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Episode 10.59: Stupidity or Treason

Before we get going this week. I just want to take some notice of the fact that it is July 4th, it is Independence Day, and happy Independence Day to all of you. I hope you have a chance to go back and listen to, I think it’s Episode 2.6A, where I will read to you the Declaration of Independence in all its initially florid and inspiring glory, and then tedious recitation of complaint against the king. And when you’re done with that, and you’re in this mode of thinking about the American War of Independence and the American Revolution and revolutions in general, and the participation of a certain young French marquis in all of that, you can feel free to go pre-order Hero of Two Worlds as a way to celebrate the 4th of July. You know, hot dogs, cookouts, baseball, and pre-ordering Hero of Two Worlds, all of the traditional 4th of July events.

Okay, so we ended last week, right on the verge of a new session of the Duma, which was set to reconvene on November the First, 1916. Specifically, we ended with meetings of the Kadet delegates, and their strategy sessions with other leaders of the progressive bloc, which remember now includes everybody from socialists on the left to right-wing conservatives concerned about the quality of leadership being exhibited by Nicholas and Alexandra specifically. Out of these meetings, Pavel Milyukov agreed to take the Kadets into battle in the very first session of the Duma, because, remember, his two great concerns are first, winning the war, which means changing the government, but two, heading off a revolution, which is now right on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The February Revolution is not going to come out of nowhere. It was being talked about in the inner circles of power, among liberal professionals out in the bread lines, out on the front lines. Whether people were excited that a revolution was coming or terrified that a revolution was coming, there was a belief sort of omnipresent that a revolution was coming.

Milyukov and the progressive bloc in the Duma decided to adopt a confrontational and antagonistic policy towards the government in order to prevent the crisis from sliding in the direction of radical left wing leaders. That if the Kadets elected to abdicate that leadership role by being conciliatory towards the government and willing to compromise, that they themselves would be swept aside, along with the tsar.

Now very specifically, one of the people Milyukov was worried about in October, 1916 was a hyper energetic lawyer who entered the Duma in 1914 as a member of the Trudovik Party and who quickly became their most popular, most eloquent, and most ambitious leader, Alexander Kerensky. Now Kerensky has been involved in events, going all the way back to the revolution of 1905, and there’s about three specific places where I came close to introducing him, but just didn’t pull the trigger, but now the time is truly at hand to introduce Alexander Kerensky, so let’s introduce Alexander Kerensky.

Alexander Kerensky was born in Simbirsk in 1881. His father was a teacher at a local school who went on to become a regional superintendent. His mother was the granddaughter of a former serf who became a successful merchant, so the Kerenskys were sort of in that milieu of the respectable middle classes or even upper middle classes. Now, if you go back to the episode where I first introduced Lenin way back when, you will find me referencing another respectable middle-class family in Simbirsk in the 1880s, the Ulyanovs, it was a small world in Simbirsk, and the Ulyanovs and Kerenskys were friendly with each other, and Kerensky’s father was a teacher of young Vladimir Ilyich. But young Kerensky was only six years old in 1887. When the eldest son of the Ulyanovs was arrested for trying to assassinate the tsar. And they got blacklisted from society. The Kerenskys themselves moved out of town two years later. Kerensky went on to school and then at age 18, he entered St. Petersburg University where he wound up studying law. He graduated in 1904, and took his newly-minted legal degree right into the thick of the Revolution of 1905. Now Kerensky was a radical right from the start. And he was operating around the Narodist wing of radicalism, putting him directly adjacent to the SRs. He was briefly jailed in 1904 for his suspicious connections to revolutionaries and terrorists, but he was released, and while he himself was not a bomb throwing terrorist, he made a name for himself during and after the Revolution of 1905 as a defense counsel for many defendants arrested for political crimes, his energetic defense of all of these defendants earned him a lot of trust and good will and support from the revolutionary groups, even as Kerensky himself stayed on the legal side of the lines, Kerensky emerged into the wider public consciousness after the Lena Goldfields massacre in 1912, and when I said a few episodes back that the massacres became a scandal that led to public outrage and sympathy strikes, well, Kerensky was one of the most prominent voices documenting and publicizing what happened in the press? Kerensky is one of the major reasons the Lena Goldfields massacre became a public outrage rather than something that was just covered up. When elections for the Duma came along in 1914, Kerensky was elected as a member of the Trudovik party, that non revolutionary, moderate peasant socialist group to the left of the Kadets.

