Queer people

Several accounts have been published of the assassination of Rasputin, differing in detail. This event had so much to do with the collapse of Russia that I took pains to collect evidence as to what actually happened.

As every one knows, during the autumn of 1916 Rasputin had succeeded in gaining complete ascendency over the Czar and Czarina. He was a person who could have existed only among the Russians. He gloried in being a peasant of the grossest and most common clay, but, just as a filthy fakir in India can acquire a reputation for holiness by his self-imposed penances, so a Russian moujik can do the same if he has personality, cunning, and a smattering of ecclesiastical lore. Rasputin had all these and he was, besides, a creature of immense physical strength and physical temperament. His doctrine was that the cure for all human ills was humility, and he set out to humble the great ladies of the Court. He had some curious magnetic power which he exercised more successfully over women than over men, but even men felt it. His influence over the Royal Family was such that he was able to persuade the Czar that the only medical attendant to whom he should listen was the Tibetan herbalist, Batmaef, whom Rasputin described as a doctor appointed by God. The story in Court circles was that Batmaef administered herbal decoctions to the Czar himself and, by this means, weakened his will-power.

In the late autumn there were rumours that Rasputin’s influence had been bought by the Germans to persuade the Czar to make a separate peace, and Youssoupov, one of the young nobles, determined to worm himself into Rasputin’s confidence in order to ascertain the truth of these rumours. After some weeks he succeeded in winning his confidence, and at last, in an interview lasting for two hours, Rasputin revealed the whole plan to him. A separate peace was to be proclaimed by the Czar on 1st January 1917, and it was then the second week in December. There was, therefore, no time to lose.

Rasputin was the most ‘protected’ person in Russia. He was said to be watched over by two German detectives, a detective appointed by a group of bankers, and an Imperial detective who was responsible for his personal safety. The little group which was resolved upon his death believed that they were under the direction of a Higher Power because everything fitted in so perfectly and easily with their design. Rasputin seemed positively to cultivate the society of Youssoupov, who called upon him a day or two before Christmas and said that he was about to leave for the Crimea to spend Christmas there, and that as Rasputin had never set foot in his house, he had come to invite him to drink tea with him that evening: he would consider it the greatest honour. Rasputin did not demur at all. He said, laughingly, that he would tell the detectives he was going to bed and that they were free for the evening, and he invited Youssoupov to call for him in his car at the back door in order to give the slip to any detective who might remain on duty.

In Prince Youssoupov’s house there was a dining-room in the basement. From this a winding staircase led to the first floor, with a landing half-way giving into the hall. On this landing was a small room. On arriving at the house Rasputin was conducted into this dining-room, where bottles of madeira and port were set out. The conspirators had previously obtained from a chemist a drug known in Russian as ‘cianistii kalii,’ which was said to have a very quick action on the heart, and to be tasteless when taken in wine. It was in the form of a white powder contained in glass tubes, and the quantity introduced into the wine was believed to be sufficient to kill twenty men. During the afternoon the potion had been tried upon one of the dogs in the courtyard, and the effect was immediately fatal.

They sat down at the table, and Youssoupov plied Rasputin with the wine. There was nothing in this, for Rasputin, like most Russian peasants, had a strong head and was always ready for carousal. He was quite unconscious that there was anything unusual in the taste of what he was drinking, but as time went on and conversation flagged Youssoupov began to realise that the poison would not act upon such a man. He made an excuse for going upstairs to the little room on the landing, where his friends were waiting. The Grand Duke Dmitri lent him his revolver and he went down again, feeling, as he said, that he was not acting of his own volition, but was under the direction of a Higher Power. He found Rasputin leaning on his hands and breathing loudly as if he was not feeling well. At the end of the dining-room was a large ikon. Youssoupov went and knelt before it to pray for strength to do what he had to do for the salvation of the country. Then Rasputin got heavily to his feet, came over to the ikon, and stood beside him. Youssoupov rose, put the pistol to Rasputin’s side, and fired. Rasputin uttered a terrible cry and fell backwards on the floor, where he lay motionless. There was a doctor in the little room upstairs, and Youssoupov went to call him. All came down with the doctor; some were in favour of firing another shot to make sure, but the doctor, on examining the wound, declared that the bullet had entered the heart and had pierced the liver, and that clearly the man was dead. Then they went upstairs to consult about a motor-car in which the body was to be removed. This took some time, and then Youssoupov, in whose mind the idea had been working that Satanic power might have kept the man alive in spite of his wound, went down alone into the dining-room to make sure. The body was still lying in the same place. He felt the pulse: it was not beating. He opened the monk’s robe to feel the heart. At that moment Rasputin, with a terrible cry, sprang up and seized him by the throat. He was throttling him. Then superhuman power came upon Youssoupov, who flung him down on the floor: he lay without motion.

With the horror of this incident upon him Youssoupov ran upstairs. The Grand Duke, the doctor, and another officer had gone away for the car and only Poroskewitz, a member of the Duma, was left, and he had a pistol with three cartridges left in it. To him Youssoupov poured out his story. They came out on the landing with the intention of descending the staircase and, looking down, they saw the bullet-head of the monk coming up the staircase. He was on all fours like a bear. They shrank back into the room, and saw him stagger to his feet on the landing and go through into the hall. They followed. Rasputin fumbled with the door leading to the courtyard, dragged it open, and went through into the darkness. The two men ran to the door and saw him against the snow as he was crossing the courtyard. Poroskewitz fired three shots, but he still ran for several paces, and then fell close to the gateway which led from the courtyard into the street. Youssoupov had with him a rubber truncheon such as the police use and, finding him still alive, put an end to him with that weapon. It was then seen that one of the revolver bullets had hit him in the back of the skull and still he had lived.

