CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AT twenty-nine, Prince Felix Yussoupov was the sole heir to the largest fortune in Russia. There were four Yussoupov palaces in Petrograd, three in Moscow and thirty-seven Yussoupov estates scattered across Russia. The family’s coal and iron mines, oil fields, mills and factories churned out wealth which exceeded even the wealth of the tsars. “One of our estates,” wrote Yussoupov, “stretched for one hundred and twenty-five miles along the Caspian Sea; crude petroleum was so abundant that the ground seemed soaked with it and the peasants used it to grease their cart wheels.” Once, on a whim, Prince Yussoupov’s father had given his mother the highest mountain in the Crimea as a birthday present. In all, the size of the Yussoupov fortune was estimated fifty years ago at $350 million to $500 million. What the same possessions would be worth today, no one can guess.
The wealth of the Yussoupovs had been accumulated by centuries of standing at the elbows of Russia’s tsars and empresses. Prince Dmitry Yussoupov, descended from a Tartar khan named Yusuf, had whispered in the ear of Peter the Great. Prince Boris Yussoupov was a favorite of Empress Elizabeth. Prince Nicholas, the greatest Yussoupov of all, was a friend of Catherine the Great, an advisor to Catherine’s son, Tsar Paul, and a counselor to her two grandsons, Tsar Alexander I and Tsar Nicholas I. Prince Nicholas Yussoupov’s estate at Archangelskoe near Moscow was a city in itself, boasting huge parks and gardens with heated greenhouses, a zoo, private glass and porcelain factories, a private theatre and the Prince’s own companies of actors, musicians and ballet dancers. Seated in the audience, Prince Nicholas could, with a wave of his cane, produce an extraordinary effect: all the dancers would suddenly appear on stage, stark naked. A gallery on this Archangelskoe estate contained portraits of the Prince’s three hundred mistresses. When the old grandee died at eighty-one, he had just concluded a liaison with a girl of eighteen.
At his birth in 1887, Felix Yussoupov stepped into a fairyland of art and treasure left behind by these lusty progenitors. The drawing rooms and galleries of the Moika Palace, where he was born, were lined with a finer collection of paintings than those hanging in most of the museums of Europe. There was furniture which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and a chandelier which had lighted the boudoir of Mme. de Pompadour. Jewel- encrusted cigarette boxes by Faberge were scattered idly about on tables. Dinner parties brought two thousand guests to sit before golden plates and be served by costumed Arab and Tartar footmen. One Yussoupov mansion in Moscow had been built in 1551 as a hunting lodge for Ivan the Terrible; it was still connected by tunnel with the Kremlin several miles away. Beneath its vaulted halls, filled with medieval tapestries and furniture, there were sealed underground chambers which, when opened in Felix’s boyhood, revealed rows of skeletons still hanging in chains from the walls.
Cradled in wealth, Felix nevertheless was a spindly, lonely child whose birth caused his mother great disappointment. Princess Zenaide Yussoupov, one of the most famous beauties of her day, had borne three previous sons of whom only one had survived. She had prayed that her next child would be a girl. To console herself when Felix was born, she kept him in long hair and dresses until he was five. Surprisingly, this pleased him and he used to cry out to strangers in the street, “Look, isn’t Baby pretty?” “My mother’s caprice,” Prince Yussoupov wrote later, “was to have a lasting influence on my character.”
In adolescence, Felix Yussoupov was slender, with soft eyes and long lashes; he was often described as “the most beautiful young man in Europe.” Encouraged by his older brother, he took to dressing up in his mother’s gowns, donning her jewels and wigs and strolling in this costume on public boulevards. At The Bear, a fashionable St. Petersburg restaurant, he attracted enthusiastic attention from Guards officers, who sent notes inviting him to supper. Delighted, Felix accepted and disappeared into intimate private dining rooms. In Paris, continuing these masquerades, he once noticed a fat, whiskered gentleman staring persistently at him from the opposite side of the Theatre des Capucines. A note arrived which Felix hastily returned; his beaming admirer was King Edward VII of England.
