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

party.
    ‘He wore a silk blouse embroidered in cornflowers with a raspberry-coloured cord as a belt,’ recalled Yusupov in his account of the evening. ‘His velvet breeches and highly polished boots seemed brand new.’
    Rasputin’s beard, usually a wiry tangle, had been neatly combed: Yusupov had never seen him look so immaculate. ‘As he came near to me,’ he wrote, ‘I smelt a strong odour of cheap soap.’
    Rasputin was visibly agitated. He confessed to Yusupov that he had been warned that hidden enemies were plotting to kill him. His close friendship with the tsarina and his perceived influence over the tsar had indeed earned him many foes.
    Rasputin’s reputation may have been tarnished in the eyes of the public at large, but it had done him no harm amongst the aristocratic ladies of the Imperial court. His attraction was so magnetic – hypnotic, even – that women lost all sense of propriety when they were in his presence. One English eyewitness looked on in horrified astonishment as a succession of princesses queued up to suck his fingers after he had finished eating his meal with his hands.
    The death threats against Rasputin had not stopped him from accepting an invitation to the Yusupov Palace. He had been lured there by the promise of a debauched midnight rendezvous with Prince Feliks’s wife, Irina.
    Marital infidelity was not unusual amongst the more decadent sections of Petrograd’s aristocratic elite. Yusupov knew that offering his wife to another man would raise few eyebrows amongst those in his own dissolute social circle. He was himself almost certainly bisexual and he was also ambiguous in his gender. He confessed in his memoirs to spending his evenings disguised as a lady and consorting with the gypsy musicians of the Neva Delta.
    For Rasputin, the chance of a few snatched hours with Princess Irina was not to be turned down lightly. She was blessed with both a wistful beauty and an impeccable pedigree: she was the tsar’s niece. As Yusupov knew all too well, his wife was most alluring bait.
    Dr Lazovert stepped out of the car and opened the side door to the palace, standing aside to allow Yusupov and Rasputin to enter the marbled atrium. The sound of echoed laughter could be heard coming from Yusupov’s study and the gramophone was playing a scratchy version of ‘Yankee Doodle Went To Town’.
    The merriment unnerved Rasputin and he asked what was going on. ‘Just my wife entertaining a few friends,’ said Yusupov. ‘They’ll be going soon.’
    Neither of these statements was true. Yusupov’s wife was more than 2,000 miles away at the family’s country estate in the Crimea. And the guests had no intention of leaving. Grand Duke Dmitri, the tsar’s first cousin, had arrived a few hours earlier, along with a flamboyant monarchist named Vladimir Purishkevich. There was also a Russian officer named Captain Sergei Soukhatin in the palace that night. Unbeknown to Rasputin, all of these men were conspirators. They were planning to murder him before the first light of dawn broke through the winter sky.
    It was to be a night not just of murderous intent, but of spectacular deceit. Nothing was quite as it seemed in the Yusupov Palace on that December evening. Nothing would happen exactly as it was recorded. When the perpetrators came to set down their stories, it was as if the entire evening had been reflected in a distorting mirror that twisted and obscured reality.
    The principal eyewitness account was written by Prince Feliks himself. It makes for a compelling, if disturbing, read. He recalled that Rasputin paused momentarily in the atrium before the two of them descended into the palace basement where there was a private dining room.
    It was rarely used by the family, for it was a grim vaulted cellar with chiselled stone walls and granite flagstones. But it had one distinct advantage over all the other rooms in the building: it was deep underground and hidden from the eyes and ears of the