S4 – 10: Ghosts

and that was nothing unusual. But the hours ticked by, and then the calls started to come in from the police. They were trying to track down Gregory as well. Well. All the maid could tell them was that she had seen his friend come by to pick him up the night before, the family friend, Felix Yusupov, and they had left together, so Resputant must be at the Yusupov palace.

People started coming to their apartment. They started to line up at the door as usual, bringing their pain, their needs, their desires, but there was no sign of Gregory to meet them. So Maria put in the call to her friends of the Empress, and they promptly relayed the message to Alexandra Grigory it seemed was missing. After that, Maria called the woman who had introduced Rasputant and Felix use Upov. Together,

they tried to get in touch with Felix. After a few tries, they had him on the phone, but as Maria watched them talk, she saw something come over the woman's face. By the time they ended the call, Maria could tell she was deeply upset. Felix had sworn that he had not seen Gregory the night before. He had not picked him up, much less hosted him at the use of haf Palace. That was all he had to say, and then he hung up. The two looked at each other.

One thing was clear. Felix was lying, and with Grigory missing, they began to suspect why. It was a moment of dawning horror that would stay with Maria for the rest of her life. So and police agents were at the door. They came to sweep the house. Of course, Maria left them in and they marched into respute and study, where they started to gather up his papers. Maria may not have realized it right away, but they were wasting no time.

Anything in Grigory's possession that could embarrass the Czar needed to be swept out of sights immediately. The empire was the priority, but the respute and apartment wasn't the only place getting the police sweep Because those gunshots in the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace, they hadn't gone unheard. The conspirators had planned for everything to be done quietly in the prepared room of the palace basement. That plan had failed, and the thing they were afraid of actually came true.

A person who heard those gunshots was a police officer, and shortly after the shooting he had strolled up to the Yusupov Palace and seeing Felix standing outside, so he approached and asked what was going on. Felix tried to play it off. Maybe it was nothing, Maybe it was just some of his friends playing with the pistol. Nothing arius. The officer had walked on, but around four am he came back, something about Felix hadn't sat right with him.

If there was some horseplay with the handgun, he thought he should probably report it. This time, though, he talked with a man who had fired the gun. Vladimir Pershkevitch. When the police officers started asking questions, Perishkevitch leaned in. He put his arm around the officer's shoulder, and he took the opposite approach from Felix, I mean, the exact opposite. He asked the officer what he thought of Grigory Rasputin. Was he an enemy of Russia and an enemy of

the Czar? And the officer agreed, and so Perishkevitch told him that only hours before they had killed Grigory Resputin in that very courtyard. And if that sounds like an enormous mistake by Pershkevitch, then you're probably following along. The police officer promised not to tell, and Pershkevich slapped him on the shoulder and sent him on his way. Unfortunately for the murderers, his way took him right back to the police station, where he immediately told his supervisors. Word

flashed up the chain of command. By eight o'clock the next morning, the report already had reached the Minister of the Interior. Grigory Rasputin had been killed, and in the ranks of the Petrograd police they were celebrating his murder. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. The photographer's camera captured the scene. A line of blood crossed the snowy courtyard leading away from the side entrance. Investigators were trying to argue their way inside the palace, but Felix was a

relative of the czar. Only orders from the Emperor himself could authorize a search, and someone was saying that the blood they could see spilled on the ground came from the family dog, since one of the servants had shot it in the courtyard in the dark hours of the morning. Eventually, though, the police were let into the palace, but they were guided from room to room and not allowed to wander

on their own. They never saw the basement room. It was true about the dog, though, Felix had ordered one of his servants to shoot it outside and cover their tracks, but the splashes of its blood over the trail in the snow weren't enough to hide what had happened in his house, not least because Paraskevitch had been telling people their plans for weeks. He had been telling people in the Russian government. He had been telling journalists Russia had

to be saved, so Rasputin had to go. It was the message he had been spreading everywhere, and there was no shortage of people eager to lap it up. Parashkevitch was always ready to clarify that he didn't think any of the rumors were true, for example about Grigory and the Empress being lovers, but it was bad enough that people believed it was true, and so Perishkevich said he was going to kill Resputin like a dog. Once. Perashkevich had even met with the head of the British secret

intelligence in Petrograd and told him too. Apparently, Pershkevich even laid out the details of the plan. The British agents ignored the report only because he had already heard so many stories from other people saying they would kill Rasputin as well, and nothing had ever happened. Only this time there was blood in the snow, and the very next day, two workers who were crossing the Petrovsky Bridge saw blood on the railing too, not to mention the rubber burned

into the road where a vehicle had sped away. When a watchman arrived to check out their reports, he went down onto the ice under the bridge, and there he spotted a boot that had been carelessly thrown from above and missed the hole in the ice. When he reported it to the police, it put them on the trail of grig Cory's body. Things that were moving fast now. By midday on December seventeenth, the word was spread wide. Prince Felix Yusupov, together with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, Vladimir