Yussoupov’s first sexual experience occurred at the age of twelve in the company of a young man from Argentina and his girl friend. At fifteen, roaming Italy with his tutor, Felix first visited a Neapolitan bordello. Thereafter, he wrote, “I flung myself passionately into a life of pleasure, thinking only of satisfying my desires.… I loved beauty, luxury, comfort, the color and scent of flowers.” He also tried opium and a liaison with “a charming young girl” in Paris. Bored, he enrolled as a student at Oxford, maintaining at the university a chef, a chauffeur, a valet, a housekeeper and a groom to look after his three horses. From Oxford, he moved on to a flat in London, where he installed black carpets, orange silk curtains, modern furniture, a grand piano, a dog, a pet macaw and a French couple to cook and serve. He moved in a gay circle which included ballerina Anna Pavlova, Prince Serge Obolensky and ex-King Manuel of Portugal. Day or night, when friends visited Felix Yussoupov, he took out his guitar and sang gypsy songs.
Felix, the younger Yussoupov brother, became the family heir when Nicholas, his older brother, was killed in a duel by an outraged husband. In 1914, Felix returned to Russia to marry. His bride, Princess Irina, was the niece of the Tsar and the most eligible girl in the empire. At their wedding, Felix wore the uniform of the Russian nobility: a black frock coat with lapels and collar embroidered in gold, and white broadcloth trousers. Irina wore Marie Antoinette’s lace veil. The Tsar gave her in marriage and presented as his gift a bag of twenty-nine diamonds, ranging in size from three to seven carats apiece.
During the war, Yussoupov was not called for military service. Remaining in Petrograd, he achieved a glittering reputation as a bohemian, “Prince Felix Yussoupov is twenty-nine,” Paleologue observed, “and gifted with quick wits and aesthetic tastes; but his dilettantism is rather too prone to perverse imaginings and literary representations of vice and death … his favorite author is Oscar Wilde … his instincts, countenance and manner make him much closer akin to … Dorian Grey than to Brutus.”
Yussoupov first met Rasputin before his marriage. He saw him often, and they caroused together at dubious night spots. As treatment for an illness, Yussoupov submitted himself to Rasputin’s caressing eyes and hands. During this time, he often heard Rasputin speak of his Imperial patrons: “The Empress is a very wise ruler. She is a second Catherine but as for him, well, he is no Tsar Emperor, he is just a child of God.” According to Yussoupov, Rasputin suggested that Nicholas should abdicate in favor of Alexis, with the Empress installed as Regent. One year before he finally acted, Yussoupov concluded that Rasputin’s presence was destroying the monarchy and that the
Purishkevich spoke in the Duma on December 2. The following morning Yussoupov called on Purishkevich in a fever of excitement. He said that he planned to kill Rasputin, but that he needed assistance. Enthusiastically, Purishkevich agreed to help. Three other conspirators were brought into the plot: an officer named Sukhotin, an army doctor named Lazovert and Yussoupov’s youthful friend Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. At twenty-six, Dmitry was the son of Nicholas II’s last surviving uncle, Grand Duke Paul. Because of the difference in age, Dmitry referred to the Tsar—actually his first cousin—as “Uncle Nicky.” Elegant and charming, Dmitry was a special favorite of the Empress, who often found herself laughing at his jokes and stories. Nevertheless, she worried about his character. “Dmitry is doing no work and drinking constantly,” she complained to Nicholas during the war. “… order Dmitry back to his regiment; town and women are poison for him.”
As December progressed, the five conspirators met regularly, weaving the threads of entrapment, death and disposal of the corpse. The date was determined by Grand Duke Dmitry’s heavy social calender; December 31 was the first evening he had free. To cancel one of his previous engagements, the conspirators decided, might arouse suspicion. The place selected for the murder was the cellar of Yussoupov’s Moika Palace. It was remote and quiet and Princess Irina was away in the Crimea for her health. Yussoupov himself was to bring Rasputin there in a car driven by Dr. Lazovert disguised as a chauffeur. Once in the cellar, Yussoupov would feed Rasputin poison, while the others, waiting upstairs, would take charge of removing the body.
As the heavy December snows swirled through the streets of Petrograd, Rasputin sensed that his life was in danger. After the impassioned denunciations hurled at him in the Duma, he understood that a crisis was coming. The ebullient Purishkevich, unable to abide by his pledge of secrecy, soon was bubbling with hints to other Duma members that something was about to happen to Rasputin. Catching wisps of these rumors, Rasputin became moody and cautious. He avoided as much as possible going out in daylight. He was preoccupied with the idea of death. Once after a lonely walk along the Neva he came home and declared that he had seen the river filled with the blood of grand dukes. In his last meeting with the Tsar, he refused to give Nicholas his customary blessing,