During the first two years of the war, he was among the most stridently radical voices pushing for the replacement of the government, and always gesturing in the direction of the streets and saying if the Duma doesn’t take from action to hold the tsar and his ministers responsible for the horrors, befalling Russia, the people will know what to do. With Kerensky and his allies on the radical left all but ready to take the political crisis out into the street, Milyukov and the more moderate Kadets decided they had to go into the new session of the Duma with an uncompromising and confrontational posture or they would lose control of the situation entirely.

So the new session of the Duma opened on November 1st, 1916. It involved some extremely perfunctory speeches, but also some incredibly inflammatory speeches. Kerensky gave a barn burner attacking the ruling class for dragging essentially all of Europe into a giant, bloody mess of a war, and demanding the incompetent malevolent and possibly treasonous leaders of Russia be replaced immediately. He said there, is no salvation for our country until with a unanimous and concerted effort, we forced the removal of those who ruin, humiliate, and insult us. Speaking of the pack of sycophantic ministers leading Russia to ruin, he said, “you must annihilate the authority of those who do not acknowledge their duty. They must go. They are the betrayers of the country’s interests.”

Now this was a fiery speech from a firebrand, so though it was powerful and entertaining, it wasn’t exactly unexpected. A radical like Kerensky making radical demands isn’t going to move the needle much. But then Milyukov took the floor to make his own speech. By this point, Milyukov was widely respected among his fellow delegates and out in society and in the press as a sane and moderate voice, he was a liberal democrat, sure, but one who kept both feet firmly planted in truth, reason, and facts.

When Milyukov started echoing and amplifying the uncompromising and accusatory themes developed by Kerensky, people sat up and took notice. He started by saying that even though it’s been known practically from the beginning of the war the government was failing to meet the challenges of the war — for example, the scandal of shortages of shells and ammunition — the Duma delegates tried to be reasonable, to join the national war effort to help and to push the government towards accountable success. But the time for trying to work with the government was now over. “I must say this candidly,” Milyukov said. “There is a difference now in the situation. We have lost faith in the ability of this government to achieve victory, because, as far as this government is concerned, neither the attempts at correction, nor the attempts at improvment, which have been made here, have proved successful.” He then went on to give full voice to the idea that the cause of all this was treason in high places. He said he had seen documents produced by the German government in which rules are laid down for the disorganization of the enemy’s country, showing how to stir up trouble and disorder. “Gentlemen, if our own government wanted deliberately to set itself a task, or if the Germans wanted to employ their own means for the same purpose, the means of influencing and of bribing, they could not do better than to act as the Russian government has acted. Despite acknowledging it might all be ineptitude, Milyukov went on to outline several suspicious connections between Russian ministers and government agents, most of which he said he learned about from sources while he was traveling in France and Switzerland. Milyukov said he had seen damning evidence that unfortunately he was not at liberty to divulge. Milyukov then played on a comment made by one of those out of his depth ministers elevated into the government because of loyalty to Alexandra and subsequently among those being accused of treasonously pro German contact. This minister took self-aware umbrage at this and said, I may perhaps be a fool, but I am not a traitor. Milyukov use this as a launching point for his grand finale: “Does it matter, gentlemen, as a practical question, whether we are in the present case, dealing with stupidity or treason? When the Duma keeps everlastingly insisting that the rear must be organized for a successful struggle, and the government persists in claiming that organizing the country means organizing a revolution and deliberately prefers chaos and disorganization, what is it? Stupidity or treason?” With cries bursting forth from the audience, “Stupidity!” “Treason!” or some of them shouted, “Both!” There was a great deal of laughter and applause.