Perishkevitch and other conspirators, had murdered Grigory Rasputin. The French Foreign Minister was reporting it back across Europe. The Stock Exchange Gazette was running the story. The news was out. All attempts to do things quietly had failed. The murderers gathered to plot their next move. They agreed to keep up the story about the dog for as long as

they could. No one would admit to the truth that was now being published across Russia, but they knew that they would only last so long, so they agreed they needed to run. Pershkevitch didn't waste any time. He hopped on a hospital train and raced toward the Romanian front. Felix Yusupov, though, wasn't so quick to turn tail. That night, he says he went to dinner with a British officer and fielded phone calls from friends who are rushing to

congratulate him. Not that we can take his word for it, but there's no doubt Felix was proud of himself and he wanted to bask. After all, no authority below the Tsar could touch him. Not far off, though, the news was landing very differently in a different palace. Like she did so many other times, Alexandra put pen to paper and wrote to Nicholas. She told him what she knew.

That Grigory was missing, that Perishkevitch was crowing about killing Rasputin, that Felix was denying it, but that he was definitely involved. She wrote, I cannot believe that our friend has been killed. God have mercy. In the following days, people who saw Alexandra said it was clear she was in anguish. She ordered that Felix Usupaf was forbidden to leave the capital. She placed the Tsar's cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri, under house arrest.

She worried, she raged, and she refused to be swayed by the excuses and the lies they tried to send her. She was cut to the core, especially when there was no more denying the truth. In the early morning hours of Monday, December nineteen, a small piece of fabric was spotted downstream from the bridge, poking up through a crack in the surface of the frozen river. Divers broke through, and sure enough, right there, stuck to the underside of

the ice was Grigory rest Mutant's body. They lowered hooks and dragged him from the water. A photographer's camera captured the scene. It was a stunning image rast mutants body on its back, dragged through the snow on a plank of wood. His legs are still wrapped in the cloth from the yusup off palace, and his ankles are still bound by a length of chain. His frozen beard points up towards the sky, and his arms are spread wide.

They brought Maria resputant to the river. At the end of the bridge was a small hut where Maria and her sister were lead Inside. There they were shown a body a It was horrible. Maria remembered that the face was swollen and the hair was thick with clots of blood, but the debris had been cleaned off his features and Maria could see that it was her father. She said his clothes were frozen, stiff, and they peeled and flaked like sheets of micah. The investigators took note of the details.

It was clear that whatever weights were tied to the body had slipped away, and Rasputant had not sunk when he hit the water. What's more, the fur coat that was thrown into the water with the body had trapped air and acted as a float. The gold cross still clung to his chest over the blue silk shirt he had gotten as a gift from Alexandra. The thin twine

that had tied his wrists had obviously snapped. Perhaps it was when he hit the water, or maybe it was during the fall when the body was flung over the rail. The head seemed to have struck one of the supports on the way down, but there was no doubt this was Rasputant's body, and along with everything else, the bullet holes puncturing his head and chest told the tail this was murder. The next thing they needed, without a minute

of delay, was an autopsy. Afraid of what might happen if his followers knew his body was in the city, the authorities bustled the girls away and packed resputants corps for travel. His arms frozen wide in the icy river, and rigor Mortis refused to fit into a coffin, so in an open topped wooden box, Grigory's body was carried seven kilometers outside the city limits to the Chessmenski Palace. The roads were blocked, guards were set, and the body

was warmed up to thaw. The man called in for the work was Petrograd's senior autopsy surgeon, Dr. Dmitri Kosorotov, known as one of the leading forensic experts in Russia. He was the man trusted to write manuals on forensic medicine and lecture at the Military Medical Academy. But it didn't take his fine tuned expertise to detect the cloud of alcohol around the body. Resputants corpse, he said, smelled

