How Did Rasputin Actually Die? Poisoned Cakes, Three Bullets and an Icy River

Grigori Rasputin was shot dead in the early hours of 30 December 1916 (17 December in the old Russian calendar) at Prince Felix Yusupov's palace in Petrograd. He died of three gunshot wounds, one of them fired into his forehead at close range. The famous version in which he shrugs off cyanide, survives bullets and finally drowns in a frozen river comes mostly from the memoirs of his own killer, and the surgeon who examined the body found no evidence of poison and no water in his lungs. To understand why such a myth grew around one death, you have to understand how a Siberian peasant ended up at the heart of the last Russian court.

A peasant from Siberia

Rasputin was born in 1869 into a peasant family in Pokrovskoye, a village on the Tura River in western Siberia. After a pilgrimage to a monastery in 1897 he went through a religious conversion. He is often called a monk, but he never held any official position in the Russian Orthodox Church; he was closer to a strannik, a wandering pilgrim, and later gained a reputation as a starets, a holy elder.

Around 1903–1905 he reached Saint Petersburg, where he impressed several religious and society figures. In November 1905 he met Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.

The boy who could bleed to death

The key to his influence was a sick child. Alexei, born in 1904, was the only son and heir of Nicholas and Alexandra, and he was born with haemophilia, a condition that stops blood from clotting properly. Any fall could become life-threatening. From around 1906 his desperate parents turned to Rasputin as a faith healer.

The most famous episode came in 1912 at Spała, in Poland, where the boy suffered severe internal bleeding after a jolting carriage ride and seemed close to death. Alexandra had a telegram sent to Rasputin in Siberia. He replied that God had heard her prayers and that "the Little One will not die", and soon afterwards the bleeding stopped. Historians still argue about what happened. One explanation suggested by some writers is that Rasputin kept doctors from giving aspirin, a painkiller whose anti-clotting effect was not understood until the 1950s. Whatever the reason, the empress became convinced he was her son's lifeline.

Holy man or charlatan?

At court and in the press Rasputin divided opinion completely. Some Russians saw a mystic and prophet; others saw a religious fraud with a scandalous private life. His influence peaked in 1915, when Nicholas left the capital to command the army in the First World War. With the tsar away, Alexandra and Rasputin were blamed for appointing and dismissing ministers, and as defeats mounted on the Eastern Front both became deeply unpopular.

In November 1916 the right-wing Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich said in a speech that the tsar's ministers had become puppets whose strings were held by Rasputin and the empress. Within weeks he would be one of the killers. Rasputin had already survived one attack: in 1914 a woman named Khioniya Guseva stabbed him in the stomach outside his home in Pokrovskoye.

The night at the Moika Palace

A group of nobles, led by Purishkevich, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Prince Felix Yusupov, decided that Rasputin's hold over the empress was endangering the empire. In December 1916 they lured him to Yusupov's Moika Palace.

Yusupov's own memoir tells a story that sounds like a horror film. He says he served Rasputin cakes and Madeira wine laced with cyanide in the basement, and that Rasputin ate and drank without any effect. Yusupov then fetched a revolver and shot him in the chest. Later, when he went back to check the body, Rasputin supposedly leapt up, attacked him and chased him into the courtyard, where Purishkevich shot him again and he fell into the snow. The conspirators wrapped the body in cloth, drove to the Petrovsky Bridge and dropped it into the Little Nevka river.

What the autopsy actually found

The body was pulled from under the ice on 1 January, roughly 200 metres downstream. The city's senior autopsy surgeon, Dmitry Kosorotov, reported three gunshot wounds, one of them at close range to the forehead, along with other injuries, many of which he thought had been inflicted after death. He found no evidence of poisoning. According to the historians Douglas Smith and Joseph Fuhrmann, he also found no water in the lungs, so the claim that Rasputin was thrown into the river alive and drowned is wrong.

There are other cracks in the legend. Rasputin's daughter wrote that her father avoided sweet food and would not have eaten the cakes. A modern analysis published on the centenary of the murder concluded that the real events were less dramatic than Yusupov's account. Later lurid claims about mutilation were also contradicted by Kosorotov's examination. As one historian put it, what really happened in the Yusupov house that night may never be known; what we can say is that bullets, not poison or water, killed him.

Why the killer's version won

Yusupov had every reason to make Rasputin seem superhuman. If the victim was a demonic creature who could not be poisoned, the murder looked less like a crime by aristocrats and more like a desperate act to save Russia. The story was also simply irresistible, and it travelled through films, novels and songs for a century.

What happened next

Rasputin was buried in early January 1917 at a small church at Tsarskoye Selo, with only the imperial family and a few close friends present. Within weeks the monarchy fell. After Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, soldiers acting on Alexander Kerensky's orders dug up the body and burned it, so the grave could not become a shrine for supporters of the old regime.

The boy he was called to protect did not survive the revolution. Alexei was killed with his parents and sisters in Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. Many historians argue that Rasputin's sinister reputation helped discredit the tsarist government and hastened the fall of the Romanovs. Today he lives on in pop culture, from Boney M.'s 1978 disco hit "Rasputin" to the animated film Anastasia.

Learn with Rasputin: English phrases about power and mystery

Phrase	Meaning	Example
the power behind the throne	someone with hidden influence over a ruler	Critics called Rasputin the power behind the throne.
to pull the strings	to secretly control events	Who was really pulling the strings at court?
larger than life	more dramatic than ordinary people	Rasputin was a larger-than-life figure.
to take something at face value	to accept it without questioning	Don't take the killer's memoir at face value.
shrouded in mystery	not clearly known	His death remains shrouded in mystery.

Try this: Write a short English paragraph comparing Yusupov's story with the autopsy, using "take something at face value" and "shrouded in mystery".