Milyukov went on to say, basically, I’m just here asking the question, but he said, given all the suspiciously treasonous conduct that he just outlined in the speech, we cannot therefore find much fault with the people if they arrive at conclusions, such as I have read here. So the stupidity or treason line was carefully calibrated to pose as a question something that left the audience able to draw their own heavily implied conclusion, especially as Milyukov spent most of the speech claiming he had just seen secret evidence that it was very much treason. But hey, maybe it was just stupidity. It was after all impossible to tell the difference.

As soon as the incendiary opening session of the Duma was over, the government tried to censor Milyukov’s speech and prevent its distribution. But it was printed and copied and either passed around hand to hand or printed by sympathetic members of the progressive bloc, who use their resources and immunities to spread the speech as widely as possible. Milyukov later said his speech acquired a reputation as being the signal of revolution, but that that was not his intention. And this is pretty much true, Milyukov is trying to prevent a revolution by forcing out the government and replacing them with people like Milyukov, but still, he’s just kind of flicking matches in the direction of a pile of oily rags. And before we move on here, we do need to establish that most Milyukov’s accusations, maybe even all of them, were just completely made up. He targeted specifically Prime Minister Stürmer, the guy who has a German name, which is very suspicious, but all of Milyukov’s hints that he had seen secret evidence of treason, he was just making that up. He was fibbing. But Milyukov believed that the ends of forcing the government out, and putting responsible ministers in their place, far outweighed any ethical qualms about the means he utilized. I mean, all he was doing was falsely accusing a couple ministers of high treason, and even if they weren’t guilty of treason, they were certainly guilty of stupidity, and again, it’s impossible to tell the difference.

Now out at army headquarters, all of this was being reported to Tsar Nicholas. The Duma is in an uproar, the whole nation seems to be turning against you and your ministry, and everyone is being accused of treason. Now, by now, Nicholas is not in the best place mentally. He is not sleeping very well. He is depressed. He is restless and anxious pretty much all the time. He was being given medications by his doctors with hash as the active ingredient, and he didn’t want a hostile confrontation with the Duma that might lead to a revolution. So on November 8th, he dismissed Prime Minister Stürmer. In his place, Nicholas appointed Alexander Trepov, who did have the confidence of the Duma and the progressive bloc. Now, unlike Minister of the Interior Protopopov, who he introduced last week, who had been appointed because he too enjoyed the support of the Duma and the progressive bloc, but who immediately turned into a toady and lick spittle, Trepov actually wanted to work with the Duma. He believed he could lead something of a government of national unity to see Russia through this crisis, with war on one side and revolution on the other.

Now, speaking of Protopopov, Nicholas was also now under enormous pressure to get rid of the minister of the interior he had just appointed back in September. The Duma now had absolutely zero confidence in Protopopov. They considered himself a traitor and an enemy, if not to Russia, then at least the progressive bloc. On November 11th, the tsar gave in again, and agreed to fire Protopopov. But by now, Alexandra had Protopopov wrapped around her finger. She did not want to see him replaced with somebody far more hostile to her interests. Protopopov had also entered into some kind of working alliance with Rasputin. He willingly paid Rasputin a monthly stipend in exchange for Rasputin’s ongoing support with the empress. So when Alexandra and Rasputin heard Nicolas was going to fire Protopopov, the emperess got on a train and personally implored her husband not to do it. Nicholas, clearly giving up the ghost on having anything like a will of his own, said, okay, and reversed course again. Protopopov would remain minister of the interior, much to the outrage of the Duma.

