Welcomed, unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky. She came in with the others. It was a typical day for Resputant. Petitioners were lined up outside his door. They filed in with requests for prayer, for favors, for help with something in their lives that was out of reach. Maybe they wanted healing for themselves or for a wounded son who had come back from the front, and she came in with them. In fact, there's no sign that
Resputant thought she was any different from the rest. That is until she stepped up to Grigory. Something in her hand caught the light, and he asked her to show it to him. As she approached. Out from under her coat, she drew a revolver with a ferocious light in her eyes. She raised it between them and wavered. After a moment, she broke down. The point of a gun fell to
the floor, and she offered it to Resputant. She had come to kill him, she said, and the secret police who were guarding Resputin hadn't see that she was carrying a weapon to her meeting with him. She could have taken his life then and there, but instead she put the gun in his hands, and as she did, she told him it was when she saw his eyes that she realized her mistake. She simply couldn't go through with it. What clearer sign could there be that Resputin was God's
chosen man. He had already survived Guseva's knife attack, the plot formed against him by his craven bureaucrats had failed, and he had foiled and survived other attempts to This became just one of many. But even as attempt after attempt came to nothing, resputants paranoia grew. Yes, the attacks were foiled, but they kept on coming, and they made one thing clear to Grigory. Russians, top to bottom, rich to poor, noble to peasant, were blaming him for Russia's problems.
There were enemies abroad, but for Grigory Resputin there were just as many enemies at home. He had taken every opportunity to lift himself into a position of influence, and now he found out just how much that made him a target. Sure, I called his reaction paranoia, but then is it paranoia if the threats are real? Gregory couldn't help but see the knife in the dark cutting through
him and through Mother Russia as well. In fact, at some point in his final days he penned a letter to his daughter Maria that revealed just how dark his fears had become. And when that letter was finally found and read by Maria, it's clear that at least in this Gregory was not blind to what the future held. Here's Douglas Smith to read Resputant's words, My dear, A disaster is threatening us. A great misfortune is drawing near. The face of our lady has darkened, and the spirit
is disturbed. In the calm of the night, there will be cries and blood. In the great darkness of these griefs, I can now distinguish nothing. My hour will soon strike. I am not afraid, but I know it will be bitter. I shall suffer, and it will be pardoned to men. I shall inherit the kingdom, but you will be saved. The road of your sufferings is known to God. Men without number will perish, many martyrs will die, Brothers will be slain by their brothers. The earth will tremble, Famine
and pestilence will reign. Signs will appear to men. Pray for your salvation and through the grace of the Savior, and have her who intercedes with him, you will be consoled Gregory. Before comfort, however, would come catastrophe. It was almost as if Grigory Recipute knew that it wasn't a matter of whether his enemies would finally end his life, but when they would become the icy hand of death and drag him to his final end. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mackey. It was the autumn of nineteen six.
Alexandra had noticed the change. Gone was the wide eyed, zealous holy man. Gone was the triumph and joy in his strong voice and his excitement at the ascent into the Tsar's palace. Gone even was the man who had bragged about overthrowing his enemies and elevated his allies just the year before. Gregory resputant, was weary, cautious, and withdrawn. Alexandra wrote to the Czar. She said Grigory was wary of going out. He was a fraid for his life.
When the Empress sent her friends and advisers to speak with Grigory and comfort him, he only greeted them with screaming fits. But Alexandra's faith was still strong. She believed that God was working to keep her advisors safe, and it was sunny weather, she wrote. Surely he should take the advice he had given to so many others over the years, go out into nature, walk the wild places of earth, meet God there and feel restored. But that Grigory,
he was nowhere to be found. With each passing day, Rasputin of Petrograd left his old self further in the past. Gone were the years when he would travel from monastery to monastery, meeting with monks and religious teachers. He closed in the walls around himself. He even stopped going to church, and he drank. One friend would even remember that. It was only after spending enough time with a bottle of Madeira wine that Rasputant would begin to open up. His
fear would come pouring forth. One night between the two years of rage and despair, he sobbed out the truth he had lost the man he had always wanted to be. He called himself a devil, a demon. I am sinful, he said, where before I was holy, as they say in Vino veritas. In those moments of honesty, Grigory knew what kind of man he really was. But it wasn't only over rest sputant that storm clouds were gathering a darkness, an electric tension in the air spread over Russia throughout
nineteen six. Faith in the Tsar was dying, and for good reason. It started near the warfront, where battle lines were drawn, but it spread eastward into the Empire from there. Here's Dr Joshua Sandborn to explain. If you're in the front line or near the front line, you're experiencing a lot of personal insecurity in terms of violence. You're starting to see a breakdown of social order in many of these places, led in many cases by by deserting or
off duty soldiers. But even far away from the front, one of the key things that happens over the course of the war is a worsening standard of living driven by rapid inflation. This is a problem that ours government can't get around. Since the war began, the price of everyday items like milk, potatoes, bread, butter, and fish had been going up by four or five times their previous price.