Poroskewitz returned to the house, and while Prince Youssoupov was standing irresolute by the body there came a knocking on the gate. The police had been alarmed by the revolver shots and had sent an agent to make inquiries. It was a critical moment because the body was lying only a few feet from the gate. Youssoupov opened the gate and admitted the man, placing himself in front of the body. The policeman wanted to know if anything was wrong. Youssoupov took a high tone with him; said that the Grand Duke had been dining there and had just left in a car; that he was slightly merry, and had fired his revolver at a dog in the courtyard and had killed it: that was all. While he was speaking he was edging the police agent towards the gate, and at the mention of the Grand Duke the man seemed to be satisfied. It must be remembered, too, that the high rank of the person he was questioning may have had its effect. The report he brought to the police station, however, did not satisfy his superiors. He was sent back to make further inquiries, and this time he went to the front door, and was admitted without Youssoupov’s knowledge while he was engaged in dragging the body across the courtyard. When the Prince re-entered the house he heard voices in the sitting-room upstairs. There he found that Poroskewitz, who was a very excitable and nervous man, had blurted out the whole truth, and said that they had killed Rasputin. It was a desperate moment. Youssoupov quickly intervened, saying, ‘Look, he has gone clean off his head. When the dog was shot he said, “What a pity it was not Rasputin,” and now it has become an obsession with him, and he thinks that what he wanted has really come to pass.’ After a good deal of talking he succeeded in getting the policeman to go.

There was now no time to lose. Several things had to be done. A dog had to be found and shot and laid exactly in the position of Rasputin’s body in order that the blood marks on the snow might be taken for the blood of the dog. Scarcely had this been done when the Grand Duke’s car arrived. In Russia grand-ducal cars used to carry a flag on the bonnet which exempted them from being stopped by the police. Together they carried the body into the car, took it to the bridge, and dropped it into the frozen Neva, where it was found some three days afterwards.

The next morning there was an interrogation at the police station, but the same story was adhered to, and the police could make little headway. It is said that the Czarina was pressing for extreme measures against the assassins, but that the Czar, who was about to return to the Front, refused his consent. People who were about him at the time said that he had never seemed more cheerful than when he heard of Rasputin’s death. The assassins were banished to the Caucasus and to Persia.

When will the romance of escapes during the Great War be adequately written? There were stories of Russian peasant prisoners escaping from internment and wandering over the frontier into Switzerland not knowing that they were in a neutral country, living in the woods like wild animals, with hair and nails grown long, unwashed, unkempt, half-naked, subsisting upon food taken from the farms at night and eaten raw. There was one, better authenticated, of a Russian officer who, after five days’ wandering, succeeded in crossing the frontier into Holland with his pursuers behind. The Dutch had recently changed their uniform into field-grey, the colour worn by the Germans, and, seeing a platoon of grey-coated soldiers in front of him, the wretched fugitive turned back and re-crossed the frontier in full view of the German sentry, who shot him dead.

Who knew at that time that a necessary part of the equipment of an escaping prisoner of war was pepper, because the German dogs would scent him at night in his lair and raise the neighbourhood by their barking? But if he scattered pepper about his resting-place the dogs would sneeze and slink off home in silence.

Though there were escapes of British officers and men and civilians from internment in Germany, I believe that only one German officer succeeded in escaping from Donnington Hall and reaching Germany. This was Gunther Plüschow, an aviation officer from Tsingtau, who escaped in his machine when the fortress was captured by the Japanese, made his way to Shanghai and thence to San Francisco and New York. Here he obtained a false Swiss passport as a fitter under the name of Ernst Suse, with which he embarked for Italy. But to his great indignation our interpreter at Gibraltar spoke such fluent German that he was betrayed into unguarded observations. He was arrested and sent to England, where, after many vicissitudes, he proved his identity as an officer and was interned at Donnington.

His escape from Donnington Hall was managed with great skill. On 4th July 1915, he and an officer named Treffitz reported sick and remained in bed. At roll-call the N.C.O. ticked them off. It was raining hard, and they had no difficulty in slipping away to the outer enclosure and hiding in the bushes. At 6 P.M. the doors between the inner and outer enclosures were locked and they remained outside. Other officers were occupying their beds when the roll was taken, and at 10.30 ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ was sung from the windows to inform them that they had not been missed. They climbed the wire entanglements and made for Derby, where they separated, each man finding his way independently to London.

In his book published in Dutch, Adventures of the Tsingtau Flying Man, Plüschow gave an account of his proceedings while trying to board the Dutch packet, which did more than justice to his courage and endurance and less than justice to the truth. According to this narrative he spent his nights in Hyde Park, suburban gardens, and in a lair under a timber stack at Greenwich. Twice he was plunged into the stinking mud at low water and nearly drowned while setting out in the dark to swim to the mooring buoy. But, in fact, as we discovered too late, he eluded the registration regulations by passing his nights with different women, at whose rooms he was not called upon to register at all, for he was amply provided with money, and he knew London well from a former sojourn in 1913. He boarded the buoy to which the Princess Juliana was moored, climbed the cable, and hid himself in one of the life-boats. Probably he stole a landing-card from a sea-sick passenger, or he may, as he says, have walked ashore without one, unchallenged. At any rate, he landed at Rotterdam, and was accorded an ovation by the German colony at a public luncheon arranged by the German Consul.

In May 1916, when the last batch of German officers was received at Donnington Hall, it was reported that the prisoners were plunged into deep depression by the news from the German Front.