Now, keeping Protopopov in place is one of those little things that really helps turn the February Revolution from possibility to inevitabity. Protopopov elected to cement his standing with the imperial couple by feeding them contrived news and various reports that made the situation out there in Russia sound far more positive and hopeful than it really was. He constantly read them letters that he said were coming in spontaneously from people out in the countryside, but which he himself had commissioned, saying, we love you, we support you, which is what Nicholas and Alexandra want to hear. And so at this incredibly critical moment for them, for their regime, and for Russian history generally, the imperial couple sunk deeper into the erroneous belief that all the hostility to them was contained within a narrowly circumscribed clique of malevolent agitators in St. Petersburg, rather than the population as a whole.

When the Duma reconvened from a short recess on November 9th, the mood in the room was as hostile as ever. They had successfully taken out Stürmer, but believed they needed to keep going. They were incensed Protopopov was still on the job. And the role of Rasputin in all of this was now openly discussed, with his presence by the emperor’s side no longer considered a matter of private scandal, but national security. So at this November 19th session, an ultra nationalist right-wing delegate named Vladimir Purishkevich rose to give a speech. Purishkevich was no left wing radical. He was in fact a hardcore monarchist, a raging anti-Semite, and one of the original organizers of the Black Hundreds back in 1905. After outlining how terrible the government was, he especially excoriated Protopopov. But he also kind of absolved them from blame. He said, the real trouble comes from those occult powers, and those influences which shove this or that individual into position, helping into high positions those who are incapable of holding them. Everyone knew who he was referring to, and shortly thereafter, he was contacted by people who shared his opinion and who believed something drastic now needed to be done to save the Russian Empire. They had to kill Rasputin.

By the end of 1916, unless you were in the inner circle of hyper loyalists around the empress, you hated Rasputin and believed he was exercising a malign influence and needed to go. It was well-known he was the reason Protopopov kept his job, and in fact, one of the first things Alexander Trepov did after becoming prime minister was offer Rasputin 200,000 rubles in cash, as well as an ongoing monthly allowance, in exchange for going back to Siberia and never coming back. Rasputin, clevely said he would consider this deal, then immediately went to the empress to tell her all about it. Alexandra took this as further proof of Rasputin’s divine incorruptibility, as well as confirming her belief that people like Trepov were corrupt, immoral, and possibly agents of the devil. She was increasingly of the opinion that her husband ought to order at least a few of these people hanged.

With Rasputin’s position at the empress’s side apparently unassailable, more than a few people came to the conclusion that the only way to get rid of Rasputin was to get rid of Rasputin. As Purishkevich himself said, “While Rasputin is alive, we cannot win.”

So in late November and early December 1916, a group of conspirators came together under the influential auspices of a woman named Zenaide Yusupov Alston, who was the richest woman in Russia. She was a former friend of Alexandra’s, who fell out with the empress specifically because of Rasputin’s. The principal organizer of this conspiracy was her son, Prince Felix Yusupov, who happened to be the husband of the tsar’s young 21 year old niece Irina. He recruited accomplices, including Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, one of those are his favorite nephews. Possibly though, not conclusively, a Duma delegate named Vasily Maklakov, a doctor named Stanislaus Lazover, a young army lieutenant named Sergei Sukhotin, and now, the aforementioned Vladimir Purishkevich.

In December 1916, rumors swirled of plots to kill Rasputin. But the ace ain the hole that this conspiracy had was that Rasputin believed that Prince Felix was his friend and supporter. Now it’s not clear to me whether Felix went into his relationship with Rasputin intentionally trying to befriend him so he could later betray him, or if he genuinely started as a friend and had a change of heart. Lots of Rasputin’s worst enemies started as his friends. The point though is that Rasputin believed Prince Felix was his friend. There were not many people who could have lured Rasputin out of his house in December 1916, but Prince Felix Yusupov was one of them.

