It is difficult to answer the question whether anyone other than Sergei Yesenin knew what happened in the fifth room of the Angleterre Hotel on the night of December 27-28, 1925. The event that excited the entire literary world of Russia at that time remains one of the most mysterious.
The murder or suicide of a poet always entails an endless train of riddles, gossip and rumors. And even discarding the play of imagination and guided only by facts, it is impossible to shed light on the event of the distant winter of the twenty-fifth year.
Under close scrutiny, the facts do not look very convincing, the behavior of those who then surrounded Yesenin seems very strange, as well as the behavior of the poet himself. In this regard, his voluntary death raises great doubts.
However, it is impossible to assert anything concrete in this situation, since even if there are evidences that contradict the main version, they are not so convincing as to make an unmistakable conclusion about Yesenin's murder. And yet, if we summarize all the conflicting facts, then there are many reasons for doubting the poet's suicide.
On the morning of December 28, Wolf Ehrlich and Elizaveta Ustinova, Yesenin's neighbors in the hotel and his old acquaintances, decided to pay a visit to the poet. At their knock, Yesenin did not open the door. Suspecting something was wrong, since the key was sticking out in the door from the inside, they called the hotel manager Nazarov, who barely opened the door with a spare key.
Yesenin's corpse was located near the steam heating pipe, to which a noose was tied. Yesenin was turned to face the pipe, his appearance was disfigured: his forehead was badly burned and pushed, one eye protruded, the other had flowed out, the bridge of his nose was burned, his right hand was badly cut.
The corpse in underwear and trousers, without a jacket and boots, was laid on the wood, covered with a sheet and taken to the Obukhov hospital. The room was sealed. The body was examined by forensic scientist Gilyarovsky, who stated that a depressed groove was found on the deceased's forehead over the bridge of the nose, four centimeters long and one and a half wide, and cut wounds were found on the hands, one of which, four centimeters long, in the tendon of the right hand. It is assumed that all these wounds could have been inflicted by the deceased himself.
The question immediately arises: could Yesenin have hanged himself on a red-hot battery, capable of disfiguring his face to such an extent? But on this score there is precise evidence. The fact is that the batteries were very weakly heated during the day. When Ehrlich came to visit a friend, Yesenin sat in a fur coat - it was very cold. At night, the heating worked at full capacity, but probably after the accident happened.
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If you believe Ehrlich, then his last poem "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye …" Yesenin dedicated it to him, and moreover, since there was no ink in the hotel, the poem was written in blood. Moreover, Ehrlich said that he did not read it right away and even completely forgot about it, remembering only after the tragedy happened. Wasn't there a drop of ink in the whole hotel? How, then, were the guests registered? If Yesenin was afraid to leave the room, anticipating death, then he could certainly send someone to the shop for a bottle of ink. In addition, memorizing two invented quatrains for Yesenin would not be difficult. It is also hard to believe that, having received the poems written personally by the famous poet, Ehrlich did not read them.
At 6 o'clock in the evening Ehrlich visited Yesenin, since he had forgotten his briefcase, then left the hotel and went to a party with M. Frohman. It seems that he was not going to return from there that evening. Ehrlich stayed at a party until two o'clock in the morning, until everyone had dispersed, and then stayed with Frohman to spend the night. Thus, he provided himself an alibi. The artist Svorogin, who painted the dead Yesenin that morning, spoke of Ehrlich's actions like this:
“It seems to me that this Ehrlich gave him something for the night, well, maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. It was not for nothing that he “forgot” his briefcase in Yesenin's room … And he did not go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin's note in his pocket."
It is believed that Ehrlich carried the poem with him in order to then put it in the room. Yes, apparently did not have time - the number was sealed. They say different things about the poem, someone thinks that it does not belong to the poet and was not written by him, that it is a clever fake for the author's style and handwriting, and therefore the hand was cut so that it was clear where the blood was taken from. Someone thinks that Yesenin could have ordered the poem as a requiem for Mozart.
Did Yesenin come to Angleterre?
There is a rather serious version that Yesenin did not come to the hotel at all. It turns out that at that time the fifth room of the hotel was completely uninhabitable. It has not been used for several years, as it used to be a small pharmacy. After its closure, it was decided to equip the premises again for a hotel room, but they did not have time to do the repairs by December 27, there was not even a bathtub. Yesenin would hardly have agreed to live in such conditions.
It follows that he was arrested right at the station. They were probably interrogated and tortured and then killed. Then, wrapping the body in something, they took it to a hotel, which at that time was a refuge for the Chekists. Most of the service personnel served in the GPU, so it didn't cost anything to spread the rumor that the key in the door was sticking out from the inside. Only it is not clear why they should kill Yesenin in the dungeons of the GPU, and then take him to the hotel, knowing full well that such actions could not go unnoticed.
If everything happened in Angleterre, then the Chekists, having received the task to eliminate the poet, would hardly have done it with such monstrous evidence against themselves. And wouldn't it have been easier to remove Yesenin somewhere on the train or on the street under the pretext of robbery, finally, it could have simply been poisoned.
By the way, the version of the robbery is also not so primitive. It is likely that Yesenin was robbed and killed in a hotel and, in order to cover up his tracks, hung the corpse on a battery. Among the hotel staff there could be accomplices of criminals.
It can also be assumed that Yesenin himself could have had a party in his room, and it is possible that a fight could have occurred there, of which he became a victim. Moreover, there were plenty of traces left after drinking.
Nevertheless, the version of the murder of the poet, in which Erlich and Ustinov were implicated, is the most probable. Their strange behavior on December 27 and 28 was all too obvious. By the way, not so much time has passed since then, and with a strong desire, you can most likely get to the bottom of the truth.