like Kognak. There was a challenge of determining what had been done to the body after death, where it was smashed against the bridge supports and gashed open by the edge of the river ice. And there was the challenge of tracing the three bullet wounds that Dr Kosrotov identified and the shot to Grigory's forehead he determined had been

close enough to leave powder residue. As he tallied up the injuries and started to come to a determination of what had killed the Siberian holy Man, Dr Kosotov drew a picture that was sound and reasonable and based on the evidence in front of him. Unfortunately, that picture is not the one that the world would see. In fact, the story of Resputant's death was already being told without

the benefit of knowing what the autopsy found. Void of evidence, these stories were free to include whatever speculations seemed best to fit the legends and rumors already swirling about Grigory's life and death. And that was all before Felix Yusupov's own myth making through a shroud over Resputant's corpse, one that would hide the realities from our eyes for generations. Here's historian Douglas Smith to help us unravel the legend.

So much of the myth of resputants murder, which is something that everybody seems to know in some sort of detail, comes from your supers memoirs. You supers memoirs are sort of network of lies, the tissue of have truths and an attempt to bade himself in glory, if you will, for a truly horrible deed. He depicts himself, he soup of does as like sort of Sat Michael slaying the dragon.

He depicts Resputin as a man that was impossible to kill, um, that he had sort of superhuman power in him, that he was Satan himself, And in fact, in the various versions of the memoirs that you super frights he and each one exaggerates the impossibility of killing Rasputin with each retelling of the tale. Felix didn't want to think of himself as a cold blood murderer. He certainly didn't want

others to think of himself that way. He and his accomplices needed to believe that they were something more, and so the story that they told grew from the cold realities into something far more sinister, spiritual, legendary, but completely false.

With each retelling of the tale, that you know, they beat him, they poisoned him, they shoot him, he refuses to die, that they dump him in a hole in an icy branch of the Nieva River, and even then he still breathes his last and tries to make the sign of the cross, and eventually only dies of drowning.

I mean, this is all just a pack of lies that you Soup have told to make himself feel better, to aggrandize himself, and quite frankly, to earn money, because he was now living in in exile after the Revolution in Europe and had no way to make a living other than to keep retelling the story of how he had killed Resputant. When Dr Kosaratop opened the body, he own no water in the lungs. Grigory didn't drown. He

was dead before he hit the water. But that's just one aspect of Felix's myth, dissolved by the findings of the autopsy. Chief among the details that Felix would build his story on was the thing that he couldn't shake that Grigory had swallowed an army's worth of cyanide that night and remained unscathed. As Felix told the story, he had added massive doses to the cakes and wine, and

Rasputant had taken it all. As far as he was concerned, some malignant spiritual energy had preserved him from its effects. That would become one of the key details of the Resputant myth that would be told and retold down the generations up to today. But traces of cyanide is something Dr Kassarotov would have been able to spot right away.

In fact, he didn't find any food in Grigory's stomach at all, no cakes poisoned or not, And if there had been something put in Rasputant's drink, it couldn't have been a lethal dose of cyanide. The body would have given off a signature scent of almonds, among other tell tale effects, but the autopsy report noted nothing of the kind. Maybe Felix was telling outright lies about the attempt to poison Grigory, But the other possibility is that they dosed

him with something other than cyanide without knowing it. Some historians think it was just an inert powder substituted along the way, perhaps by someone with a pang of conscience. Felix and his friends were simply too ignorant to know what they had wasn't the real deal. It wasn't that Grigory had miraculously survived poisoning. It was simply that his murderers bungled just about every part of their attempt to

kill him. Dr Kosaratov found when he examined the body that the killing looked messy, but fairly ordinary, fairly easy, that is, to explain an ultimate fact. There was probably never any poison, And in point of fact, we know from photographs taken at the autopsy of Resputent's body after it was pulled from the ice, that he was shot three times at close range, twice in the torso, and a third and final time at point blank rage, right

into the middle of his forehead. Rasputin was more than dead when they finally dumped his body into the icy river. Gregory had been shot once through the stomach and liver, He had been shot again in the back, and the bullet pierced his kidney and lodged against his spine. Either one of those could have killed him given enough time, and the shot to his head was certainly enough to

end his life. But generations of historians, investigators, and writers have had to cut through Felix Yusupov's tall tales to get at the truth. The man was mortal with a legend has proved impossible to kill. The rumors spread Grigory Rasputant was protected from poison by dark spiritual powers. We know that's false, but it was so much more fun to leave it. Resputant was nearly immortal and survived being shot, beaten, stabbed, and poisoned, only to be killed by the rivers of Russia.

