Together the three conspirators planned to lure Rasputin to Yusupov’s riverside palace on the pretext of meeting his beautiful wife, the Grand Duchess Irina. There they would kill him with poison and sink his body to the bottom of the Neva so that he would be counted as missing rather than dead. The plotters were anything but discreet: half the journalists of Petrograd seem to have known all the details of the murder days before it took place. It is frankly a miracle that, despite the plotters’ immunity from police investigation, nothing was done to prevent them.
On the fatal day, 16 December, Rasputin was explicitly warned not to go to the Yusupov palace. He seems to have sensed his fate, for he spent most of the day destroying correspondence, depositing money in his daughter’s account and praying. But the worldly attractions of the Grand Duchess Irina were too much for him to resist. Shortly after midnight he arrived in Yusupov’s car smelling of cheap soap, his hair greased down and dressed in his most seductive clothes: black velvet trousers, squeaky leather boots and a white silk shirt with a satin-gold waistband given to him by the Tsarina. Yusupov showed his guest to a basement salon, claiming his wife was still entertaining guests in the main part of the palace and would join them later. Rasputin drank several poisoned glasses of his favourite sweet Madeira and helped himself to one or two cyanide-filled gâteaux. But over an hour later neither had taken effect and Yusupov, his patience exhausted, turned to desperate measures. Taking a Browning pistol from his writing desk upstairs, he rejoined the basement party, invited Rasputin to inspect a crystal crucifix standing on a commode, and, as the ‘holy man’ bent down to do so, shot him in the side. With a wild scream Rasputin fell to the floor. The conspirators presumed he was dead and went off to dispose of his overcoat. But meanwhile he regained consciousness and made his way to a side door that led into a courtyard and out on to the embankment. Purishkevich found him in the courtyard, staggering through the snow towards the outside gate, shouting, ‘Felix, Felix, I will tell the Tsarina everything!’ Purishkevich fired and missed him twice. But two more shots brought his victim down in a heap and, just to make sure that he was dead, Purishkevich kicked him in the temple. Weighed down with iron chains, Rasputin’s corpse was driven to a remote spot of the city and dumped into the Neva, where it was finally washed up on 18 December. For several days thereafter, crowds of women gathered at the spot to collect the ‘holy water’ from the river sanctified by Rasputin’s flesh.62
The news of Rasputin’s murder was greeted with joy among aristocratic circles. The Grand Duke Dmitry was given a standing ovation when he appeared in the Mikhailovsky Theatre on the evening of 17 December. The Tsarina’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elisaveta, wrote to Yusupov’s mother offering prayers of thanks for her ‘dear son’s patriotic act’. She and fifteen other members of the imperial family pleaded with the Tsar not to punish Dmitry. But Nicholas rejected their appeal, replying that ‘No one has the right to engage in murder.’63 Dmitry was exiled to Persia. On special orders from the Tsar, no one was allowed to bid him farewell at the station, and the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna was put under house arrest for trying to.
Contrary to the intentions of the conspirators, Rasputin’s death drew Nicholas closer to his grief-stricken wife. He was now more determined than ever to resist all advocates of reform. He even banished four dissident grand dukes from Petrograd. As the revolution drew nearer, he retreated more and more into the quiet life of his family at Tsarskoe Selo, cutting off all ties with the outside world and even the rest of the court. There was no customary exchange of gifts between the imperial couple and the Romanovs at the dynasty’s final Christmas of 1916.
Rasputin’s embalmed body was finally buried outside the palace at Tsarskoe Selo on a freezing January day in 1917. After the February Revolution a group of soldiers exhumed the grave, packed up the corpse in a piano case and took it off to a clearing in the Pargolovo Forest, where they drenched it with kerosene and burned it on top of a pyre. His ashes were scattered in the wind.
iii From the Trenches to the Barricades
Trotsky’s boat sailed into New York harbour on a cold and rainy Sunday evening in January 1917. It had been a terrible crossing, seventeen stormy days in a small steamboat from Spain, and the revolutionary leader now looked haggard and tired as he disembarked on the quayside before a waiting crowd of comrades and pressmen. His mood was depressed. Expelled as an anti-war campaigner from France, his adopted home since 1914, he felt that ‘the doors of Europe’ had been finally ‘shut behind’ him and that, like his fellow passengers on board the Montserrat, a motley bunch of deserters, adventurers and undesirables forced into exile, he would never return. ‘This is the last time’, he wrote on New Year’s Eve as they sailed past Gibraltar, ‘that I cast a glance on that old canaille Europe.’64
It was a mark of the party’s frustration that three of the leading Social Democrats — Trotsky, Bukharin and Kollontai — should find themselves together in New York, 5,000 miles from Russia, on the eve of the 1917 Revolution. Nikolai Bukharin had arrived from Oslo during the previous autumn and taken over the editorship of Novyi mir (New World), the leading socialist daily of the Russian émigré community. At the age of twenty-nine, he had already established himself as a leading Bolshevik theoretician and squabbled with Lenin on several finer points of party ideology, before leaving Europe with the claim that ‘Lenin cannot tolerate any other person with brains.’ Short and slight with a boyish, sympathetic face and a thin red beard, he was waiting for Trotsky on the quayside. Unlike the dogmatic Lenin, who had heaped abuse on the leftwing Menshevik, he was keen to include Trotsky in a broad socialist campaign against the war. He had known the Trotskys slightly in Vienna and shared their love for European culture. He greeted them with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them, as Trotsky’s wife recalled, ‘about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once’. Although it was late and the Trotskys were very tired, they were dragged across town ‘to admire his great discovery’.65 Thus began the close but ultimately tragic friendship between Trotsky and Bukharin.
Trotsky saw less of Alexandra Kollontai. She spent much of her time in the New Jersey town of Paterson, where her son had settled to avoid the military draft. This was her second American trip. The year before she had toured the country proselytizing Lenin’s views on the war. An ebullient and emotional woman, prone to fall in love with young men and utopian ideas, she had thrown herself into the Bolshevik cause with all the fanaticism of the newly converted. ‘Nothing was revolutionary enough for her,’ recalled a Trotsky still bitter fourteen years later at her denunciation of him, in a letter to Lenin, as a waverer on the war.66 Trotsky was closer to the Bolsheviks than Kollontai appreciated, and the motives for his leftward progression from the Mensheviks were similar to her own.