The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River

On the freezing night of 16 December 1916 — 29 December by the Western calendar — Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was lured to the Moika Palace in Petrograd, the home of Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest young man in Russia. Within a few hours he was dead, and his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka river. The peasant mystic who had held extraordinary sway over the Empress Alexandra, whose apparent power to calm the haemophilia of the heir to the throne had made him indispensable and detested in equal measure, was gone. But the manner of his going, as it came down to us, reads less like a murder than like the killing of a monster in a folk tale. He was poisoned and would not die. He was shot and would not die. He was shot again, beaten, bound, and drowned — and even then, the story goes, the water finished what the poison and the bullets could not. The near-immortality of Rasputin is one of the twentieth century’s most vivid legends. It is also, in most of its particulars, a fiction — and we can name the man who wrote it.

The night as legend tells it

The seductive version comes chiefly from the memoirs of the killer himself, and it is worth telling in full because its power lies in the accumulation. Yusupov and his fellow conspirators, the story runs, lured Rasputin to the palace cellar with the promise of meeting Yusupov’s beautiful wife. There they fed him cakes and poured him wine, all laced with enough potassium cyanide to kill several men. Rasputin ate and drank, and nothing happened. He grew merry. The poison, which should have dropped him where he sat, seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever. Increasingly frantic, Yusupov excused himself, fetched a revolver, returned, and shot the mystic in the chest. Rasputin fell.

And then, as Yusupov bent over the apparently dead body, Rasputin’s eyes opened. He leapt up, seized his killer by the throat, and — bellowing — staggered up the stairs and out into the snow-covered courtyard. The conspirators fired again and again into the fleeing figure; he fell once more. They bound him, wrapped him, drove him to the river and pushed him beneath the ice. When the body was recovered, so the legend insists, the lungs were full of water and one arm had worked partly free of its bindings — proof that even shot, even poisoned, even beneath the frozen Neva, Rasputin had still been alive, still struggling to escape, and had finally succumbed only to drowning. Poison, two rounds of gunfire, a beating, and the river: it took all of them, and even then the monk fought to the last. It is an unforgettable story. Almost none of it is true.

The kernel: a real murder, a real autopsy

Strip the theatre away and a genuine, documented murder remains. Rasputin really was killed at the Moika Palace on that night by a conspiracy of aristocrats who believed he was corrupting the crown and dragging Russia to ruin during the catastrophe of the First World War. The ringleaders are known: Prince Felix Yusupov; the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a cousin of the Tsar; and Vladimir Purishkevich, a right-wing member of the Duma, among others. Their motive was political and, in their own minds, patriotic — they thought that removing Rasputin might save the monarchy. His body really was recovered from the Malaya Nevka a few days later, and it really was subjected to a formal autopsy. And it is the autopsy, rather than the memoir, that lets us see the night as it actually was.

The post-mortem was conducted by Professor Dmitry Kosorotov, a senior forensic pathologist. His findings, which survive, describe a man who died of gunshot wounds — three of them. There were wounds to the body and, decisively, a bullet fired into the forehead at close range, a wound that would have caused near-instant death. Kosorotov found no water in the lungs. That single detail collapses the most famous element of the entire legend: Rasputin did not drown. He was already dead when he went into the river. The picture of a man clawing at the ice from underneath, finally overcome by the freezing water, is precisely the part the autopsy most firmly refutes. Nor did Kosorotov find any trace of poison. The stomach, he reported, showed no signs of cyanide at all.

The fork: where the memoir leaves the record

So we have two accounts that cannot both be true: Yusupov’s memoir, all cakes and cyanide and a corpse that will not stay down, and Kosorotov’s autopsy, describing a man shot dead — most likely by that forehead wound — before the water ever touched him. The fork between them is the heart of the mystery, and it runs straight through the question of the poison.

If there was cyanide in those cakes, why did Kosorotov find none, and why did Rasputin not die as any human being would? Several sober explanations have been offered. Perhaps there was never any poison — perhaps Yusupov, or the doctor in the plot, lost their nerve, or the poison was never administered, and the whole cyanide episode was invented afterwards to make the killing sound harder, grander, more the felling of a demon than the ambush of a peasant. Perhaps the cakes contained sugar, which can, under some chemistry, blunt cyanide’s action, though this has been much disputed. Whatever the mechanism, the physical evidence is unambiguous: no poison in the body. The most economical reading is that the poisoning as described simply did not happen, and that Rasputin was killed by gunfire in a far more ordinary and far more brutal way than the legend allows.

