We’re picking up on Prince Felix’s plot!

The prince and Rasputin arrived at Moika Palace. The driver took them to the back of the palace where there was a door to the basement. Felix kept his bachelor room there, which was a place where he and his friends could sit comfortably, drink, and play cards.

Rasputin followed Felix inside without betraying any uneasiness. The co-conspirators were waiting and greeted him in a friendly way. They pressed the monk to eat pastries and drink some Madeira wine, both of which had been laced with cyanide. Rasputin loved wine, but evidently did not like pastries or sweet food. He believed they could diminish his powers. Nevertheless, he consumed what they gave him, and asked for more wine.

The conspirators avoided looking at each other. Rasputin had consumed enough cyanide to kill a family of elephants. They nervously poured more wine and offered him more food. At last, Rasputin grew bored. The princess was not coming down, he concluded, and he rose to go.

In that moment, Felix panicked and shot him in the heart. Rasputin fell to the floor without a word. He was not dead, but he could not live more than a few minutes. One of the conspirators, Lazovert later wrote, “We left the room to let him die alone, and to plan for his removal and obliteration.” The men went upstairs for a congratulatory toast. At length, Felix went downstairs to check on Rasputin.

He found the monk lying down where he’d been shot. Yusupov bent over him, and nearly fainted when Rasputin’s eyes opened (the “green eyes of a viper,” Felix later described them) and he roared in rage. His thick hands gripped Felix who struggled out of his grasp and ran from the room, screaming that Rasputin was alive. In his memoirs, Prince Yusupov wrote: “This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil. There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.”

“We heard a strange and unearthly sound behind the huge door that led into the library,” Colonel Lazovert recounted. “The door was slowly pushed open, and there was Rasputin on his hands and knees, the bloody froth gushing from his mouth, his terrible eyes bulging from their sockets.”

The monk staggered into the garden, and the nobles shot him twice more – once in the back and once in the forehead. Still, he did not die! The men beat him senseless in the courtyard and finally he was still.

Rasputin was dead. The conspirators confirmed it. But they took no more chances. They bound him in heavy chains, wrapped him in a sheet, and loaded the body into a wagon. In late December, the surface of the river had long since frozen and they labored together to cut a hole in the ice. Finally they were able to slide Rasputin’s body through the hole and into the dark water.

When Rasputin did not appear at the royal residence the next day, Alexandra seemed to know he was dead. She insisted the police drag the river. Two days later, when the 48-year-old monk’s body was found, one hand had worked free of the binding. He had been poisoned; beaten; shot in the head, heart, and back; and drowned. There are conflicting accounts of what injury actually killed him. I’ve also seen at least one report that claimed there was no cyanide in his system.

Alexandra was terrified thinking of Rasputin’s last letter: You must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death, then none of your children will remain alive for more than two years. The family had spent so much time with the tsar’s cousin Dmitri Pavlovich in his youth that they considered him a foster son.  And the ringleader was Felix Yusupov, Irina’s husband.

Felix’s money and connections stalled the police but the tsar was furious. He was unwilling to have Felix or Dmitri imprisoned or executed but he exiled Felix to Rakitnoye, the Yusupov family’s remote country estate. Dmitri was sent to the Persian front with the army. When the extended family protested, the tsar refused to capitulate.  “Nobody has the right to kill on his own private judgment,” Nicholas wrote. “I am astonished that you should have applied to me.”

Irina’s father visited the couple at Rakitnoye in February and found their mood “buoyant but militant.” The following month, Nicholas was forced to abdicate the throne for himself and Alexei. Irina’s father, who was next in line, refused to accept imperial authority, and just like that, three centuries of the Romanov dynasty were over.

The tsar and his family were murdered by Bolsheviks a year and seven months later. It took exactly 75 years before their bodies were located (twenty-five years x three). Rasputin’s terrible prophecy was fulfilled.

The last post will reveal what happened to Princess Irina and her family. If you want to see police photos of the crime scene  and autopsy, Margarita Nelipa, author of Killing Rasputin, generously posted them.

Go to the last part!