In some cases, corrupt officials, bad coordination, and decrepit railroads meant that the bodies of the wounded were being carried back to distant hospitals, and the food for both the army and the nation were often trapped on their way from point A to point B. You're starting to see breadlines, the discussion of the need for rationing, and you're starting to see the supply situation deteriorate in terms of trains being able to to ship what they need to on time.
All of these things are are beginning to deteriorate, and social relations are also becoming more and more poisonous. Ethno politics has done its role there. That's wide sort of influx of refugees and the difficulties of dealing with them has helped poison the social relationships. The President of the Doom wrote in some cases that rotting carcasses changed course
halfway through their journey. Instead of going to the markets where they could be butchered and sold to feed hungry families, they were diverted to soap factories, or, if they were too far gone, directly to the rubbish heap. Meat that was supposed to go to the front for the army, it was piled high in mounds. There was nowhere to store it, and it wasn't allowed to be sold. Soon enough, the mounds began to stink, a poisonous fume and an insult to every Russian in the cities, where food was
growing more scarce by the day. Who Rasputin thinks should be the minister of you know, of whatever, you know, minister of interior. Let's say that doesn't have a huge bearing on people's lives. You know, they're seeing things just just collapsing. And it's not the result of a particular minister or anything. It's the whole structure. It's it's autocracy itself that has led them into this problem. One bitter irony is that the starvation of the Russian people had
weighed heavy on Rasputant's mind for years. Even as he was bungling the appointment of government ministers, he was begging the Czar to move his Russian soldiers like the pieces on a chessboard. It seems that in this case, at least Grigory saw where the problems were. With so many people lining up at his door every day to spill their problems on his desk, how could he miss it
When it came to food. The cities were in crisis by now, though few people in the Imperial government wanted to hear what resputant had to say about anything moving troops, moving food, moving money. After all, what did this holy man drunk every night and whispering in the Czarina's ear know about any of that. But it wasn't just the looming specter of starvation that had the Czar's subjects stirring with anger. It was also the work they were forced
to do. Strikes in the munitions factories had begun at the end of nineteen fifteen. And then there's what happened further south, in the Central Asian steps that would later become Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. There was open bloodshed because in the spring of nineteen SI team the Czar's military planners needed more workers at the front line, a lot more. They wanted a million men building bridges and cutting roads
for the army. The projects were a massive amount of work, so they decided to force it on the subjugated peoples of the Empire. But if you think drafting a million men into forced labor at the drop of a hat sounds like a recipe for rebellion, then you've been paying attention, especially once you know that all the wealthiest Russian settlers and the imperial governors of those provinces all bribed themselves
free of the draft. Soon enough, the imperial administrators found the telegraph lines cut, the railways destroyed, and the Russian garrisons under siege. Suddenly, rather than pulling men out of the Central Asian planes to serve the Russian army, the Czar was sending soldiers in, and it was a blood bath. Kurgis fighters destroyed Russian towns and killed Russian settlers. The Russian army rolled through the countryside, burning buildings and butchering
people who had been the Czar's subjects. Just before, the Russian general in command wrote that in the wake of his army he saw hundreds of unarmed and innocent Kyrgyz slaughtered. That had become another war of ethnic destruction under the Emperor's hands. By the end of nineteen sixteen, the Empire was at war anywhere and everywhere, and it was falling to pieces. They had joined the court of Ivan the Terrible, and something about that era had followed the yusupa family
down through the years. In those early days, they had been warlord's, amassing wealth and hereditary power. They worked their way into the royal courts, they converted to Orthodoxy, and
