The murder of Grigori Rasputin
Petrograd, Russia, 1916
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant regarded as a healer and holy man, gained enormous influence over Empress Alexandra because she believed only he could ease the hemophilia of the heir to the throne. In the middle of the First World War, the nobility and part of the Duma blamed him for the discredit of the imperial family and for the choice of ministers. In the early hours of 17 December 1916 by the Russian calendar (30 December in the Gregorian calendar), he was lured to the Yusupov family palace, on the Moika canal in Petrograd, by Prince Felix Yusupov.
According to the accounts of the conspirators themselves, among them Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the deputy Vladimir Purishkevich, Rasputin was taken to a cellar room and given sweets and wine said to have been poisoned with cyanide, while a gramophone played upstairs to simulate a party. As the poison had no effect, the prince shot him, and there were further shots in the courtyard. A policeman who heard the gunfire was put off with a story about a dead dog. The body was taken away by automobile and thrown from a bridge into the Malaya Nevka river; a boot and bloodstains on the parapet guided the search, and the body was found under the ice about two days later.
Sources
In the game
Ice on the Canal
Petrograd, December 1916, Saturday, 11 am. Twenty degrees below zero. At 8 am, the river police pulled the body of a long-bearded man from under the ice, near the Islands Bridge.
The killers were never put on trial: the tsar sent the grand duke to the Persian front and the prince to one of his estates in the countryside, and a few months later the February Revolution overthrew the monarchy. The details are still debated today. The autopsy did not firmly confirm the poisoning, there is disagreement over whether Rasputin was still alive when he hit the water, and some historians maintain that a British secret service agent took part in the crime, a version never proven.
