What really happened to Grigori Rasputin?

History is full of stories that “everybody knows” but which later turn out not to be true after all. One of these concerns the assassination of Grigori Rasputin, the “mad monk”, in December 1916.

Rasputin was a strange character from Siberia who persuaded the Russian Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, that he could help with the treatment of Crown Prince Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia. He did indeed appear to have a beneficial effect on the boy’s health, possibly through keeping at bay the court doctors whose treatments were making his condition worse.

However, Rasputin then went further and started to become influential in political matters, which did not go down well with the class of aristocrats who formed the Russian court and whose advice was being ignored. It was one of these, Prince Felix Yusupov, who is credited with being Rasputin’s assassin. 

The story that is usually told is that Yusupov invited Rasputin to an evening drinks session where he was given poisoned cakes which he wolfed down greedily but which had absolutely no effect on him. Yusupov then – according to him – shot his victim twice in the heart but Rasputin refused to die. The prince was then joined by associates who continued to shoot Rasputin as well as stabbing him and kicking him in the head, again to no effect. He only died after being wrapped in a rug and dropped through a hole in the ice on the frozen River Neva.

But the real facts are very different.

For one thing, the plot to assassinate Rasputin originated in London, not St Petersburg. Had Rasputin succeeded in his aim of persuading Tsar Nicholas to withdraw Russia from World War I, the full might of the German Army would have turned westwards to make life extremely difficult for the Western Powers, especially Great Britain. The British therefore had very good reasons for wanting Rasputin dead.

The chief agent in the plot was a British intelligence officer named Captain Oswald Rayner, who had known Prince Yusupov at Oxford University and travelled to meet him in St Petersburg. It was Rayner who actually killed Rasputin by shooting him once in the forehead with his Webley service revolver. The mad monk died instantly and was then dumped in the river. Captain Rayner promptly made his escape back to England.

The Yusupov account, which made him look like a noble hero who had saved Mother Russia from the Devil incarnate, was full of holes, unlike Grigori Rasputin.

For one thing, Rasputin would never have been tempted to drink madeira or eat sweet cakes. This was because a previous abdominal injury had made it impossible for him to ingest sugar without causing him severe pain. 

For another, an autopsy carried out on the body when it was recovered from the river found no water in the lungs, which meant that he did not die from drowning and was already dead before going though the hole in the ice. Reviews of the autopsy by forensic pathologists working in recent decades have confirmed the original findings and pointed out that the fatal wound almost certainly came from a weapon that was only used by British soldiers at that time.

However, if the assassination aimed to prevent Russia from abandoning World War I, it did not succeed, because that is what happened. This was due in part to Germany responding by allowing Vladimir Lenin to cross Germany from his exile in Switzerland so that he could return to Russia and lead his Bolsheviks to victory in the 1917 Revolution.

So the clinical and well-planned assassination of the mad monk only succeeded in delaying the inevitable.

© John Welford