Poisoned, shot, or drowned? Here’s how Rasputin really died.
On the night of December 16-17, 1916, a murder took place at one of Russia’s grandest palaces. The crime marked the culmination of an ugly, concerted campaign against both the victim and his imperial Russian patrons. It would rock the tsarist elite at a time when World War I was ravaging Europe and Russia was inexorably sliding toward revolution.
More than a hundred years later, the sensationalist reporting of the murder of Grigory Rasputin—for so long erroneously portrayed as a mad monk—has persisted in distorting the truth about his close relationship with Russia’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra. How this lowly peasant and former horse dealer achieved such unique access to the reclusive Romanovs alarmed the imperial inner circle, who demonized Rasputin and those who followed him.
One of the (royal) family
In a photograph taken around 1909, Rasputin poses with Tsarina Alexandra, her four daughters, her son, Alexei, and Alexei’s nanny, Maria Vishnyakova.
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(From Tsar to U.S.S.R.: Russia’s chaotic year of revolution.)
From country to court
Born in 1869 to peasant farmers, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin grew up in Pokrovskoye—an obscure village in western Siberia some 1,600 miles from St. Petersburg. Little is known for sure about his upbringing, as records are scarce. At age 19, he married Praskovya Fyodorovna Dubrovina, who later bore him four children. When he left home in 1892, his family stayed behind. Rasputin is said to have experienced a religious epiphany and spent three months at a monastery, though he never became an ordained priest. Instead, he wandered Russia for several years seeking personal spiritual enlightenment—very much in the tradition of the itinerant Russian holy man.
By 1905 Rasputin had established himself in St. Petersburg as a spiritual guru and healer at a time when interest in alternative medicine and the occult were fashionable among Russia’s elite. There, he gathered around himself a clique of adoring, mainly female, acolytes who revered him as a man of God. But soon rumors began to circulate about Rasputin’s libidinous behavior as a heavy drinker and sexual predator.
Children of the ‘mad monk’
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Photographed in 1911, Rasputin’s eldest daughter Maria, fourth from the left, sits with her father and some of his followers. Maria escaped Russia after her father’s death, eventually settling in the United States in 1937.
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Rasputin’s two teenage daughters, Maria and Varvara, lived with him in St. Petersburg. In December 1916, rumors of death threats against their father had reached them. When they saw him getting ready to go out on the 16th, they hid his galoshes to try to keep him safe at home, but he found them and met his fate that night. After his murder, Maria and Varvara lived with their mother, but the girls’ ties to the Romanovs endangered them. Maria fled Russia for continental Europe, while Varvara remained behind and died in 1924. Touring across Europe, Maria worked as a dancer and circus performer before immigrating to the United States in 1937. She lived there until her death in September 1977.
Entering royal circles
Rasputin led a strange and contradictory double life. In the presence of his admirers, he cultivated a persona that was sober, wise, and advocated purity of body and mind. While away from them, Rasputin would sometimes run riot as a drunken, sexual degenerate. Projecting a perpetual pious image was hard work; Rasputin was a deeply conflicted man, torn between his profound religious beliefs and a deep, rebellious compulsion to sin.
The Russian public was already deeply suspicious of Rasputin when he was introduced to the tsar and tsarina in 1905. His reputation as a healer drew him in closer to the royal family because of the poor health of their son and heir, Tsarevitch Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. In 1908 Rasputin allegedly used his abilities to ease Alexei’s suffering during a severe episode. Alexandra saw Rasputin as a healer and relied on him to help in Alexei’s care.
Lady of influence
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Tsarina Alexandra (left) sits alongside Anna Vyrubova in an undated photograph.
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Anna Vyrubova was another lightning rod for controversy for Empress Alexandra. Twelve years her junior, Anna was summoned to court in 1905 as a lady-in-waiting and soon became one of the empress’s closest confidants. Utterly devoted to the empress, Anna was part of the imperial family’s inner circle. Like many other upper-class women in Russia, Anna was a devotee of Rasputin, who had prophesized the end of her marriage in 1907. Awed by his abilities, Anna passionately believed the holy man could help Alexandra and her hemophiliac son. She helped facilitate a link between the empress and Rasputin, for which she would draw the ire of Russia’s elite.
Dangerous influence
Rasputin, however, could not limit his role to health and spirituality. He also began offering political advice to both Nicholas and Alexandra. In doing so, he began making enemies for himself in the Russian aristocracy and government. Other members of the Romanov family despised Rasputin as a quack and con man. Alexandra became estranged from her own sister, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, after she warned the tsarina about Rasputin. The situation grew so dire that even Alexandra could not protect her beloved “Father Grigory” from the hatred of her own family and friends.
