To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) by Andrew Cook

the lesser arms of the river north of the city.
According to this morning’s newspapers, the tragedy to which this discovery points appears to have been enacted on Saturday morning at the Yusupov Palace on the Moika canal. But none of the names of participants is mentioned.
     
    Meaning murder. Prince Yusupov had been a well-known figure in London society before he married. There were cuttings… This was obviously big news, too big to spike, but it was just as obviously chapter two of a story. Where on earth was chapter one? Something was missing. By the time Steed had rummaged for anything from Petrograd correspondent Wilton that might have come in earlier and slipped behind the desk, it was the middle of the night in Russia. In London, the Times must also be put to bed, so late on Tuesday under the headlines RASPUTIN DEAD – BODY RECOVERED IN THE NEVA – SUSPICION OF MURDER , Steed composed the following lead-in, to appear in italics:
Telegrams received from Petrograd allege that the notorious monk Rasputin, whose body has just been recovered from the Neva, was murdered. The messages so far to hand from our Petrograd Correspondent make no direct reference to this and other material points. His narrative must therefore be regarded as still incomplete. 15
     
    Wilton’s story appeared below this paragraph on Wednesday. His wire of Saturday had never arrived. He received a baffled enquiry from London that Tuesday, wrote a full report of the Rasputin affair and sent it back with the only explanation for the lost message that he could think of.
I send you my notes of the Rasputin affair written on the day after he was killed. [Sunday 31 December.] A full message was cabled, but probably never reached you… any delay in messages sent from here is due entirely to the censorship which invariably gives preference to Agency telegrams.
     
    His notes show that he had been ahead of all the news agencies in that he saw the Police Report on Sunday, just as Stopford did. Wilton was well connected in Petrograd, and in a position to see what had been going on since he worked out of an office in Gorokhovaya Street.
    For a Head of the British Intelligence Mission, Hoare was comparatively ill-informed. He knew Purishkevich, and had been told well in advance by the man himself that there was to be an attempt to ‘liquidate the affair of Rasputin’. He had, however, taken no notice at all, thinking Purishkevich’s tone ‘so casual that I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying rather than an expression of a definitely thought out plan’. Now, presumably cursing his own lack of judgement, he kept quiet about Purishkevich’s warning in his despatches to London. 16 Stopford did not confide in him. Nor, for reasons we shall discover later, did certain members of his own team.
    Stopford wrote on Tuesday morning to the Marchioness of Ripon, a society hostess of his own age. 17 She was a remarkable woman; Prince Yusupov had been a great friend of hers, despite the difference in their ages, in London before the war, when she had been responsible for bringing Diaghilev and Nijinskis to London. Stopford, knowing that she could be relied upon to pass information to people in government who mattered, sent regular letters to her or her daughter Lady Juliet Duff, a Russophile and fluent Russian speaker who also knew Yusupov well. 18
I have got such awful rheumatism in both arms and both hands I can hardly hold a pen…
All the Imperial Family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest, for even the Emperor has not the right to arrest his family. It has never been done since Peter the Great had his son Alexei Petrovich arrested, and it was for threatening to arrest the Tsarevich (Alexander I) that the Emperor Paul was killed. 19
     
    In England people told each other that those Russians were quite mad. Things had changed in the last century or so, and it seemed unlikely that any present-day Romanovs