Rasputin's Death: The Poison, the Bullets and What Actually Killed Him

Grigori Rasputin died on the night of 16 December 1916, and if you believe Felix Yusupov (a Russian prince, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the empire, and a man who would spend the rest of his life explaining himself), it involved cyanide in the cakes and wine, then bullets, then the Neva river. Yusupov told this story many times and with considerable enthusiasm. It got better with each telling. Almost none of it is true.

The Death of Rasputin

The post-mortem, conducted by Professor Dmitry Kosorotov, found no trace of poison. What it found was a gunshot wound to the forehead, fired at close range, which is a rather more straightforward cause of death than the legend requires. Andrei Simmons, writing in Kritika in 2004, noted that Yusupov's accounts shifted substantially between tellings, details multiplying with each version. That is not what reliable testimony tends to do. The drowning detail, it seems, was added for atmosphere. The official record is considerably less gothic. The legend, it turns out, needed more help than the facts could provide.

This matters because Rasputin's reputation as the man who refused to die is the load-bearing structure of his mythology, and his mythology was almost entirely built by the people who feared him most. Which raises a question the popular biography almost never asks: what was he actually doing in that palace, and why did it frighten them so badly?

Rasputin and the Romanovs

He arrived in St Petersburg in 1903, a self-described holy man from Siberia with no formal religious training, and within four years he was sitting with the Tsarina. Her son Alexei had haemophilia, which in the early twentieth century was essentially a slow death sentence for a child of any class, royal or otherwise. Rasputin appeared to help. Nobody has satisfactorily explained how.

Whether this was hypnosis, some talent for keeping the boy calm and thereby reducing stress-induced bleeding, or something else entirely, Alexandra did not much care about the mechanism. She believed it was divine. That belief was enough to put Rasputin at the centre of the court.

The court's problem was not that he was a fraud. Frauds are manageable. The problem was that he had genuine influence over the Tsarina at a moment when Russia was fighting a catastrophic war and the Tsar was largely absent, commanding troops at the front. Alexandra was making appointments. Rasputin had opinions about those appointments. The exact reach of his political influence is still contested, but the perception of it was real, and in court politics perception is often the thing that gets you killed.

The Rasputin Prophecy

His prophetic reputation rests mainly on a single document, reportedly written in 1916, in which he warned Nicholas that noble-born assassins would bring the dynasty down with him. Felix Yusupov carried out the murder that December, and the Romanovs were dead within two years, shot in a basement in Yekaterinburg. Nobody disputes that the document exists. Whether it constitutes prophecy is a less flattering question. He knew powerful people wanted him dead, because several of them had told him so directly. Knowing your enemies are circling is not prophecy.

Why the Legend Survived

The persistence of his influence after death is harder to explain than the death itself. Something close to a mythological figure, which is a strange fate for a man who was, by most contemporary accounts, genuinely unpleasant to be near. His personal hygiene was reportedly appalling, his behaviour at the salons he frequented bad enough that even sympathetic accounts struggle to paper over it. None of it mattered.

The letters kept arriving. The petitions. The women who travelled considerable distances convinced he could heal their children. Russia in its final Romanov years was a country generating mystics and faith healers faster than it could produce competent generals, and Rasputin was simply the one who had got closest to the throne.

His proximity to the imperial family gave him a credibility that no amount of scandal entirely dissolved. He was buried quietly in January 1917. When the revolution came, his body was exhumed and burned. The men who murdered him were celebrated. Felix Yusupov gave interviews about it for the rest of his life.

The Romanovs were shot in a basement eighteen months after Rasputin died on the floor of that palace. The more interesting question is not whether he saw it coming. It is why so many people, across more than a hundred years, have needed him to have.

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