The cyanide should have killed him in three minutes. Instead, Grigori Rasputin sat in the basement of Moika Palace on the night of December 17, 1916, eating poisoned cakes, sipping poisoned wine, and carrying on conversation as if nothing were wrong. Prince Felix Yusupov, his host and would-be assassin, watched in mounting horror as the Siberian mystic simply refused to die.
The murder of Rasputin has become one of history's most sensational assassination stories, complete with poison, gunshots, and a body dumped beneath the frozen Neva River. But the familiar narrative—that Rasputin was somehow superhuman, impervious to toxins—obscures a far more interesting question: what actually went wrong with the poison? And hovering at the edges of this bloody scene is another mystery entirely: the possible presence of a British intelligence agent in the murder room.
Why Did the Poison Fail to Kill Rasputin?
The answer is almost certainly chemical, not supernatural. The conspirators used potassium cyanide, a compound that kills by preventing cells from using oxygen. In sufficient doses, death follows within minutes. Yet Rasputin consumed the poisoned pastries and Madeira wine, showed no immediate distress, and continued talking with Yusupov for nearly two hours.
Modern toxicologists have proposed several explanations. Potassium cyanide is highly unstable when exposed to heat; if the cakes were baked after the poison was added, the cyanide may have decomposed into harmless compounds. Another theory suggests that the sugar in the cakes and wine could have interfered with the poison's absorption. Some researchers have even questioned whether the conspirators, despite their later claims, actually added sufficient cyanide at all.
What is documented is that Yusupov expected a quick death and got something else entirely. When the poison failed, the prince excused himself to confer with his co-conspirators upstairs—Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Vladimir Purishkevich (a member of the State Duma), and military officer Sergei Sukhotin. Their backup plan was considerably less subtle.
The Moika Palace Basement: A Crime Scene in a Noble House
The murder site itself tells part of the story. The Moika Palace, sometimes called the Yusupov Palace, was one of the grandest residences in St. Petersburg. The House of Yusupov ranked among Russia's wealthiest noble families, and their palace on the Moika River reflected centuries of accumulated fortune. It was an unlikely setting for assassination—or perhaps the perfect one, since Rasputin would have had no reason to suspect danger from such elevated hosts.
Yusupov had lured Rasputin to the palace under the pretense of introducing him to his wife, Irina, supposedly recovering from illness in an upstairs room. The basement had been specially prepared: a fireplace, a cabinet with mirrors, the poisoned refreshments arranged for the guest of honor. The intimacy of the setting was deliberate. Rasputin's influence over the Empress Alexandra—who believed he could control her hemophiliac son's bleeding episodes—had made him the most hated man in aristocratic Russia. The conspirators needed privacy for their work.
The Moika Palace, now a museum, preserves the basement where the murder took place. Visitors can still see the room where Rasputin ate the cakes that were supposed to kill him—a crime scene frozen in time, complete with wax figures reenacting that December night.
Was a British Intelligence Agent Present at Rasputin's Murder?
The documented conspirators were all Russian nobles and politicians, but a persistent theory places British intelligence officer Oswald Rayner inside the palace that night. Rayner, a member of the Secret Intelligence Service station in Petrograd, had been a friend of Felix Yusupov since their student days at Oxford. The two had remained close, and Rayner was in the city on the night of the murder.
British interest in eliminating Rasputin was straightforward: by late 1916, London feared that the mystic was encouraging Empress Alexandra to push for a separate peace with Germany. Such a peace would have been catastrophic for the Allies, freeing German forces to concentrate on the Western Front. If Rasputin's influence could end the war on the Eastern Front, removing Rasputin became a matter of strategic urgency.
The evidence for Rayner's direct involvement remains circumstantial but intriguing. Some researchers have noted that the fatal gunshot to Rasputin's forehead appears inconsistent with the wounds from Russian service revolvers and more consistent with a British-issue Webley. Rayner reportedly met with Yusupov the day before the murder, and again the day after. Whether he was merely aware of the plot or actively participated is a question that British intelligence files—much of which remain classified or were destroyed—cannot definitively answer.
What is clear is that if Rayner was present, the murder of Rasputin becomes something more than a domestic Russian affair. It transforms into an act of wartime covert operations, a killing in which a foreign power may have pulled the trigger on one of the most influential figures in the Russian court.
The Death That Took Multiple Attempts
After the poison failed, Yusupov returned to the basement with a revolver. He shot Rasputin in the chest, and the mystic collapsed. The conspirators assumed he was dead. They were wrong again.
When Yusupov returned to check the body, Rasputin suddenly lunged at him, grabbing the prince by the throat before staggering up the stairs and out into the courtyard. Purishkevich fired additional shots, finally dropping Rasputin in the snow. The conspirators then wrapped the body in cloth, drove it to the Petrovsky Bridge, and pushed it through a hole in the ice into the Neva River below.
When the body was recovered three days later, an autopsy revealed water in the lungs—suggesting that Rasputin may have still been alive when he hit the freezing water. Whether he actually died from the gunshots, the cold, or drowning has been debated ever since. The autopsy itself was conducted hastily, and the results have been questioned by later researchers.
The Aftermath: A Murder That Changed Nothing
The conspirators believed they were saving Russia. By removing Rasputin's malign influence over the Empress, they hoped to stabilize the monarchy and keep the nation focused on winning the war. History had other plans. Within three months of Rasputin's death, the February Revolution swept Tsar Nicholas II from power. By November, the Bolsheviks had seized control. The Romanov dynasty, which the assassins had hoped to preserve, was annihilated.
The irony is stark: Rasputin had been blamed for weakening the autocracy, yet his removal did nothing to save it. The forces that would destroy imperial Russia were already far beyond the reach of palace intrigues. The murder in the Moika Palace basement was a spectacular act of political violence that solved nothing.
What the murder of Rasputin reveals is not the supernatural resilience of a Siberian mystic, but the chaos of a regime in its death throes. The cakes failed because chemistry is indifferent to political desperation. The British may have been involved because great powers rarely leave the fate of continents to aristocratic amateurs. And the conspirators believed a single death could redirect history—the oldest and most persistent delusion of assassins everywhere.
The echo of that December night is not about a man who was hard to kill. It is about the limits of what killing can accomplish.