generation after generation they served the czar well. So well, in fact, that in the opening decades of the twentieth century, as Nicholas and Alexandra took power and the currents of history channeled them to their meeting of fate, the heir of the Yusupa family was set to receive the largest fortune in all of Russia, which is to say, perhaps the largest fortune in the entire world. In fact, the stories about the family of Felix Yusupov were so extravagant
and so numerous that they were almost unbelievable. Some said that the Yusupov hunting lodge, built in the fifteen hundreds, was still connected by an underground tunnel to the Kremlin in the heart of Moscow. They said that if you wandered the underground vaults, you would not see only hordes of medieval wealth, tapestries and ornate furniture glowing in the low light, but that you might even stumble onto skeletons still dangling from chains along the walls. And that was
the story of just one Yusupov house. But they had three palaces in Moscow alone. They had thirty seven estates scattered across the Romanov Empire. Their lands included iron mines, coal fields, oil deposits, and a string of factories that made their family indispensable players in the world of the czars. And that was the world that Felix was born into. As Douglas Smith describes, Prince Felix use Soup was a member of one of the great aristocratic families of Russia. Uh,
centuries of extreme wealth and power and prestige. Um, one of the truly one of the richest, most powerful families in Russia. He was doated on, he was spoiled, um, he was indulged. Uh. He was you know, sort of the worst, I would say, examples of the of debauched aristocracy in the early part of the twenty century. Nothing was expected of him. It was a life of glamor of Champagne. He was a notorious boy about society if you will, at the time, who really had no purpose
in life. Felix used to pav shared the preoccupations of the Russian elite. Along with his older brother, he gained a deep interest in spiritualism and the occult. For a while, they held seances in their home. They hoped to speak to the dead, to hear voices from a world beyond their own. Questions of afterlife seemed to terrify Felix, and he spent much of his time worrying about his weaknesses,
the things he might lose. He and his brother even promised each other, like many spiritualist friends, that the first to die would travel back from the afterlife to appear to the other. But it wasn't just his life that Felix was worried about losing. It was also the way his position allowed him to dominate others. In fact, it seems he cared quite a lot about holding onto his prestige and power. Even as a child, Felix loved to
flaunt his position to entertain himself. He would even scoop together his mother's jewels and deck himself in her finery. Then he would order the family's vast household staff to gather around him and treat him like a monarch. If nothing else, he felt born to rule. Details like that create an eerie echo of Czar Nicholas, and there are others too. Felix's father was also a military man who loved being a soldier. He tried to be a kind
patriarch and there but lacked tact and subtlety. Felix was never his favorite son, but eventually Felix was his only son. His parents had had doated on his older brother, who was killed in a duel, and then all of their attention and devotion, especially from his mother, Princess Zaida, were showered upon Felix. In nineteen fourteen, the chords binding Felix to the house of the Romanovs were drawn even tighter when his mother arranged his marriage. His new bride she
was the niece of the Czar. But now the blood and treasure of the Czar's world were pouring away, not just as the war sapped the empire strength and exposed its flaws, but at home too. The Russian people had been demanding a different world. Step by halting step, Nicholas had given ground to them. Strikes, revolutions, parliaments, and manifestos all were signs that the world Felix loved, with himself
on top, was changing. In his own lifetime and in the war years, things were spinning even more out of the aristocracy's control, and the voices of the czar subjects were growing louder. The household staff of the Empire were talking back and making their feelings known, as Joshua Sanborn says, above all this feeling that the rich are doing okay in this war, and the rest of us are bearing this burden, and look at how badly they're managing it.