So on the night of December 16th, 1916, Yusupov leaned on Rasputin to come to his residential palace, which had just undergone some grand renovations to finally meet his young 21 year old wife Irina, who was supposedly desperate to meet Rasputin. When Rasputin entered the palace, the salon had been carefully staged to make it look like a big party was just winding down. There were a few other people there, and nothing raised Rasputin’s suspicions too much. Yusupov told Rasputin to make himself comfortable, enjoy some food and some wine. Irina was just upstairs and will be down any minute. The truth, of course, was that Irina wasn’t even home, nor was she even in St. Petersburg, she was a thousand miles away on a holiday in the Crimea. The only people upstairs were a small gang of assassins.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t actually call them a small gang of assassins. They weren’t there to rush down and kill Rasputin or anything like that, they were just there to help dispose of the body. The plan was to poison Rasputin and wait until he dropped dead. Yusupov pushed a reluctant Rasputin to eat cakes and pastries and wash it down with madeira wine, all of which was allegedly laced with cyanide. But after hanging out together for more than two hours an increasingly agitated Yusupov realized the poison wasn’t working, or maybe Rasputin had magical powers or something. So he excused himself and said he was going upstairs to check on his wife, and then he conferred with his accomplices. grand Duke Dimitri said, well, maybe we should just let him go and try again another day. But the others said, no, we’ve got him here now and we have to kill him. Now. So Yusupov got a revolver. He went downstairs and told Rasputin he wanted to show him a really cool cross that was made out of, like, crystals and fancy gems. Come on, it’s down in the basement. So they went down there together, and as Rasputin was looking at this cross, which was really cool and made out of crystals and fancy gems, Yusupov pulled out the revolver and shot Rasputin in the side. Rasputin, let out a yelp, and dropped on the floor, like a sack of bloody potatoes.

So just to be clear here, the story of Rasputin’s death is pieced together from later recollections. It’s not a hundred percent clear what actually happened down in the basement or what happened in the palace. But it sounds like Grand Duke Dimitri. Dr. Lazover, and Lieutenant Sukhotin took Rasputin’s coat and boots and drove to Rasputin’s house where one of them wore it to the front door to make it seem like Rasputin had come home for the night. Then, they bundled up the coat and boots, got back in the car, and tried to burn them in a fire. But the clothes wouldn’t fit in the stove they were trying to use, and so instead they decided to go back to Yusupov’s palace and dispose of them there. Meanwhile back at the palace, Yusupov and Purishkevich were enjoying cigars. Yusupov decided to go down into the basement to check on Rasputin’s body, where he found to his horror Rasputin’s eyes open, with a kind of bloody foam coming out of his mouth, and he was apparently laying there and saying “Felix, Felix.” This is of course all very freaky, it’s like something out of Tales from the Crypt, and Yusupov rushes back upstairs to tell Purishkevich, ah, zombie Rasputin is coming. He’s going to kill us. So Purishkevich grabbed the revolver and they rushed back downstairs, but by now, Rasputin is gone. So they frantically search for him and find Rasputin stumbling through the courtyard trying to get out of the property, Purishkevich then aimed his revolver and fired twice, missing both times, and Rasputin almost made it to the gate before Purishkevich’s third shot hit him and he fell. With Rasputin now prone on the ground, Purishkevich walked over and just to be sure, put another bullet in Rasputin’s brain. Then, just to be really, really sure, Yusupov ran inside the house, grabbed this heavy iron fire poker, came back outside and beat Rasputin’s body repeatedly with it.

But, the final answer to the question of who killed Rasputin was: Vladimir Purishkevich, with the revolver, in the courtyard.

