On Friday the sixteenth of December in the year 1916, freezing darkness enveloped the streets of Petrograd, the capital of a country at war. A howling wind drove the snow flurries along the icy Moika River. As the clock had recently struck midnight, a lone passerby might have expected the black automobile speeding down the embankment to turn into a pumpkin. But it did not. Instead, the open-top vehicle stopped by a magnificent palace overlooking the river, and two passengers alighted. Although one of them was a prince, the other was no Cinderella. A tall, gaunt man with a ragged beard and glowing eyes, he was none other than Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, a man who had become a myth in his own lifetime. He was known to all of Petrograd and beyond as a holy man and a political influencer, a hypnotist and a charlatan, a healer and a rapist. His younger debonair companion was his host for the evening, Prince Felix Yusupov. Snow crunched underfoot as, wrapping themselves in heavy fur coats against the biting cold, they crossed the short distance to the side entrance of the palace. The doors opened and closed, swallowing the two dark silhouettes. Grigory Rasputin would never leave the palace alive, and Felix Yusupov would always claim to be “the man who murdered Rasputin”.
At that hour, the real soon-to-be murderer was in bed. Although the next day was Saturday, his day off, he was planning to get up early to write some letters to friends back home. “Keeping a regular routine disciplines the mind,” he always thought. He closed the book he had been reading — another part of his regular, mind-disciplining routine — and set it down on the rickety chair that served as his bedside table. From it he picked up a cup of tea, still warm despite the room’s chilly temperature. His childhood as the eldest of seven children and his college years at Oxford got him used to sleeping in chilly rooms. “A hot-water bottle would be useful,” he thought, but a nice cup of tea did an equally good job of lulling him to sleep. Like most of his countrymen, he would prefer a drop of milk in his tea, but Russians, he discovered, drank their tea mahogany-colored and steaming hot, sometimes sweetening it with a dollop of jam. Yet, jam and milk, like other provisions, were getting harder and harder to obtain in Petrograd. Thank God, his landlord allowed him as many refills from his pot-bellied samovar (tea-urn) as he wanted. The young man drank his tea, yawned, turned off the lamp, and pulled his feather blanket up to his chin. He was ready for a good night’s sleep which was not to be. He had just fallen asleep when the screech of the doorbell brought him back from the land of Morpheus to the land of mahogany-colored tea, food shortages, and freezing darkness.
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