This is becoming more and more dominant among all sectors of society. Felix used upon thought, he knew who was to blame for all of this. He thought it was clear who was behind the concessions that Nicholas had made to the people's demands, and who it was that weakened
the Empire's power year over year. The peasant from Siberia, Like many of the avid readers and rumor mongers of Russian high society, Felix and his family had closely followed the stories published about Grigory and his connection to the Romanovs. As we heard in the last episode, Felix and his mother weren't shy about trading their theories on how Rasputin
manipulated the royal family. Every new salacious story about the Empress and her adviser would have hammered those fears and suspicions deeper, but it wasn't all just second hand, because as a wanderer of the high society salons, Felix Yusupov had his own encounters with Grigory Rasputin, and when he did, the gulf between the two men could not have been any wider. In fact, in the things he wrote about Grigory,
you can almost hear the sneer behind Felix's words. When they first met, Felix said he saw Grigory had a low, common face. The peasants features were, course, he said, and his eyes were small, shifty, and sunken under heavy brows. Rasputant's hair was untidy, his beard was shaggy, and his clothes were common and plain. The thing that irritated Felix the most, though, was Grigory Rasputants self assurance. Simply put
the man looked like a peasant. He was a peasant, and so Felix thought that he should act like one, he should bow and scrape to the rightful rulers of the world. But Grigory did not. In fact, Felix said that just being looked at by Resputant was like being pierced with needles, and Felix never forgot that, and he never forgave that either, But for a while Felix kept those feelings hidden. His aristocratic friends fell in with Rasputin.
Some of the women in his circle even became the radical followers of the holy Man when they met with him. Felix even tagged along from time to time, But when the rumors began, they found a willing ear with Felix Yusupov. For a while, the pampered prince kept his distance. He swallowed whole the stories he heard about Alexandra, and as the days turned dark, his fear, suspicion, and resentment only grew.
When Felix's father was dismissed from his post as Governor General of Moscow, Felix knew who was to blame, and soon enough he found his thoughts turning again and again to the peasant and to his belief that this coarse and shifty must be a German spy undermining the Empire. He started meeting with other men who felt the same, people who had spoken out against the role that Rasputant played in the royal household. But he was disappointed with everyone he found to be all bark and no bite.
With each passing day that attempts to kill Rasputin came to nothing. Felix Yusupov, air to Russia's largest fortune, became more and more convinced he needed to do the job himself, until he decides that he is going to do save Russia by killing Raspute and putting together a plot to do him in. And this becomes, if you will, his e day fixed, This becomes his raised on Tetra, and he devotes all of his energies and times to figuring
out how he's going to do away with Rispute. And if there's one thing that a wealthy family of aristocrats had learned over the centuries while serving the Oars, it was how to slide up to someone in a position of power and win their friendship, even the real purpose was to stab them in the back. Their first meeting was a shock. Felix had hated Resputant at their earliest encounter, but he had described him then as muscular, thin and
twitching with nervous energy under his peasants attire. Now, in the fall of nineteen sixteen, Felix found himself face to face with a slumping man, puffy with drink, who was wrapped in luxury, and when Grigory started talking, Felix says he found it all incoherent. There was a discourse on brotherly love. To Felix, it seemed that even Grigory didn't understand what he was saying. When a phone call came from the Imperial Palace, Grigory rushed off, but not before
he said he wanted to meet together once more. It was just what Felix wanted to hear, so they started to meet regularly. It was the first step in Felix's plan. He would become Grigory's favorite disciple. He would learn how Gregory thought, what he liked, and what his intentions really were for the Empire. If there were any diabolical con games that Gregory was running in the shadows, Felix wanted to ferret them out. Those were the threads he would use to weave a net around rest Sputin and drag
him in. For months, he bent all of his wiles and all of his wealth towards the plan. Rest Sputant's daughter Maria, remembered that Felix started to visit their house almost every single day. They would send everyone out and close themselves up together to talk and Felix would beg for prayers of healing and words of advice. He even
ingratiated himself to the rest Mutants girls. Maria said that he became a close friend, and that made everything that came next hurt even more, because it was all just laying the groundwork for that coming December. Even as Felix became convinced that Gregory himself didn't have some sort of master plan for the throne, he held even more firmly