That's false too, but there's a sick pleasure in recounting the amount of punishment one body could absorb before nature steps in to finish the job. And then, of course, there's the story that comes from the most salacious rumors about Grigory's sexual conquests and the gossip that he was, as we've all heard, the lover of the Russian Zarina. It's those earlier stories that gave rise to the idea that Felix or someone among the killers cut off Resputant's

penis and preserved it. After all, it had grown its own legends, all blown out of proportion with each time they were repeated. It was even enough for collectors and museums to claim over the years that they have its inhuman mass pickled in brine. While it's unbelievable size makes it a marvel to visitors today, and what could tickle fancies more than a story like that. Here's the thing, though,

it's unbelievable, because it's not true. Gregory's body was intact at the autopsy, but as with so many other parts of Rasputant's life, the truth never got in the way of a juicy anecdote. The truth about his exploits was far from mystical. As we know by now, he was simply a man who used his position and his preaching to take sexual advantage of women who were vulnerable. But

that truth doesn't lend itself to playful retellings. In reality, Gregory's whole corpse was embalmed, dressed in white silk, and sealed in a zinc coffin. Before the lid was closed, he was joined by some dried flowers and an icon. It was far quieter than the storytellers would have us believe. Also far quieter was the Royal household. Nicholas arrived back in Petrograd on Monday, December. The year nineteen sixteen was coming to a close on a sober note for the

Imperial household. They were shaken, but one attendant noted that the name Grigory Rasputin was never spoken that night. In the following days, though they were all asking what should be done with the holy man's body. Alexandra started putting the question to her advisers directly, the Palace commandant suggested that it be shipped back to Siberia. Other officials responded with worry. What if the news got out that rest Mutant's corpse was traveling by train, there might be a

violent demonstration on the way. Even with his death, the hatred of Gregory Resputant had not dissipated. That was clear to see for just about everyone, which is also why they started to worry when Alexandra insisted that he be buried nearby. In fact, Resputant had participated in laying the cornerstone of a new church at Alexander Park, near the Imperial residence. Alexandra wanted him there, so in the early morning of Wednesday, December one, soldiers began to dig a

shallow grave in the foundations of the church. A police fan arrived with its heavy burden. By the time the Imperial family followed, the Zinc coffin was already in the ground. Only a few people were there beyond Nicholas, alex Xandra, their daughters, and a few of their household. No one in Rasputant's family was consulted. Maria and her sister Varvara had left the capital without an invitation to their own father's burial. Alexandra and each of her daughters tossed a

white rose down into the hole in the earth. Nicholas wrote a brief account in his diary, A sad spectacle, he said. Then the imperial family went back to their daily lives, meetings with officials, war briefings, and even with Grigory now gone the revolving door of ministers, Alexandra and her daughter's returned to nursing duties, attending hospital trains and celebrating their care for Russia's wounded sons with ornate faberge eggs.

At the graveside, a military guard prohibited anyone from approaching. For a while, Alexandra made daily visits, holding herself together. There were times it seemed that she still believed she was under her friend's protection. A few months later, she wrote to Nicholas that even though God had sent them a hard burden to bear, they should have courage. You

should wear the cross, she wrote. It seems she had taken the one Resputin was wearing on his chest when he died, and she had given it to the Czar. The fact that nestling it against his heart failed to save Grigory from the bullets that killed him didn't seem to occur to Alexandra. She said it would help Nicholas when he was making difficult decisions. Besides, she was praying fervently for her husband, and she believed she wasn't the only one. Another voice was still reaching out to God

on the Romanov's behalf. She told Nicholas that Resputin was nearer to them than ever, even in the world beyond, and Alexander was far from alone in that thought. It was widely reported that the Minister of the Interior was regularly attending seances. They whispered that he was always trying to summon rest Sputin and to get advice from the

murdered peasant from beyond the grave. As the days went by, other government officials started to observe that he attended to his duties less and less and spent his time at the Imperial Palace more and more. His motives, though, were more than suspicious, especially when he decided to take things up a notch. He started telling Alexander that he wasn't just getting messages from Rasputin. No, he said that the spirit of Rasputin had come back from the other side

and taken up residence inside a new body. With Rasputin dead, Russia was saved. At least that's what the killers hoped. The dark forces that affected the Empire through their Siberian puppet had that tool ripped from their hands, the Czar's family would move on and God would once again bless the empire. With the enemy's plots overthrown, they would have victory in battle and a time of peace and plenty would follow. The French Foreign Minister wrote in his diary

on December that the public was rejoicing. They were kissing in the streets, he said, and marching to the churches burning candles to the saints. That fish agents wrote that the people of Petrograd were acting as if they were suddenly freed from a great weight. It was, they were saying, better than Russia's greatest victories in the war, all thanks to Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri and their band of heroes.

