The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

The actual executioner was Prince Felix Yusupov, an orchidaceous young man about court who had married one of the Czar’s nieces. He carried out his gruesome mission with aristocratic amateurishness, and Rasputin’s end in consequence was as grotesquely messy as his whole career had been. Yusupov lured the starets to his home for a midnight drinking bout, served him Madeira spiked with potassium cyanide. While waiting for the poison to take effect Yusupov played the guitar for the man he was murdering. His co-conspirators upstairs steadied their nerves by playing Yankee Doodle over and over again on the phonograph. When it was clear that the cyanide had failed, Yusupov used a revolver. Rasputin fell on his back, seemingly dead. Later, however, he revived and was only finished off — by one of the shaken young prince’s accomplices — after a ghastly scuffle. The blood-spattered corpse was weighted and dropped through a hole in the ice into an arm of the Neva.