to his conviction that Gregory needed to be killed. In Felix's eyes, rest Sputant was a greedy and uncultured peasant, but he had risen too high for his position to be an accident. He must be a puppet for some secret masterminds who were exploiting him from a distance to bring about the downfall of Russia. So in a way, become full circle. This was at the height of Resputants power. It was the time when the Empress paid the most
attention to what Gregory advised about running the empire. He finally lived up to the rumors about meddling in imperial affairs. But even then, when a sharp eyed Felix wormed his way into Rasputant's confidence to uncover the truth about his schemes. He didn't find some evil genius. He simply uncovered a selfish man who had improvised his way to the very pinnacle of world power by seizing each new opportunity as it came and abandoning the best parts of himself along
the way. Now that Grigory had it all, the only thing he could do with power was wielded according to his paranoia. To protect his fragile position on weighty matters. He was mostly ignored by everyone other than Nicholas and Alexandra, the rulers whose empire was slipping from their grasp. The fact that there was no grand plan, no grand conspiracy, was too much for Felix to believe. For so long Russian aristocrats had imagined that the problem with Nicholas was Alexandra,
and then that the problem with Alexandra was Resputin. It wasn't hard for someone to simply bump the issue one step back. The problem with Resputin must be some undiscovered cabal, the real enemies of Russia, whoever they may be. Felix still believed that the best way to stop them was to take the tool out of their hand. So he
put together a team. A wounded army officer who had been reassigned to Petrograd, a monarchist politician Vladimir Pershkevitch who had a history of organizing Eliador's terrorist fighters, decorated military doctor likewise sent home carrying wounds from the war that they blamed on Resputin Oh and one other man, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, the Czar's cousin and one of Felix's oldest friends, also helped that as a grand Duke, Dmitri
would be immune from prosecution, a member of the imperial family, a wealthy noble, too army officers, and a member of the Duma. To Yusupov, this team felt like the perfect representatives of every part of society that matters. Together, they would kill the upstart peasant, save the Czar, and bring order back to the empire. Felix did all of this under the watchful eye of one other person, his mother. Even with a team like that, they decided to commit
their killing in secret. An assault on Gregory's apartment would be too noisy. There was too much secret surveillance, There too many observers who could report events to the Czarina, and no one wanted Alexandra setting her sights on them. Better to pick a secluded spot late into the night, the kind of place where Gregory may have wandered in one of his revelries and lost his police tail. Felix had just the spot in mind too. In fact, an
old seller in his palace was being renovated. It had to stairway, one that went up into the residence and one that opened directly onto the courtyard. They could arrive there and slip underground before anyone had time to notice them. In preparation, Felix set about making the room comfortable. His workmen put down carpets and hung curtains over the gray stone. Porcelain vases and oak chairs were arranged between other curios, ivory bowls, A cabinet of inlaid ebony and tiny bronze columns.
A little Italian cross carved of rock, crystal and silver was put on display. The red stone mantel piece was decorated with gold and ivory. It looked like a room used every day to entertain important guests. Its fireplace was ready for the welcoming glow of flames. It was all a picture of elegance. The stage was set. Now they just needed Grigory to arrive for his last supper. First, there was the lure. Felix knew what Grigory liked, so he offered up his wife. That is to say, he
dangled and invitation toward Resputin. The two had never spent time together. Would Grigory like to come by some evening and meet the Mrs Gregory was never going to pass up on that. Then there was the hook. With the help of two servants, Felix arranged the furniture and set out tea, biscuits, and cakes, and then brought out some of his own wine from the cellars. Once he was satisfied with the food and drink, Felix went to church. He would later say that as he knelt in prayer,
he felt a sense of divine lightness. He was happy he was about to murder a man in cold blood. The mild evening faded into darkness. A fire was set in the hearth, and around eleven the team tropped down the stairs into the cellar, where they gathered around Felix. It felt cozy and quiet, It felt ready. They still had another hour to wait, so they brewed tea and sampled cakes. The conversation was muted. They set the room
in deliberate disarray. It should look as if Felix's wife and a group of her friends had retreated just seconds before. When they had finished, Felix opened the ebony cabinet and pulled out a small box. He lifted the lid to reveal a small pile of crystals and handed it to the doctor. Putting on gloves, the doctor crushed them into a fine powder with a knife. He then carried it to the table. He split every pink cake and dusted the inside with a layer of powder. The group watched