Right Once again, a far bleaker reality would shatter the myths spun up by the propagandists of Russian aristocracy, and it was Nicholas first of all, who felt the pinch because it felt to him like the attack on rest Sputin had a secondary target his wife, so he felt he didn't have a choice. The murderers had to be dealt with. The rest of his family urged Nicholas to let the issue go. The murder had perhaps been misguided,

but Grigory was only a peasant. Was Nicholas really going to pursue the members of his own bloodline over the death of someone like that. Alexandra had begun the prosecution, She had even put a Grand Duke under house arrest, but surely Nicholas would see that all of this as an overreaction. If the murderers and their social set thought that the Tsar would see things their way, they once again misunderstood just how much Grigory Resputant had meant to

the Romanovs. On the twenty three December, Grand Duke Dmitri received orders he was being sent away from Petrograd to the Persian Front. He was leaving the very next morning. In strict secrecy. He boarded the train and left the capital. No one was confused about why he was being pushed out into the war zone. Other aristocrats tried to push back. They got together and co signed a letter asking for Nicholas to show mercy on the Grand Duke's youth and

ill health. The Czar's response he scrawled by hand across the top of the letter, no one has a right to commit murder, and he returned it to sender. Felix was also exiled, not that it was hard for him. He retreated from the capital only as far as his comfortable estate in the south. There he started to receive visits from the rush and nobility, people who wanted to congratulate him, and people who simply wanted to thumb their

nose at the Czar. Any bonds of love and trust that had existed between Nicholas and the nobility were broken, and that had massive implications for what came next. As the Russian elites took all their venom, all their spites, and all their grievances and poured them out on the Czar's doorstep and on his German wife. Here's historian Joshua Sanborn to say more. The criticism of Alexandra and then by extension, rast putin a lot of it is wrapped up in quite um uh i don't know the best

way way to put it. I mean, a lot of it is wrapped up obviously anti Germanism, a lot of it is wrapped up in in in sexism obviously. Uh. You know that that's a lot of the criticism that's happening for them, um, But it also doesn't reflect the fact that I talked about before, which is that the decisions they're making in nineteen six after Nicholas leaps for the front in the nineteen sixteen, let's say they're not

that consequential. I don't think it actually matters that much through the minis sor of Interior, Minister of Communications, It's right.

I just don't think it matters too much. Most of the actual work that's being done is being done by people that that they don't have control over, especially in the military, and so you know, I don't see them as that important now in terms of the loss of public faith on the part of the Petersburg elite, which is something important that the faith of your political elite is something important in a political system. It's obvious that

they have an effect on that. So for sure they have an influence on that, and that's why the you know, that's why it's conservatives and ultra right right wing people that assassinate rest Putin. And one thing is clear, Nicholas was right to worry. By the end of nineteen sixteen, Russian aristocrats weren't satisfied with the death of rest Sputin. There were at least a few who considered killing Alexandra

as well. Some even plotted a full blown coup. In the end, Russian elites and government officials spent much of their time stewing over the ways that the Czar was fumbling the reins, that they failed to see their own part in tearing the social fabric to shreds. They wanted someone to blame for what they were doing themselves. It's

that blindness that Douglas Smith describes here so well. I came away after six years of research and writing and thinking about Respute, and you know, seeing him as this great scapecoat, sort of one of the great scapegoats of history. And it's not to deny his faults, it's not to deny him of responsibility for things that he did to further the demise of the autocracy. But everyone wants to

put it all on his shoulders. It was strange to just read account after account after account of people who were part of Russia at the time, in the government, in the army, at court, and they all want to place it on resputing shoulders, as if it hadn't been Resputing, none of this would have happened. There would have been no war, there would have been no revolution, there would

