The Siberian Mystic Who Was Reportedly Poisoned, Shot Four Times, and Drowned in the Neva Before He Finally Died in the Early Hours of 30 December 1916

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869–1916) was a Siberian peasant from the village of Pokrovskoye in the Tobolsk Governorate. He had taken up the religious wandering life of a strannik (pilgrim-mystic) in his early thirties without formal monastic ordination. He arrived in Saint Petersburg in 1903 carrying letters of introduction from the Kazan theological academy bishop, and had been introduced to the Russian Imperial court in November 1905 through the mystical circle around the Black Princess Anastasia of Montenegro.

The Empress Alexandra Feodorovna met him on 1 November 1905. Her four-year-old son Alexei had been diagnosed with haemophilia in 1904. Rasputin reportedly stopped one of Alexei’s bleeding episodes through prayer at the Empress’s bedside in October 1907. The reported success established Rasputin’s permanent place in the Empress’s household — and through her, in the inner circles of the Imperial court.

By 1914 he was the most-discussed unofficial influence in the Russian government. By 1916 — as the First World War casualties mounted and the Tsar’s effectiveness as commander-in-chief at the front degraded — he was blamed by the conservative Russian aristocracy for the cabinet appointments and dismissals that the Empress (acting from Saint Petersburg in the Tsar’s prolonged absence) had been issuing at his advice.

The aristocratic plot against him crystallised in late November 1916.

The plot

The principal conspirator was Prince Felix Yusupov — at 29 the wealthiest non-royal aristocrat in Russia, the heir to the Yusupov fortune of approximately 300 million pre-war rubles, and the personal son-in-law of the Tsar’s sister Xenia (through his 1914 marriage to the Princess Irina Alexandrovna). Yusupov’s co-conspirators were the Tsar’s first cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (25), the conservative Duma politician Vladimir Purishkevich, the military doctor Stanislaus Lazovert, and an army officer named Sukhotin.

The plot was designed to look like a private quarrel: Rasputin was to be invited to the Yusupov Palace on the Moika Embankment on the pretext of a late-evening introduction to Irina Yusupova (who was actually in Crimea), and poisoned at the private supper in the basement cellar room of the palace. The cyanide had been provided by Lazovert and baked into pastries and mixed with the Madeira wine.

What Yusupov’s account says

Yusupov’s 1927 published account Lost Splendor and his earlier 1916 confessions describe the murder as follows.

Rasputin arrived at the Yusupov Palace at approximately midnight on 29-30 December 1916. He ate the pastries and drank the Madeira. He was unaffected. Yusupov, alarmed, conferred with the co-conspirators upstairs. He returned to the cellar with a Browning pistol and shot Rasputin in the chest.

The co-conspirators came downstairs. They examined Rasputin, who appeared dead. Yusupov reportedly returned to the cellar alone shortly afterwards to retrieve Rasputin’s overcoat. Rasputin seized him by the throat.

Yusupov escaped upstairs. Rasputin crawled out into the palace courtyard. Purishkevich shot him three more times — once in the back, once in the head, once in the chest. The co-conspirators wrapped the body in a blanket, loaded it into a car, drove to the Petrovsky Bridge over the Neva, and dropped the body into the river.

The body was recovered from the Neva on 1 January 1917, two days later.

What the autopsy says

The autopsy was performed by the Petrograd medical examiner Dmitri Kossorotov on 1 January 1917. The report — preserved in the Russian State Archives — confirms three gunshot wounds and identifies the fatal one as a close-range head shot through the forehead. The autopsy does not find evidence of cyanide in the stomach. The autopsy does not find evidence of drowning — there is no water in the lungs, which indicates that Rasputin was already dead when he entered the river.

The Yusupov narrative is inconsistent with the autopsy on two counts: the cyanide and the drowning. The cyanide inconsistency has been explained in several ways — the pastries may have been less poisoned than Lazovert had believed; the high gastric acid of a peasant diet may have neutralised the cyanide; the pastries may have been replaced with unpoisoned ones by Yusupov in a fit of moral hesitation. None of the alternative explanations is documented.

The drowning inconsistency is more difficult. It suggests that the “third revival” — Rasputin seizing Yusupov by the throat — was a post-hoc literary embellishment by Yusupov rather than a actual event. The demonic-survival narrative — poisoned, shot, clubbed, shot again, drowned — was a 1920s European publishing genre that Yusupov’s memoir fitted into. The actual murder was probably a quicker and less theatrical event.

The forensic 21st-century reanalysis by the Scotland Yard pathologist Richard Cullen (2004) identified the close-range forehead shot as the fatal one and proposed — on the basis of the calibre and the wound pattern — that the shot had been fired from a British Webley service revolver rather than a Yusupov-Purishkevich Browning. The 2004 hypothesis is that a British intelligence officer named Oswald Rayner (who was personally present at the Yusupov Palace on the night of the murder and was a personal friend of Yusupov from Oxford university days) was the actual shooter. The British intelligence motive would have been concern that Rasputin was pushing Russia toward separate peace with Germany.

The Cullen-Rayner hypothesis is speculative but plausible. It has not been confirmed.

What followed

The February Revolution followed within ten weeks of the Rasputin murder. The murder did not save the Romanov dynasty — the dynasty fell eight weeks later. The Tsar abdicated on 15 March 1917.

Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich were exiled by the Tsar to Persia and Romania respectively for the murder. The exile saved both of their lives — neither was in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power, and both survived in Western European exile through the subsequent decades. Yusupov died in Paris in 1967, aged 80.

Rasputin was buried at Tsarskoe Selo on 3 January 1917. After the February Revolution his body was exhumed and burned by soldiers of the Provisional Government. His remains do not survive.

A 1928 apocryphal English-language pamphlet published by the Yusupov-defending writer William le Queux codified the demonic-survival narrative for the English-speaking world. The 1932 Hollywood film Rasputin and the Empress fixed the mythological version of the murder in the popular imagination. The 1978 Boney M disco song “Rasputin” completed the process. The actual murder of Grigori Rasputin in the early hours of 30 December 1916 was probably less mythological than popular memory records.