THE HIGH SOCIETY PLOT THAT TURNED MESSY 100 YEARS AGO

MURDER PLOT NEARLY FOILED 100 YEARS AGO

For reasons nobody can really remember, one of the last songs ever heard by Russian holy man Grigori Rasputin was a scratchy gramophone recording of Yankee Doodle.

“What’s all this? Is someone giving a party here?” asked the holy man as he stepped into St. Petersburg’s Moika Palace almost exactly 100 years ago.

Russians at the time knew the massive yellow Moika Palace as the home of the Yusupovs, one of the country’s wealthiest families. But within hours the building would gain the title that it holds to this day: “The place where they killed Rasputin.”

The sound of the gramophone was coming from upstairs, where conspirators were doing an extremely bad job of pretending they weren’t there. But Rasputin’s host, an increasingly nervous Prince Felix Yusupov, tried to pass off the jaunty American folk tune as just his “wife entertaining a few friends.”

“Meanwhile, let’s have a cup of tea in the dining room,” Yusupov suggested cheerfully. By the Russian calendar, it was just before midnight on Dec. 29, 1916.

In a country full of Cossacks and bear hunters, the most critical assassination in Russian history had fallen to a slight, hash-smoking rich kid. Given what the rest of the 20th century would hold for Russia, it can be difficult to remember just how odd it was that Rasputin had become one of the country’s most influential figures.

He was an ill-kempt, bad-mannered, religious zealot with a taste for women. And yet, he had inserted himself into the centre of the court of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, using only his magnetic charisma and reputation for faith healing.

By the winter of 1916 Russia was in the midst of losing the First World War. With Rasputin pushing for a negotiated peace with Germany, Yusupov and others vowed that the only way to save their country was to get rid of the bearded womanizer pulling all the strings.

“Disaster will come to anyone who lifts a finger against me,” Rasputin told Yusupov as they sat down for tea on Dec. 29. The quote comes from Yusupov’s autobiography Lost Splendor, from which the account of Rasputin’s murder survives.

The assassination plot had been simple: Clandestinely invite Rasputin over for tea, kill him with poison and then dump the body somewhere inconspicuous.

But almost immediately, a stressed-out Yusupov started to screw up. He forgot to offer poisoned cakes to Rasputin. He then handed Rasputin regular wine instead of the poisoned wine he had prepared. As an awkward silence descended over the room, Yusupov tried to patch up the errors by “accidentally” dropping the non-poisoned glass and becoming unusually enthusiastic that Rasputin should try the cakes instead.

Upstairs, Yusupov’s nervous co-conspirators seemed to be pacing the floor, causing the room to echo with eerie creaking.

The scene couldn’t have been more suspicious, but an oblivious Rasputin easily plowed through enough poisoned fare to kill a horse.

After two hours, the nobleman awkwardly excused himself and came back into the room with a pistol behind his back.

“Look at the crucifix and say a prayer,” Yusupov blurted, pointing to a crystal crucifix. When Rasputin inexplicably complied, Yusupov shot him in the chest.

With films still in their infancy, it was not yet a movie trope that a wounded bad guy is left for dead, only to miraculously spring to life for a final showdown. There have been disputes ever since as to the true resilience of Rasputin that night. But if Yusupov’s account is to be believed, Rasputin’s legend as an almost supernatural figure was to be solidified with just such a resurrection.

As the triumphant Yusupov leaned over the prone Rasputin to make one last check for vital signs, the holy man’s eyes sprang open.

With foam on his lips, a screaming Rasputin wrestled the terrified Yusupov to the ground, and made a beeline for the palace grounds, leaving a trail of blood.

As Rasputin sprinted for freedom, it was one of the conspirators, the right-wing politician Vladimir Purishkevich, who dropped the holy man with four pistol shots echoing through the deserted nighttime streets of St. Petersburg.

Rasputin was wrong about Yusupov facing “disaster” for conspiring against him.

The nobleman may have lost his vast holdings in the Russian Revolution that occurred only months later, but he and his wife would end their days in comfortable exile in Paris — where the Russian expat was apparently always happy to mention his role in one of Europe’s most convoluted assassinations.

“Prince Felix Yusupov, you killed Rasputin?” a French interviewer asked Yusupov in 1967, soon before the nobleman’s own death at age 80.

“Oui,” he said.

DISASTER WILL COME TO ANYONE WHO LIFTS A FINGER AGAINST ME.