In 1792 Catherine the Great commissioned the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, Nicholas II’s favorite imperial residence.
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In 1915 World War I was raging, and Nicholas left Russia to spend time on the eastern front. Lonely and distraught, Alexandra began spending more and more time in Rasputin’s company. Rasputin now had his own personal chauffeur to take him out to Tsarskoye Selo for private prayer meetings with the tsarina.
(Has the U.S. ever fought on Russian soil? You’d be surprised.)
Gossip about their relationship took an ugly turn. Concern grew within the Romanovs that Alexandra was leading the family into disrepute. Lurid rumors flew that her relationship with Rasputin had become sexual, as pornographic images of them were circulated in St. Petersburg. Rasputin and Alexandra were talked of as dark forces who would bring Russia to ruin.
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Depicting him as the true ruler of Russia, a caricature shows Rasputin manipulating Nicholas and Alexandra.
Depicting him as the true ruler of Russia, a caricature shows Rasputin manipulating Nicholas and Alexandra.
Fine Art/AlbumDanger to Russia
Rasputin had long been the target of death threats, and soon there were open and widespread calls for his removal—by whatever means necessary. After a knife attack by a woman in June 1914 left him with a near-fatal stomach wound, he was accompanied everywhere by a police agent. No one could get close enough to kill him because Rasputin was always carefully guarded.
A statue of Rasputin stands in Tyumen, the Siberian city where, in 1914, he recovered from a murder attempt.
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Rasputin’s alleged influence over the tsarina generated serious concerns among several senior members of the Romanov family. They tacitly encouraged a murder plot hatched by a young, impetuous, and inexperienced 29-year-old: Prince Felix Yusupov.
Born into one of Russia’s wealthiest families and married to Nicholas II’s niece Irina, Yusupov considered it his patriotic duty to rid Russia of Rasputin. With Rasputin out of the picture, Yusupov hoped to restore the reputation of the tsar, as well as help Nicholas rely more on his extended family, the nobility, and the Duma.
In October 1916 Yusupov inveigled his friend (and Tsar Nicholas’s cousin), 25-year-old Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, into planning the murder with him. At the end of November, they had recruited Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Russian State Duma who had already openly lambasted Rasputin. Two others were taken on to assist in the final plan: a Life Guards officer, Lieutenant Sergei Sukhotin, and a Polish doctor, Stanislav Lazovert, who was to help with administering the poison—potassium cyanide crystals—which Yusupov had obtained.
From playboy to assassin
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Marrying into the royal family, Prince Felix Yusupov wed Nicholas’s niece Irina. Their only child, also called Irina, was born in March 1915.
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Raised in the lap of luxury, Prince Felix Yusupov enjoyed throwing wild parties, smoking and drinking, and having love affairs with men and women. After his older brother’s death in 1908, Felix became the heir to the family fortune: palaces, estates, jewels, oil fields, coal and iron mines, factories, and mills. In terms of wealth, the Yusupovs were said to be second only to the Romanovs in Russia. But after Rasputin’s murder in 1916 and the revolution that followed, Felix lost his fortune. Felix and his wife, Irina, were forced into exile, eventually settling in Paris, France, where they lived off their remaining assets. When those ran out, they turned to other means. In 1927 Felix used Rasputin’s death for income when he published La Fin de Raspoutine, his account of the assassination plot. Nearly two decades later, Felix profited from his past again with his scandalous memoirs, Lost Splendor, that covered not only the infamous murder but also his decadent youth.
(How Catherine really became ‘The Great’ in Russia.)
Murder of the monk
The best known account of the events of December 16-17, 1916, comes from Yusupov’s own writings published some 10 years after Rasputin’s death. In La Fin de Raspoutine (and later in his memoirs, Lost Splendor, that followed in the 1950s) Yusupov lays out the assassination plans from start to finish. To begin, Yusupov had already made Rasputin’s acquaintance in the preceding weeks by consulting him a few times about health problems.
The Yusupov family owned a palace on St. Petersburg’s Moika Canal, which was chosen as the location for the murder. Yusupov would invite Rasputin to the Moika to meet his wife, the beautiful Princess Irina. To conceal the visit and elude his security detail, Rasputin would arrive very late on December 16.
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Nicholas was extremely fond of his cousin Dmitri Pavlovich, pictured here, whose involvement in Rasputin’s murder was a heavy blow to the sovereign.
Royal assassin
Nicholas was extremely fond of his cousin Dmitri Pavlovich, pictured here, whose involvement in Rasputin’s murder was a heavy blow to the sovereign.
