Rasputin Grigory Efimovich (1869-1916) was a favorite of Emperor Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. The fact that Grigory Rasputin had a huge influence on the royal family caused great hatred for him everywhere. The lower classes hated “out of rudeness,” out of a desire to savor the weaknesses of the powerful, and persons close to the court, and religious leaders, because the “dirty man” took part in big politics.
A close friend of the royal couple, the maid of honor of the Empress A. Vyrubova wrote: “I also remember episodes with one of Rasputin's famous enemies, the monk Iliodor, who at the end of his adventures took off his robe, married and lives in America. He was undoubtedly an abnormal person. This Iliodor launched two attempts on Rasputin's life. The first he succeeded when a certain woman Gusev was able to stab him in the stomach - in Pokrovsky. This was in 1914, a few weeks before the start of the war. The second attempt was rigged by Minister Khvostov with the same Iliodor …"
1916 - another conspiracy was drawn up against Grigory Rasputin. Its main participants were Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, famous politician Vladimir Purishkevich and military doctor S. S. Lazavert. The conspirators managed to lure Rasputin to Yusupov's palace in St. Petersburg, agreeing to kill him there, and throw his body into the river under the ice. For the murder, they prepared cakes filled with poison, and bottles with potassium cyanide, which they wanted to mix into the wine.
On arrival at the palace, Rasputin was received by the owner, while Purishkevich, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and Doctor Lazavert were waiting upstairs in another room.
Purishkevich, describing in his diary the murder and death of Rasputin as a feat that was accomplished by the conspirators to save Russia, nevertheless pays tribute to Rasputin's courage:
“Another good half hour of the time that was utterly painful for us passed, when, in the end, we clearly heard the clapping of two traffic jams one after the other, the clink of glasses, after which the interlocutor who had previously spoken below suddenly fell silent.
We froze in our positions, going down a few more steps down the stairs. However … another quarter of an hour passed, and the peaceful conversation and even sometimes laughter below did not stop.
“I can't understand anything, - spreading my hands and turning to the Grand Duke, I whispered to him. - Is he bewitched, or something, that even cyanide does not work on him!”
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… We went up the stairs and with the whole group went back to the study, where two or three minutes later Yusupov entered again inaudibly, upset and pale.
“No,” he says, “it's impossible! Imagine, he drank two glasses of poison, ate several pink cakes, and, as you can see, nothing; absolutely nothing, and after that, at least 15 minutes have passed! I don’t know how we should be, moreover, he was already worried why the countess didn’t come out to him for so long, and I barely explained to him that it was difficult for her to disappear unnoticed, because there were not many guests up there … He sits gloomily on the sofa now, and, as I see, the effect of the poison affects him only in the fact that he has incessant belching and some salivation …"
After 5 minutes, Yusupov appeared in the office for the third time.
“Gentlemen,” he told us swiftly, “the situation is the same: the poison doesn’t work on him or not, go to hell will not do; time is running out, it is impossible to wait any longer."
"But what about?" - Dmitry Pavlovich noticed.
“If it’s impossible with poison,” I replied to him, “you need to go all-in, in the open, go down to us or all together, or leave it to me alone, I’ll lay him down or out of my“sauvage”*, or I’ll smash his skull with brass knuckles. What do you say neither this?"
“Yes,” Yusupov noted, “if you put the question this way, then, of course, you will have to stop at one of these methods.”
After consulting for a minute, we decided to go downstairs and leave me to lay him down with knuckle dusters … Having decided so, we cautiously moved to the stairs in single file (with me at the head) and already went down to the fifth step, when Dmitry Pavlovich, taking my shoulder, whispered in my ear: Attendes un moment (Wait a minute (French)) and, rising back again, took Yusupov aside. I, Lieutenant S. (Lieutenant A. S. Sukhotin was another participant in the conspiracy) and Lazavert went back to the office, where Dmitry Pavlovich and Yusupov immediately followed us back, who told me:
“Vladimir Mikhailovich, you will have nothing against me shooting him, come what may. This is faster and easier."
… Indeed, not even 5 minutes have passed since Yusupov's departure, when after two or three fragmentary phrases uttered by those who were saying below, a dull sound of a shot rang out, after which we heard a long … Ah-ah! and the sound of a body falling heavily on the floor. Immediately, not a single second, all of us who were upstairs did not go down, but literally head over heels flew down the railing of the stairs, pushing the dining room door with our swift pressure …
… In front of the sofa in the part of the room adjacent to the living room, on the skin of a polar bear lay dying Grigory Rasputin, and above him, holding a revolver in his right hand, clasped behind his back, Yusupov stood absolutely calm … No blood was visible; apparently, there was an internal hemorrhage, and the bullet hit Rasputin in the chest, but, in all likelihood, it did not come out … I stood over Rasputin, glaring at him. He was not yet dead: he was breathing, agonizing.
With his right hand he covered both eyes and half of his long, spongy nose, his left hand was extended along the body; his chest sometimes rose high and his body twitched with convulsions. He was gorgeous, but dressed like a peasant: in fine boots, in velvet trousers, in a silk shirt richly embroidered with silks, cream color, a shirt belted with a thick crimson silk lace with tassels. His long black beard was carefully combed and seemed to shine or shine even from some kind of spice …
We left the dining room, turning off the electricity in it and slightly closing the door … It was already four o'clock in the morning and we had to hurry. Lieutenant S. and Lazavet, led by Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, got into the car and drove to the station … him in the office upstairs, awaiting the return of the accomplices who had left, with whom they were supposed to tie the corpse together in some kind of matter and drag it into the car of the Grand Duke.
