Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution Read Free Page A

only possibility of escape. Oblivious to the steady disintegration of the Russian Army, it continued to stage exquisitely choreographed ballets. Tsar Nicholas himself no longer attended, yet the royal box still sparkled with candlelight throughout the performances. ‘[It] seemed to many of us to symbolise a capital that the Emperor seldom visited and a society that the Emperor never saw,’ wrote Hoare.
    The tsar’s absence only fuelled the rumours that he was no longer in charge of the country. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, concurred with the many who said he was under the baleful influence of the tsarina. Others claimed that the affairs of state were being manipulated by the tsarina’s ‘holy’ advisor, Grigori Rasputin.
    As the tsarina grew increasingly alarmed about the health of her haemophiliac son, so she became increasingly dependent on Rasputin. He seemed blessed with semi-magical powers that brought temporary relief to the young tsarevich, heir to the Russian imperial throne.
    Rasputin had many enemies. Licentious and dissolute, he was widely (if erroneously) believed to belong to the extremist Khlyst sect. Its practitioners held that boundless debauchery was the best way of suppressing lust and they engaged in orgiastic rituals while invoking the name of the Holy Spirit.
    Rasputin’s lifestyle was widely criticised in the press. The tsarina was also much maligned, albeit more obliquely. Born into the Hesse-Darmstadt dynasty, she was suspected of having pro-German sympathies. It was not long before she and Rasputin were being viewed as a monstrous duo that was secretly sabotaging the Russian war effort in the hope of a German victory.
    As the food crisis worsened, people spoke euphemistically of ‘Dark Forces’ at work in the Petrograd palaces. ‘Each and every calamity or inconvenience was in the public mind due to the “Dark Forces”,’ wrote Hoare.
    Rasputin was eventually named as the leader of these ‘Forces’ and his removal from the court was demanded by the Duma, the legislative assembly. A succession of parliamentary speakers denounced his dangerous hold over the imperial family.
    Hoare summed up these speeches in a single sentence: ‘Let the Emperor only banish this man and the country would be freed from the sinister influence that was striking down its natural leaders and endangering the success of its armies in the field.’
    He was convinced that Russia’s problems would be instantly solved if only Rasputin were to be removed from the capital. But no one, it seemed, had the power or authority to rid the country of the tsarina’s favourite.

    An icy wind was whipping off the Gulf of Finland.
    The River Neva was frozen to a pewter crust and fine wisps of snow were rasping its surface. The city of Petrograd was shivering in a deep winter chill.
    Shortly before midnight on 29 December 1916, a lone car swung into the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace. The car’s yellow headlamps cast a brief glare on the palace’s colonnaded gateway. The vehicle then made a circular sweep of the snow-covered courtyard and came to a halt by the side entrance of the building.
    Three people were seated inside the car, all of them from very different walks of life. At the wheel was Doctor Lazovert, an army doctor on leave from his duties at the battlefront. He was dressed in disguise, masquerading as the chauffeur of the Yusupov family.
    Behind him sat Prince Feliks Yusupov, an elite member of the imperial Corps des Pages . He was heir to the richest dynasty in the Russian Empire and celebrated as one of the most decadent aristocrats in Petrograd. He was also one of the most handsome. His almond eyes and delicate cheeks might have looked effeminate were it not for the compensation of a strong aquiline nose.
    The third person in the car was Grigori Rasputin, the Russian tsarina’s confidant. He usually wore the simple garb of an Orthodox monk but on this particular night he was dressed for a