have been no downfall of the dynasty. And that's so utterly simplistic and incorrect that I hope, if nothing else, I can move us off of this simplistic way thinking about him and his role in his place in history. There's a bitter irony to the ways that the Russian aristocrats obsessed over the Tsar and his wife because resputant or no, the truth is that the empire had long

since slipped beyond the Tsar's control. If he or anyone had wanted to see a different future for Russia at the end of nineteen sixteen, they would have to make

those changes in the past. As historian Helen Rappaport explains, I think the big crucial turning point could have been five after you know, the fiasco the Russo Japanese wore terrible disaster for Russia politically, Um after that, and then the bloody Sunday protest march where innocent workers marched without weapons or anything, asking for reform and for letter working

conditions when they were attacked by Cossack troops. When that happened, that turning point, That was the point where Nicholas should

have introduced major political concessions. If it introduced decent, democratic constitutional government, if he'd allowed the Duma, the State Duma, to flourish instead of constantly censoring it and shutting it down, then I don't see why Russia could not have evolved into the kind of constitutional monarchy that was made such a success by King Edward the seventh in the years leading up to World War One, because Russia was beginning

to grow economically, beginning to catch up with Western Europe in those terms, and it could have flourished differently under a much more benign and democratic constitutional monarch. But as we know, Nicholas was never willing to give up what he considered a god given right. He was the czar by heaven and he was meant to rule on are A Romanov There would never truly be a democratic constitution. Nicholas was an autocrat from the beginning to the bitter end,

the bodies piled up the war continued on. One death could easily get lost among the many millions of poor soldiers being killed on every side in a clash between empires. It is the peasants who suffer. At least some of the aristocrats saw that. Like the wealthy woman who followed Alexander's lead and tied on a nurse's gown, she believed that as a powerful matron, charity was her duty, so

she took up work in the hospitals. But simple charity fell far short of what the Russian elites would have needed to do to truly turn Russia toward a different future. That began to dawn on her when she overheard a few of the wounded soldiers talking together. They were peasants, like many Russian fighting men, and they were talking about Rasputin.

He was like them, a peasant. Whatever else might have been true about him, all the rumors and dark whispers about his evil proclivities, they saw that he had climbed high. He had done what peasants who farmed the land, who raised horses, and who worked in the factories could only dream of. They said, there he was the one peasant who had reached the czar himself, but what did he get in return? The real masters of society had him

murdered by the dawn of nineteen seventeen. The Russian people had decided long ago that they suffered more than enough at the hands of these masters of society. If the aristocrats talked idly about a coup to overthrow the czar, the Russian people were about to show their ruling class what it really looked like to seize power from abusive masters. Here's historian Joshua Sandborn to describe the outbreak of revolution.

It begins on International Women's Day, which was a relatively new socialist holiday instituted in UH as a result of the Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City. UM and UH and and UH again driven by socialist parties and by labor movements as as a way to sort of recognize women within within the socialist movement and UM so International Women's Day is provides the the opportunity for many women across the city of Petrograd to UM to go out on marches and and what they want to protest.

At this point, UM is a series of things. The war uh, the Tsarist administration and the fact that their lives have now been taken over by increasingly long breadlines, and they're putting the blame for this where it actually belongs on the sar and on the and on the war itself. They're they're not wrong about who has led them to this, to this situation. And when the defense factories also go out on strike and join them, it

becomes a crisis for the police in Petrograd. They attempt to deal with this by blocking off bridges, by doing a series of other things. They shoot into the crowd at several moments, but then they feel that they have to call in the army. The army has several barracks in the city and they have to call those soldiers up to help them police the city. And when they do that, it turns out that the soldiers are on the on the side of the protesters. You have mass

mutinies among the soldiers in the Petrograd garrison. They drive the police away, The police throw away their uniforms, they flee on trains, they hide um uh, they break open the jails, they start burning court records. All this stuff

is happening. That's are orders troops to be sent to from the front to put down the rebellion in the city Um, and the first groups of those when they arrive in the outskirts, their commanders quickly realized that Um that if they said troops into the city, those troops are also going to rebel and then they're gonna have a real problem on their hands, so they start to withdraw.

