18 months and the Empress was left alone to manage the affairs of the state. It was during this time that Rasputin wielded unbridled power. The empress was said to have been completely subservient to him because the healing of her son was uppermost in her mind. She also seemed to have believed that Rasputin had supernatural powers to do harm and was afraid of him.

Rasputin had already earned notoriety for his flagrant relationships with women of St. Petersburg's high society. It was said that his hypnotic eyes could bend people to his will. His sexual prowess had become the stuff of legend. Rumours were rife that the empress was his mistress. He was known to treat the elite women of St. Petersburg like dirt, and they seemed to have enjoyed it. It is said he even made them wash his feet and drink the water.

He himself drank like a fish and behaved in high society like a barbarian. His ‘orders’ to government officials were notorious not only because of their arbitrariness or because they were scribbled on scraps of paper, but because they hardly had any spelling or grammar. When the nobility approached Rasputin for favors Rasputin was said to have demanded the company of their women.

They were also getting increasingly worried that power was about to slip from their hands because the administration was collapsing, and the rumblings of the Revolution were beginning to be heard and felt. By 191,6 the Czar government had all but failed. The emperor himself was facing defeat on the war front. Unrest was growing across Russia.

Rasputin had unleashed himself in such a disastrous way upon Russia that people came to believe that he was the chief cause of the ills that haunted them and that his elimination was the solution – even though the fact remained that he was only an accidental player in the final disintegration of a corrupt and inept autocratic system. The rot had set in long ago.

Thus, five men under the leadership of Prince Felix Yusupov decided to put an end to Rasputin. Yusupov was the husband of the Czar’s niece. Of the other four, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was a cousin of the Czar, and Vladimir Purishkevich was a member of the Russian parliament. Also in the group were the doctor who supplied the cyanide and a lieutenant of the Russian army.

The details of the killing are gruesome and may shock readers. Some of it even seems fantastic. The essential facts appear to be as follows: Prince Yusupov invited Rasputin to the Yusupov Palace – his home – for dinner. It seems Rasputin went alone for dinner to a home that was enemy territory for him because the prince, as a lure, had promised him a private meeting with his wife princess Irina. The team had got ready for him cakes and tea laced with cyanide. According to Yusupov’s own account, even after Rasputin had consumed it all, he remained unaffected by the cyanide. Then Yusupov served him cyanide-mixed wine. But apparently, Rasputin still remained unharmed.

A worried Yusupov, in fact, asked Rasputin how he was feeling, and Rasputin is said to have replied that the wine seemed to have given him a burning sensation in the throat. Yusupov was desperate. He ran up to his room, returned with a gun and shot Rasputin in the chest. Rasputin fell to the floor. Thinking he was dead, Yusupov - so goes his own account - put on Rasputin’s coat and cap and rode to Rasputin’s house and returned secretly, to create the impression that Rasputin had left the Palace alive.

When Yusupov came back and entered the dining room, Rasputin jumped up and attacked Yusupov. The prince apparently couldn’t withstand Rasputin’s enormous strength. He was also seized with supernatural dread, seeing a supposedly dead man come alive. He ran upstairs and out into the courtyard where the other conspirators were waiting. Rasputin followed him into the courtyard.

There, he was shot in the head several times and bludgeoned till the conspirators were sure he was dead. Then they tied up the body, rolled it up in a thick cloth, took it by car to the bridge called Large Petrovsky across the Little Nevka river and threw it into a hole in the ice of the freezing river. Three days later, workers discovered it a few hundred meters downstream, caught in the ice. The body seems to have been in a semi-upright position with arms lifted up, leading to rumours that Rasputin had been alive and had tried to escape.

The empress had the body taken to the imperial palace, where it was buried with due honours in the palace grounds. The empress was said to have planned to build a church over Rasputin’s grave. In February 1917, revolutionaries took control of St. Petersburg. Czar Nicholas II abdicated. Soldiers of the revolution dug up Rasputin’s body and burned it in a nearby forest. The body was said to have sat up as the fire burned high. Apparently, the body had assumed the ‘pugilistic pose’ which is a reaction of a dead body to intense heat. This again led to rumours that Rasputin had miraculously come alive while in the fire.

Teffi (real name: Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitsakaya), the delightful writer whose genius and brilliance were eclipsed by her famous male peers, and whom Rasputin once tried to hypnotise and seduce, says Rasputin once told her, ‘Yes, they want to kill me. Well, so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.’ (Teffi: Rasputin and Other Ironies, Pushkin Press.)

Did Rasputin, after all, know something that others didn’t? History seems a haunted place where there are no answers.