With the help of household staff, who were sworn to obey orders and sworn to secrecy, they wrap the body with chains and weight, and then drove it to a bridge over a nearby canal to dispose of the body. Now, their whole big idea was to make it seem like Rasputin just got up and disappeared one day, but they failed miserably to accomplish this basic goal. While they were dumping the body, they got blood all over the railing of the bridge, and then when they tossed the overcoat and boots in after him, one of the boots wound up just landing on the underside of the bridge, where it would be discovered two days later by the police. Besides, back at Yusupov’s palace, police officers came around to investigate the gun shots, which they had heard because their headquarters were just down the road, and though the story was initially, sorry, officer’s it’s just a party that got out of hand, Purishkevich up and blurted out to them, “we’ve just killed Rasputin.”

Now, openly admitting to the cops that the mysterious gunshots they just heard were just us killing a guy seems like a crazy thing to do — and it was — but remember, Purishkevich was a well-known and very popular right wing leader. He had worked closely with the police and the Black Hundreds over the years cracking the skulls of jews and socialists and liberals who were trying to destroy the empire. And in revealing to these police officers that they just offed Rasputin, he told them it was just about taking out another one of the tsar’s many enemies, and that they shouldn’t breathe a word of this to anyone.

So obviously, that didn’t happen, and the next day nobody was like, hey, where did Rasputin go? He just up and disappeared. Everyone was saying, oh, wow, Rasputin got murdered last night. And it was pretty well known who did it. Protopopov delivered the news to the empress, and was able to more or less report exactly what happened, where it was done when, and by whom. Two days later, the police fished the battered, bloodied, and frozen corpse of Rasputin out of the canal. And just for the record, so far as I can tell, the autopsy report concluded that there was no poison in Rasputin’s body when he died. That the reason the cyanide laced cakes and wine didn’t do their job wasn’t because Rasputin had super human and supernatural strength, but because whoever was supposed to have planted the poison didn’t actually do it.

News of Rasputin’s murder induced Nicholas to return home to be with his wife, who was almost alone in St. Petersburg in refusing to believe her friend was actually dead. She held out hope he had simply gone into hiding, but the truth was ultimately unavoidable. The result of Rasputin’s murder, however, was not. To liberate the imperial couple from control of their demonic puppet master so they would see reason and change their policies. Instead it drove them deeper into a resentful isolation, where they believed more than ever they were surrounded by enemies out to get them. They believe more than ever they were fighting to the death in a battle against the forces of evil hellbent on destroying them and the empire, and they couldn’t give in. They believed more than ever that the same people asking for better ministers so innocently, had poison and revolvers behind their backs.

Nicholas and Alexandra now also had to confront the fact that these enemies included members of their own extended family. When it came out that the tsar’s nephew, Grand Duke Dimitri, was involved, the tsar was furious, and exiled his nephew to the front lines to face the Ottomans. He became even more furious when something like twenty members of his extended family came to beg Nicholas to reconsider and be lenient with the boy. The tsar is sitting there punishing somebody who was just murdered his wife’s best friend and the whole family was siding with the murderer. It was insane. This rage was further fueled as Protopopov started showing Nicholas and Alexandra letters intercepted by the police where prominent public figures were sending congratulatory letters to Purishkevich and Yusupov for the good work they just rendered the empire. Everywhere the Imperial couple looked in high society, they saw people celebrating the murder of their friend, and congratulating the people who did it.

So this was the state of things as Nicholas and Alexandra headed into the holidays and towards the new year. They broke off contact even with their own family, didn’t bother with the traditional round of parties and gift giving during the holiday season. Protopopov continued feeding the couple letters he was encouraging be written from people outside the capitol saying, we love you, everybody loves you, actually. It’s just a few troublemakers in the capitol who don’t like you. Those evil disloyal, murderous enemies? They’re a tiny minority. Everybody else is with you. This was the picture that was painted for them. This is the picture they wanted to believe, but it was far from the truth, a truth they would not realize until the very end.

As it turns out the winter of 1916-1917 would be one of the worst in recent memory, and all of those cold, hungry people out in the streets were not writing letters of support to Nicholas and Alexandra. And they were in fact, starting to think that maybe a good way to stay warm would be to set fire to the Romanov dynasty.