The one person who could never withdraw from his most disastrous decisions, from his most self destructive beliefs, was the Czar himself. He had denied the truth for so many years, saying that the Russian people could never turn against him, and he surrounded himself with advisors who agreed. The only friends the Romanovs were willing to entertain were fierce champions

of the monarchy. It was shortsighted he was blind, But over the course of their reign, Nicholas and Alexandra had built themselves an echo chamber, and for years the loudest voice in that room telling them exactly what they wanted to hear had been Grigory Rasputin, but of course it was others before him, and after his death it was men like the Minister of the Interior who floated in

on his wake. All of that had insulated the Romanovs from really understanding what was happening in Russia until, of course, it was too late and the revolution had begun. When Nicholas finally faced that reality, it washed over him like a tidal wave. Here's more from Helen Rappaport. Nicholas I feel was duped into abdicating. There is hundreds of miles away from home, when two members of the government, the Duma, came out by train and persuaded him that that revolution

of broken Impactrickrad. That was disarray in the army. People, the conscript arm lots of them were deserting at the front. Morale was low, and it was you know, there was so much disaffection with the czar and the old imperial regime that the best thing he could do save Russia and the country and the war effort was to give

up the job. He allowed himself to be persuaded. I think that his application would save Russia and it would also save the war effort, because obviously, with the revolution, everyone was worried that Russia was now going to pull out of the war effort as well on the Eastern Front. So Nicholas abdicated, thinking that he by his him removing himself as the hated cs are, the situation could be saved.

And of course, in this time, as in so many others, Romanovs look for strength not to the powers of the earthly realm, but to the heavens. It was divine guidance they had always saught, and it was to God's messengers on earth that they bent their ear. After all, the was no one on earth above them, so it was only to the powers of God's Church that they were

truly willing to bend. In revolutionary Russia, though, even the church was changing, and soon enough it was the church itself that was beginning to pave the way for the Russian people to go in a new direction. As historian Heather Coleman describes, the church did not stand up for the CSAR. The official church said goodbye when that's ore, abdicated, and the next morning got to got to work reforming itself and got to work getting on with the things

that it wanted to do. And the main thing that the church wanted to do was to call a great Church Council to rethink the relationship between the Church and the state. And the relationships within the church between the the bishops and the parish clergy and the laity, and to re organize the church for the modern world and

so um. Almost immediately after the collapse of the of the Empire, the the the the Church Council was called and it met in Moscow, UM starting in August of nineteen seventeen, and was was going right through during the revolution of October and into early nineteen eighteen. During the revolutionary days in the spring of nineteen seventeen, local diocese are choosing their representatives and there is a great revolution that is going on in the church, and people are

transforming the church from below into a democratic organization. There are there are dioceses that that ejected their bishops and voted for bishops, which was not canonical, unheard of. But we can see how how people are living out the implications of that democratic revolution of February nineteen seventeen in their church life. And these are people of all social groups who are doing this because the church incorporates all

social groups. And so I really think that but the way that the Church um is having its own revolution that is part of this broader revolution of nineteen seventeen, the last pillar supporting imperial rule had been pulled away. Once the leaders of the Church had been introducing Nicholas and Alexandra to mystical guides like Gregory Resputant, and as they work to take on the modern world, the Church in Russia remade itself into an institution that would endure

long after the doomed Romanovs. We're finally gone. They had always done things their own way. For a while, after Nicola stepped down, Alexander continued to say that the uprisings around them were nothing serious. They were just hooligans screaming for bread. Sometime soon the excitement would pass away and Russia would quiet down again. But oh how wrong she was. Riots grew worse. A new government was created in October

of nineteen seventeen. That provisional government was overthrown by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. All of Russia was consumed by civil war. Nicholas and Alexandra became what they had never been before, citizens under a new civilian authority, and then they became its prisoners. Let's turn to Helen Rappaport one final time to tell us about the last days of the Romanovs. Nicholas later realized, I think in captivity in the last months of his life, that he had been

tricked into abdicating, that it had not achieved anything. The Bolsheviks had taken over Russia pulled out of the war, which any in March nine, and things were even worse from Russia for Russia. He hadn't saved Russia by abdicating. Alexandra just retreated more and more into religiosity. Every day the girls, one or other girl would hurt when that they had their brief exercise periods morning and afternoon. One of the girls always had to stay with mother indoors.