I cannot determine how long my loneliness lasted, I only know that I felt absolutely calm and even satisfied, but I firmly remember how some inner force pushed me to Yusupov's desk, on which lay my "sauvage" taken from my pocket, like I took it and put it back in the right pocket of my trousers, and after that I left the office … and ended up in the vestibule.
No sooner had I entered this vestibule than I heard someone's footsteps already at the bottom of the stairs, then I heard the sound of a door opening into the dining room where Rasputin lay … “Who could it be?” I wondered, but the thought mine had not yet had time to give herself an answer to the question posed, when suddenly a wild, inhuman cry rang out from below, which seemed to me to be Yusupov's cry: “Purishkevich, shoot, shoot, he is alive! he's running away!"
… There was no time to hesitate, and I, not being at a loss, grabbed my "sauvage" into my pockets, set it on the "fire" and ran down the stairs. What I saw below might have seemed like a dream, if it had not been a terrible reality for us: Grigory Rasputin, whom I contemplated half an hour ago with his last breath, lying on the stone floor of the dining room, waddling from side to side, quickly ran along the loose snow in the courtyard of the palace along the iron lattice overlooking the street …
The first moment I could not believe my eyes, but his loud cry in the silence of the night on the run "Felix, Felix, I will tell the queen …" convinced me that it was him, that it was Rasputin, that he could leave thanks to his phenomenal vitality, that a few more moments, and he will be behind the second iron gate …
I ran after him and fired. In the stillness of the night, the unusually loud sound of my revolver flashed through the air - miss! Rasputin set the pace; I fired a second time on the run - and … another miss. I cannot convey the feeling of rage that I experienced against myself at that moment. The shooter, more than decent, who practiced in the shooting range on the Semyonovsky parade ground incessantly and hit small targets, I was today unable to put a person in 20 steps. Moments passed …
Rasputin was already running up to the gate, then I stopped, bit my left hand with all my might in order to force myself to concentrate, and hit him in the back with a shot (for the third time). He stopped, then I, already taking aim more carefully, standing in the same place, fired a fourth time, and it seemed to hit him in the head, because he fell facedown in the snow in a sheaf and twitched his head. I ran up to him and kicked him with all my might in the temple. He lay with his arms outstretched far ahead, scraping the snow and as if wishing to crawl forward on his belly; but he could no longer advance and only clanged and gnashed his teeth."
To what Purishkevich told about the death of Rasputin, one should add the story of Felix Yusupov about what happened when, after the departure of some of the conspirators, he went down to the dining room for the second time:
“… I found Rasputin in the same place, I took his hand to feel the pulse, - it seemed to me that there was no pulse, then I put my hand to my heart - it did not beat; but suddenly, you can imagine my horror, Rasputin slowly opens one of his satanic eyes to the full extent, following this other, he glares at me with a look of inexpressible tension and hatred and with the words: “Felix! Felix! Felix!" jumps up at once, with the aim of grabbing me. I jumped back as quickly as I could, and I don't remember what happened next."
When Purishkevich finished off Rasputin, the conspirators threw Rasputin's body from the bridge into an ice-hole on Malaya Nevka. An autopsy revealed that the royal favorite was alive when he was lowered into the river! Moreover: twice mortally wounded in the chest and neck, with two breaks in the skull, he fought for his life under water for some time and was able to free his right hand, clenched into a fist, from the ropes.
Even after his death, Rasputin's body did not find rest. Immediately after the assassination of Rasputin, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna instructed one of the prominent Petrograd architects to design a mausoleum in Tsarskoe Selo, where it was planned to transfer the ashes of the tsarist favorite. In the meantime, they arranged a temporary burial near the royal palaces, behind the park. A wooden chapel was erected near the burial mound, where members of the royal family went to pray almost every day.
After Rasputin's burial, on the very first night a group of Tsarskoye Selo officers brought a cesspool with shit and dumped its contents onto the grave mound. A few more months passed, and in 1917, during the February revolution, Rasputin's corpse was dug from the grave and stolen.
One of the witnesses, Ivan Bashilov, who was then a student and a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, later told about the circumstances of the abduction. After the revolution, Bashilov was elected secretary of the Council of Heads of the Revolutionary Students of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. And then one night a student post told Bashilov that a car had slipped out of the city at high speed in the direction of Bolshaya Spasskaya, which did not stop at the request of the post.
It should be noted that at that time there were rumors about some "black cars" that were rushing around the city and from which they allegedly fired at the police, students and the crowd. The post organized a chase. The trail from Bolshaya Spasskaya went to a village located nearby in the forest. The pursuers soon overtook the car, which got stuck in the snow, and found a group of people led by the then well-known employee of Birzhevye Vedomosti. It turned out that in Tsarskoe Selo they opened the grave of Rasputin, seized the coffin with his body and brought him to Petersburg. However, due to some unclear circumstances, they took him through the whole city and now they got stuck in the snow, opened the coffin, made sure that there was in fact the embalmed body of the murdered Rasputin …
They have already made a fire and began to burn the corpse. They explained their actions by the desire to destroy the corpse out of fear, lest the "dark forces" use the people's ignorance and create some relics out of it and try to create a counter-revolutionary cult. The student who called said that the corpse was badly burned, that it could be carried with it all night, and during the day the people would gather and one could fear excesses. Therefore, he asked Bashilov for permission to take the corpse to the institute and there burn it in the furnace of a steam boiler.
Bashilov agreed and offered to draw up a detailed protocol of all actions. In response, the student said that he had already examined the corpse, made sure that it was actually Grishka Rasputin and that nothing remarkable was found on the corpse. He was referring to the tales spread in the city that the murdered favorite possessed some kind of supernatural power …
The same night, Rasputin's corpse was taken to the Polytechnic Institute and burned in the boiler room.
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