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Yusupov had prepared a small basement room to receive Rasputin. Dimly lit with colored lanterns and a blazing open fire, the room was richly arranged with works of art and curios, carved oak chairs, cabinets of ebony, a Persian carpet, and a white bearskin rug. The table was set with a samovar for tea, biscuits, and fancy cakes—the kind that Yusupov said Rasputin liked. Before Rasputin’s arrival, Sukhotin had ground the poison into a powder that Lazovert was said to have sprinkled inside the cakes. Yusupov had also given Pavlovich and Purishkevich a potassium cyanide solution to lace Rasputin’s wine.
Just after midnight, Lazovert, disguised as a chauffeur, drove Yusupov to Rasputin’s home at 64 Gorokhovaya Street. Rasputin’s daughters recalled that he appeared in good spirits that night but also seemed highly nervous, as though he sensed something was amiss. Rasputin had dressed up for the occasion; he wore a silk shirt embroidered with cornflowers (specially made for him by the tsarina), velvet breeches, and polished boots. He had washed and combed his hair and, as Yusupov recalled, smelled of cheap soap.
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Scene of the crime
On December 16, 1916, Yusupov carefully prepared a basement room, right in his palace along the Moika River in St. Petersberg, left. He arranged it to showcase his wealth and good taste to help distract his victim. Today, the palace is a museum with rooms dedicated to Rasputin’s murder.
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Meanwhile Pavlovich and Purishkevich, who remained at the Moika Palace, made it appear as if a party were going on upstairs. As Rasputin, Lazovert, and Yusupov entered the palace through a side entrance, they heard music playing on the phonograph upstairs. Two young women had also arrived. At some point, Rasputin believed, the lovely Irina would come down to meet him in the basement. (Irina had actually refused to be involved in the night’s events and remained far away on the family estate in Crimea.)
Murder attempts
Yusupov offered Rasputin the cakes. At first he refused, then reluctantly took one, then a second. Nothing happened. Yusupov could not understand why the poison had not worked. He then persuaded his guest to sample Madeira wine from his own Crimean vineyards, having managed surreptitiously to slip some poison into the glass. Rasputin drank the wine “like a connoisseur,” then took some more, but still, mystifyingly, the poison had no effect.
Things continued in this way for some time. Rasputin prevailed on Yusupov to entertain him with a guitar. He drank more tea, his head drooped, and his eyes closed. He was tired—but yet, more than two hours later, the poison had not done its work.
All this time Yusupov’s co-conspirators were waiting upstairs. Eventually, an increasingly frantic Yusupov went to consult with them. Purishkevich recalled Yusupov frantically telling them that “the only effect that I can see of the poison is that he is constantly belching and that he dribbles a bit.”
According to the assassins’ accounts, Yusupov shot Rasputin with a Browning pistol and Purishkevich shot him with a semiautomatic Savage pistol, like this one pictured.
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The trio resolved they had no option but to shoot Rasputin. Yusupov removed a Browning pistol from his writing desk and returned to the basement, where he found Rasputin breathing heavily and complaining of a heavy head and a burning sensation in his stomach. As Rasputin stood up, Yusupov raised his pistol and fired at him, hitting him in the side of the chest. Pavlovich and Purishkevich rushed down to see Rasputin lying on the bearskin rug. Lazovert declared that Rasputin was dead, and the conspirators disappeared upstairs.
Yusupov was uneasy and went back down to double-check the body. As he drew close, Rasputin’s eyes suddenly opened wide: “the green eyes of a viper staring at me with an expression of diabolical hatred,” he recalled.
Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Rasputin lunged to his feet and rushed at Yusupov with an animalistic roar, trying to grab his throat. Despite the poison and the bullet in his chest, Rasputin seemed to find enormous strength but then crashed onto his back. Yusupov’s account at this point strains credibility, ascribing demonic powers to the injured man.
Utterly terrified, Yusupov rushed upstairs for help, retching with fear. Purishkevich now assumed control. Cocking his Savage pistol, he went down to find that Rasputin had managed to get out through the side door into the snow-covered courtyard, staggering left in his agony.
Rasputin fled through this courtyard of the Yusupov Palace on that December 1916 night.
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Purishkevich fired once and missed; then a second time—at a run—and again managed to miss. Despite his wound, Rasputin, crawling on his knees, reached the gate of the courtyard when Purishkevich fired a third time and hit him in the back. He then fired a fourth and fatal shot directly into Rasputin’s forehead.
Pavlovich, Sukhotin, and Lazovert then disposed of Rasputin’s body. They wrapped it in a heavy cloth and tied it with rope. They dragged it into Pavlovich’s car and drove to the Large Petrovsky Bridge by the Neva, where they threw the body through the broken ice. They drove home just as dawn was breaking.