The forehead shot has drawn particular scrutiny. It was delivered at close range by a different weapon, some analysts have argued, from the ones the Russian conspirators are known to have carried — and this has fed a genuinely serious historical hypothesis, advanced most prominently by the British writer Andrew Cook, that a British Secret Intelligence Service officer named Oswald Rayner, a friend of Yusupov’s from their Oxford days who was in Petrograd at the time, may have fired the fatal round. Britain had a strategic interest in keeping Russia in the war and feared Rasputin was pushing the Tsar towards a separate peace with Germany. Whether or not the British hand is real — and it remains contested — the point for our purposes is that even the most dramatic revisionist theory describes a competent political assassination by gunshot rather than a supernatural ordeal survived and re-survived. The wilder the legend grew, the further it travelled from a plain man shot in the head in a cellar.

The journey: who wrote the monster

The extraordinary thing about the Rasputin legend is that we can point to its principal author, and to his motive for writing it. Felix Yusupov spent the rest of his long life — he died in Paris in 1967 — telling and retelling the story of the night he killed Rasputin, and each telling burnished the myth. His memoir Lost Splendour fixed the canonical version: the cakes, the wine, the failed poison, the resurrection on the stairs, the pursuit through the snow. Yusupov had every incentive to make the killing epic. A young aristocrat who lures an unarmed guest into his cellar and shoots him has committed a squalid ambush. A brave patriot who confronts a satanic force so powerful it shrugs off cyanide and bullets and must be destroyed by main force has performed something closer to an exorcism. The monstrousness of the victim is what launders the murder. The harder Rasputin is to kill, the more justified — the more heroic — the killing becomes.

And the ground, again, was fertile. By December 1916 Rasputin was already a figure of dark legend in the Russian imagination, hated by the court, gossiped about in the streets, blamed for every failure of a collapsing war and a faltering dynasty. The propaganda against him — much of it exaggerated, some of it invented — had already cast him as a near-demonic seducer with unnatural powers over the imperial family. A man the public half-believed to be a living devil was primed to become a man who could not be killed by natural means. Yusupov did not create the monster from nothing; he inherited a monster and gave it a death scene worthy of its reputation. The legend of the indestructible Rasputin is, in this sense, the last and most successful piece of anti-Rasputin propaganda, written by the man who put the bullets in him.

What the legend is really about

Why does the myth endure, decades after Kosorotov’s autopsy became public? Partly because a monster who will not die is simply a better story than a peasant shot in a cellar, and better stories out-compete true ones in the marketplace of memory. But there is something more specific working underneath. The legend of Rasputin’s death is a story a dying empire told about the force it believed was destroying it. If Russia was falling, the cause could not be the ordinary rot of an incompetent autocracy, a ruinous war, and a court cut off from its people. It had to be something demonic, singular, and hard to kill — a dark presence at the heart of the palace that patriots had to destroy against unnatural resistance. The indestructibility of Rasputin is the imperial ruling class’s alibi, a way of locating the empire’s collapse in one satanic peasant rather than in themselves.

That is the pattern I keep meeting on this desk: the reach for a single powerful figure or hidden force to carry a weight that properly belongs to messy, diffuse, systemic causes. It is the same move that turns a state’s ordinary secrecy into a hidden king behind the man in the iron mask, and the same appetite for a legible villain that let a well-timed accidental death be read as a pharaoh’s curse. A world in which empires fall for boring, structural reasons is harder to bear than a world in which they fall because a demon in a cellar refused to die on schedule.

The man in the river was not immortal. He was Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant and faith healer of real and strange charisma, who was lured to a palace by men who despised him, shot in the head at close range, and dead before the ice closed over him. The monster who swallowed cyanide and rose from the dead was born the moment his killer picked up a pen. What the legend really preserves is not the toughness of the victim but the guilt and the fear of the men who killed him — and of a whole ruling order that needed the thing it was destroying to be a devil, so that destroying it could feel like salvation rather than the small, cold, panicked murder it was.