him work. When he was finished, he turned to them and told them that each cake now held enough cyanide to kill several men. He carefully stripped off his gloves and threw them in the fire as they burned. The men retreated into the house to escape the smoke, and Felix left to fetch Rasputin to break the nervous tension. As they waited, the men turned on a gramophone. Perishkevich checked his revolver at a quarter to one. In clouds of cigar smoke, Perishkevich and the czar's cousin Dmitri, walked
back down the stairs. They opened a second bottle of cyanide, dissolved into a solution, and poured it into wine glasses. Over at Resputant's apartment, Felix knocked on the door and Grigory let him inside. As he fetched his hat and coat from behind a curtain, the Resputants made recognized the visitor as Felix, the family friend. It was only as the two men headed out into the night that a prick of conscience hit Felix. He said, a feeling of
guilt swept over him, and then shame. He had been cultivating this man's trust for months, and now he would use it to take his life. But it didn't stop him. They climbed into the car together. The doctor, now dressed in the uniform of a chauffeur, pulled out into the street. Felix checked behind them to be sure that they weren't followed, but Rasputin had dismissed his Okrana secret service detail the
night before he was with friends. They made their way back to the use of off palace and the room that waited for them. Now this is the right point to say. There are only a few people who saw what happened next. Two of them are Felix Yusupov and his accomplice Vladimir Perishkevitch. And as Douglas Smith says, we believe FeelA his account at our own peril, You sup As memoirs are a network of lies, the tissue of have truths and and an attempt to bade himself in glory,
if you will, for a truly horrible deed. Like the only moment I think in his memoirs when he's ever really being honest is when you Supa frights that that killing Rasputin was quote unquote a cowardly crime, for that is what it was. The police reports taken from other eyewitnesses are slim. Most of what we know comes from the men who did the deed. It makes every moment, every little detail, as suspect as it can possibly be.
But this is the way they told the story. The car pulled up into the courtyard and Felix usher Grigory down the stairs and welcomed him to the seller. They could hear the sound of Yankee Doodle playing from the gramophone upstairs, Felix explained that his wife was entertaining friends, but she would join them soon. In the meantime, they should have a cup of tea, and they made themselves comfortable. The doctor, who had walked around to another entrance, joined
the men around the gramophone. Quietly, they moved to the top of the spiral stairway that led to the basement. They listened intently and waited. Felix offered Grigory wine and tea, but he refused both. They fell into conversation along their usual lines, but the more time stretched on, the more nervous Felix felt. Did Grigory suspect him? Had he done something to give himself away? But after a few more minutes, Grigory finally relented and asked for some tea. It was
what Felix had been waiting for. Once Rasputin was drinking, Felix offered him biscuits and then cake. Soon Rasputin was downing the cakes quickly, one after another. He expected that a single bite would kill him, but Rasputin went on talking calmly. Horror began to dawn on Felix. He turned to the wine. In his nervousness, he poured for Grigory into clean glasses, not the crystal that perish Bitch and
Dmitri had laced with their cyanide solution. It wasn't until he opened a second bottle that Yusupov was able to drop Resputant's glass on the ground and replace it in Resputant's hand with a poisoned cup. This one was a Madeira wine. He was Resputant's favorite. He sipped it slowly, enjoying every taste. When he was done, he got up and started walking around the room. The man at the top of the stairs had heard the corks pop. Minutes
passed and turned two hours. I can only imagine the looks they gave each other as they waited to be called down to help Felix dispose of a body. But their worry could only be matched by Felix, who continued to talk with Grigory, telling him that his wife's friends must be leaving soon and he would go upstairs to check. Leaving Rasputin in the cellar. Felix huddled with the others upstairs around the gramophone. He hissed out an account of what had happened. Rasputin had eaten the cakes he drank
the wine, and yet somehow he was still alive. Their plan had held, but they were determined that Grigory would not leave the house alive. Felix grabbed a revolver and descended the stairs again. It was two thirty in the morning. Back in the cellar, Felix found Gregory with his head drooping. Another glass of wine got him back to his feet, and for a moment the two men talked about going out on the town. Maybe they should go see the dancing girls respute and said. Felix shook his head and