In the chamber of death
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Waxwork figures of Yusupov (at left) and Rasputin in the basement room of the Yusupov Palace (now a museum) depict the murder plot. In his memoirs, Yusupov described how he carefully prepared the room and the cakes to avoid arousing Rasputin’s suspicions.
David South/AlamyAs soon as Rasputin entered the room, he took off his coat and began inspecting the furniture … I offered him wine and tea; to my disappointment, he refused both. Had something made him suspicious? I was determined, whatever happened, that he would not leave the house alive. We sat down at the table, and he began to talk … “It is clear my plain speaking annoys a lot of people. The aristocrats can’t get used to the idea that a humble peasant should be welcome at the Imperial Palace … They are eaten up with envy and fury … but I’m not scared of them. They can’t touch me. I’m protected against ill fortune. There have been attempts on my life but the Lord has always frustrated these plots. Disaster will befall anyone who moves against me.” Rasputin’s words echoed ominously through the room in which he was to die. But nothing could deter me now. While he talked, my one idea was to make him drink some wine and eat the cakes.
—Felix Yusupov’s account of the night of Rasputin’s death in his memoirs, Lost Splendor.
The fallout
Rumors of Rasputin’s disappearance and probable murder began to circulate rapidly in St. Petersburg. At the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the tsarina waited anxiously for news while the police initiated a search. On December 19 Rasputin’s body—his arms frozen over his head in an eerie gesture—was found by the river police near Krestovsky Island. When the news got out, the public rejoiced on the streets, said prayers of thanks in church, and lit candles in front of the icons. Yusupov and Pavlovich were feted as national heroes.
Rasputin’s battered body was pulled from the Neva River a few days after his murder. According to the autopsy, he was shot three times: in the chest, in the back, and in the head.
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Rasputin’s remains were taken in a Red Cross van to a home for army veterans. On Nicholas II’s specific instructions, an autopsy was conducted on the still frozen body that evening. A doctor named Dmitry Kosorotov ascertained that Rasputin had been shot three times by different caliber revolvers: once in the left side of the chest, another in the back, and the fatal shot—fired at point-blank range, possibly from a .455 Webley revolver—in the head. There were no traces of poison found in the body, only alcohol.
For more than 100 years Yusupov’s account has been the accepted source on Rasputin’s murder, though many have expressed reservations about its accuracy. One of the biggest points of contention is whether the cakes had indeed been poisoned. Not long before his death, Lazovert said that he had second thoughts about poisoning Rasputin and had substituted something harmless for the cyanide. Yusupov’s dramatic telling of the night’s events, accurate or not, has become stuck in the public imagination.
Aftermath
It is said that Tsarina Alexandra retrieved the embroidered shirt that Rasputin had been wearing and treasured it as a religious talisman. After the autopsy, Rasputin’s body was prepared for burial and laid out with an icon from the imperial family on his breast. At midnight on December 21, Rasputin’s zinc coffin was taken to Alexander Park at Tsarskoye Selo, where it was secretly buried in the presence of Nicholas, Alexandra, and a few others, on the site of a new chapel that was being built there.
Authorities quickly caught the conspirators and placed them under house arrest. As punishment, the tsar exiled Yusupov to a family estate in Belgorod Oblast. Grand Duke Dmitry was banished from court and sent to fight on the Persian front. Dmitry’s punishment drew heated opposition from the Romanov family, but the decision probably saved his life. When the tsarist autocracy collapsed after the February 1917 revolution, Dmitry was a long way from danger.
A jewelry box with the portraits of Nicholas II and Alexandra was produced for the 1913 tercentenary of the Romanovs.
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The conspirators claimed to have killed Rasputin to save the Russian throne, but it seems their actions did little to help the monarchy in the long term. Tensions caused by World War I and domestic turmoil boiled over a few months after Rasputin’s death. After the revolution of 1917, Nicholas II abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were imprisoned by Russia’s provisional government and exiled, first to Siberia and then to Yekaterinburg. The entire family would be murdered there in July 1918.
In early March 1917, Rasputin’s resting place was discovered at Tsarskoye Selo. The provisional government feared his grave could serve as a potential pilgrimage site and ordered it destroyed. The coffin was dug up in secret, and Rasputin’s remains were burned. For the Russian public, fueled by their irrational and deep-seated hatred of him, it was a fitting end.
(Death of a dynasty: How the Romanovs met their end.)
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Two Russian soldiers sit by Rasputin’s grave after it was found in March 1917.
Two Russian soldiers sit by Rasputin’s grave after it was found in March 1917.
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