She rarely went outside because she was so sickly or indisposed, and read the Gospels to her or read the Bible or some pious work. The last few letters she wrote were very laden with religious references and in a very profound sense I think of reconciliation, acceptance fatalism. Both she and Nicholas were deeply, deeply fatalistic. And you get the same thing with Nicholas's last few letters and then his

sense of utter despair. The last journal entry he wrote was about I think it was the eleventh of July I, about six days before they were murdered, where he just you could sense him giving up. He said, we've had absolutely known news from outside. The sense of despair because they didn't know what was going on in Russia, how their relatives were, what was happening in the rest of the world. That the sense of abandonment I think was pretty profound in Nicholas, and I think he was obviously

deeply religiously resigned to his fate. As well as for resputants family, he left very little for them. Despite the stories about how much wealth he must have hoarded by playing parasite on the aristocracy, Grigory didn't have a pile of gold to give to Maria. All the money and gifts that had been showered on him were in turn given away. He had a little property and some money in the bank, but given the state of the Russian economy at the time, it didn't add up too much

at all. At first, after Gregory had been killed, Maria and her sister were held by the Russian police. When they were finally released, they were able to go back to Siberia in the spring of nineteen seventeen, but leaving the capital didn't mean they were returning to the home they had left. All of Russia was changing. In April of that year, a group of soldiers came through and they ransacked the resputant home. Whatever was valuable, they stuffed

it into sacks and carried it off. Even the clocks were taken. Any pictures or images of Grigory were smashed, torn and stomped into the dirt in front of Maria's eyes. She begged them to stop, but they wouldn't listen. Eventually, there was nothing left for Maria in her father's house. She went looking for something new, something more stable than her father Grigory's legacy, something that would provide her a future. So she found her way into a marriage with a

local man, but it wasn't a happy one. The following spring, the weather it was bad. River travel wasn't safe, and the only way to travel from place to place was over tracks through Siberia that also offered from the storms. Despite the dark clouds, though, the Romanov family was on the move. They were being taken from Tobolsk to Eketteringburg, where their fate awaited them. They're in a locked room.

A team of gunmen would execute them one and all, it was the death that none of them would escape, whatever the stories would later say. To reach that doom, though, Nicholas, Alexandra and their children had to travel rough roads, a journey that brought them to the Siberian town of Pokrovsko. As we've said before, it was the crossroads, the place along the way for changing horses. As they came to halt, the Romanov family looked up and realized that they were

facing the largest house in town. It was the house that had been purchased for his family by Grigory Resputant. It took a long time for their captors to make the change, so Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughters stood by uneasily, looking at the house of their murdered friend. One of the Romanov daughters even made a sketch while they waited. It took so long, in fact, that the Rasputant family saw them outside Grigory's wife, Prescovia and his daughter Maria.

One was the woman whose husband had left her, the other the daughter left destitute by his death. They stood together in the house, but did not dare to approach the doomed travelers. There was no sense in trying to push past the line of armed guards. Maria Rasputin simply said that they gathered at the window. The two families faced each other across the distance, the Resputants on one side,

the Romanovs on the other. While Nicholas and Alexandra looked on, the daughters of their families raised their hands and blue kisses through the air. It was a brief moment of tenderness. Although I have to believe kisses blown at gunpoint might struggle to find their target. It was the final brief moments of connection that Nicholas and Alexandra would have with their friend, the only respite to be found on the Romanov's final journey to the death of their dynasty. Hey folks,

Aaron here. Today's episode was the final chapter in our story. If you've enjoyed the results of our team's hard work, your reviews and ratings would be incredibly welcome over on Apple Podcasts. Your kind words go a long way toward helping newcomers tap that subscribe button, and all of that helps our show. It's been an honor to be your guide over the past few weeks, and I look forward to our next tour through the dark corners of history. But we're not quite done with this season just yet.

Starting on January five, will be releasing all four of our incredible history and interviews in full. These are powerful conversations with leading scholars in the world of Resputant and the Romanovs, and the insight and detail they bring to the topic are perfect for those who want more. Just stay subscribed to the show in your app and those interview episodes will arrive automatically every week. In fact, if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll give

you a taste of what's to come. The theory goes was at British agents killed Resputant as a way to prevent some sort of peace treaty between Russia and Germany.

Now there's no truth in any of this, and there's no reality that this ever happened, um, But there have been been books written about it, there have been documentaries made about it, and there's even been this theory put forward that if you look at the the bullet hole in resputants head, that the markings around the whole proved that it was a bullet fired by a British gun, by an endfield pistol, and that this means that whoever

fired the fatal shot was a British agent. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio, with research by Sam Alberty, writing by Carl Nellis, and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians, source materials and links to our other shows over at grimm and mild dot com, slash Unobscured, and as always, thanks for listening all