walked over to the Italian crucifix. It's beautiful, he said. Gregory walked over to him and agreed. They were standing only a foot apart, and that's when Felix raised the gun, pointed it at Gregory's chest and fired. Resputant cried out and then fell down. The sound of the gun shot brought the rest of the men flooding into the room. They gathered around him while he twitched on the carpet until he lay still. The doctor leaned over and declared him dead. The shot had killed him. They rolled him
off the carpet and on to bare stone. The army officer took Resputant's hat and coat and put them on. He would leave the use of off palace looking like Gregory to anyone watching. The doctor and Dmitri went with him. Now it was just two of the conspirators left in the palace, and Perishkevitch made his way upstairs. Just as Felix was about to follow, he noticed something. Resputants left eyelid began to quiver. Felix froze, and then slowly walked
back and leaned over Grigory's face. That's when Resputant's eyes flew open. He moaned something between a growl and a scream, and then rose up from the stone floor, clawing and grasping at the air. His hands caught Felix. The two men struggled until Felix freed himself and ran for the stairs, calling for Poorshkevitch, but he could hear that Resputin was
moving behind him. When they got back to the cellar, guns drawn, it was just in time to see that Resputant had reached the door that led to the courtyard. Roaring like an animal, he disappeared up the stairs. The killers gave chase when they burst out the door, they saw powdery snow falling all around them and ahead. Rasputant, stumbling into a run, headed away into the darkness. He was nearly at the palace gates and the street beyond.
Poorashkevitch raised his revolver and fired two shots. When he could see that both missed, he took off running. The wounded man was too slow. As he reached him, Perishkevitch fired again. This time the bullet hit Rasputan in the back and dropped him to the ground. In a moment, Parishkevitch was on him. He flipped Grigory over, pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger. Poorishkevitch found Felix in the bathroom. He was in hysterics, hunched over
the sink, spit hanging from his lips. It took a few minutes for him to recover. By then, the Yusupa family servants had dragged Gregory's body back down the stairs into the cellar. Perashkevitch would later say that when Felix went down to see the body again, he flew into a frenzy and attacked Rasputant's head and face with a rubber club. It took members of the household staff to restrain Felix and drag him away. Felix was escorted to
his bed, where he collapsed. The rest was up to Perishkevitch. He ordered the servants to wrap Grigory's body in a blue cloth and bound it with a cord while he waited for the other conspirators to finish burning resputants clothes and then circle back around. When they finally pulled up to the door, still exulting from Grigory's death, they saw the look on Perishkevitch's face and realized that things had gone terribly wrong while they were away, so they moved quickly.
The four of them dragged rasputants corpse into the car to the waiting chains that were meant to weigh the body down. But as they piled in and were pulling away from the Yusupov Palace, Paraskevich looked back and noticed that Rasputants, galoshes and his heavy coat were still in the car. The other men explained they had followed the plan.
They took Resputants closed to the hospital train at Warsaw station, where it would look like he was to ride out of town, and there the train stove was already blazing, lit by Parishkevitch's wife. The only problem had been that the clothes didn't fit. Rather than destroying the evidence, they had just carried it all back out again, and now they were carrying them alongside Rasputant's body. The car crawled
through the streets. They were afraid of driving too fast and attracting attention, but eventually they cleared the city to the northwest and made it to their destination, the Bullshoy Petrovsky Bridge. Beneath them, a branch of the Nevka River flowed nearly invisible through a large hole in the ice. In a rush, the four men jumped out of the car. They dragged rasputants body to the guardrail, lifted him over
the edge, and let him go. The body of the Siberian holy Man fell into the dark water and vanished. Only then did the killers realize they had forgotten to attach the weights and chains to his bundled body. They scrambled to grab them from the car. Hurriedly, they threw the chains down into the dark hole after him. They hoped that somehow it would catch him and drag him down.
One chain they wrapped around his coat. Like everything else about their plan, it was poorly thought through and carelessly carried out. In the mad scramble, one of them spotted a boot still sitting in the car's back seat. In a rush to flee the scene, they flung it over the side, Confident that they had saved the Czar and pulled the parasite from the body of Holy Russia. The killers left back into the car, slammed the doors, and sped away into the darkness. Grigory Resputant was gone. That's
it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. 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 Grigory 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 Resputant and Felix use of POV. 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. Unobscured was aided by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thaine 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. Three Pas