RUSSIA: A Vibrant Echo

Prince Felix Yusupov, traveling as Count Sumarokov-Elston, accompanied by his wife, Princess Irene, second cousin of the Tsar and daughter of the Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovitch, and Baroness Wrangel, wife of the famed General whose White Army failed to overthrow the Bolshevik régime in Russia, arrived in the U. S. on board the S. S. Berengaria.

Prince Yusupov declared that he had not come to the U. S. to further “any personal ambitions” or any plans to restore the Monarchy. He had come to sell $1,000,000 of jewels —some of which once belonged to Tsar Peter the Great, Catherine II, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He also intended to retrieve his two Rembrandts, A Portrait of a Man, A Portrait of a Woman, worth about $1,000,000, which he pledged to Joseph E. Widener of Philadelphia for $500,000 at 8%.

Prince Yusupov is about 35, slender, with gray eyes, sandy hair, sharp features. He is reputed ” quiet, even retiring.” He was, before the Soviet Government confiscated all his property, one of the richest men in Russia, and could, it was said, travel from one end of European Russia to another and sleep each night on his own property. He was educated in England at Eton and Oxford, being a contemporary of the present Prince of Wales at Magdalen College.

The Yusupov Palace on the Liteiny Prospekt in Petrograd, is one of the finest of its kind in the former capital. Since the Bolsheviki assumed power it has become little more than a heap of ruins. Before the War, the Palace was crowded with priceless treasures. They were so well guarded that when King Edward VII, the then Prince of Wales, expressed a desire to his brother-in-law, Tsar Alexander III, to see the famed picture gallery in the Yusupov Palace, the Tsar was obliged to issue a command to Prince Nicholas, the present Prince Yusupov’s grandfather, in order to gain admittance.

The name Sumarokov-Elston is a reminder that American blood flows in the Prince’s veins, though there can be little of it. “The mysterious Colonel Elston,” as he is generally termed, because little is known of him. went to Russia in the 17th Century and gained the friendship and confidence of Peter the Great. Later General Felix Nicholaievitch Elston great-grandson of Colonel Elston, married the heiress of the last Count of Sumarokov and received permission from Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) to use the name of Sumarokov-Elston. It was their son who married Princess Yusupov, the sole heiress of the fabulously rich and eccentric Prince Nicholas Yusupov (grandfather).

The Prince is, however, famous or notorious, depending on the viewpoint, for his share in the killing of the so-called monk, Gregory Rasputin, on Dec. 23, 1916. During the past two months there have been three contributions of interest on the subject in Le Matin, Paris journal.

The first is an article by Vladimir Purishkevitch setting forth minutely the details of Rasputin’s death. He deals principally with familiar data, such as the supper in Yusupov’s palace in Petrograd, where wine and sweetmeats poisoned with cyanide of potassium were served to him without fatal results; how Yusupov shot him and still he did not die; how Purishkevitch shot him twice and kicked him in the head, without his dying. The story goes on: ” What’s the matter, my dear boy ? Calm yourself. He’s dead; I finished him. Come into your study.”

Yusupov, still deathly sick, looked at me with a distrait air, but obeyed. I put my arm around him to assist him, He kept repeating: “Felix! Felix! Felix! ”

He went down the passage just as the soldiers brought in the body. When Yusupov saw them he slipped from my arm, rushed into his study, seized the rubber slug shot that Maklahoff had given him, and sprang down the stairs toward the body. He who had poisoned without the poison producing an effect—he who had shot without the ball finding its mark—could not believe that Rasputin was actually a corpse. He rushed at him in a crisis of savage exultation, and struck him over and over again on the temple with the heavy slug shot.

I stood transfixed at the top of the stairs, unable at first to comprehend what was occurring. I was the more perplexed because, to my profound astonishment, Rasputin showed some sign of life. He turned his face upward, and I could see his right eye roll. It seemed to transfix me with a dull but terrible glare. It still haunts me even today.

I soon recovered, however, and ordered the soldiers to drag Yusupov away from Rasputin, for he would get covered with blood and soil everything around. If an investigation followed, the police might reconstruct the tragedy from the bloodstains.

The soldiers obeyed, but they had great trouble in dragging off Yusupov, who continued to strike the dying man on the temple with relentless, savage fury. Finally the two soldiers seized him by the arms, all bloody as he was, and dragged him to a great leather-covered sofa. His face presented a horrible sight. His eyes were wild, his features distorted, and he kept repeating senselessly : “Felix ! Felix! Felix !”

The second is a letter from Prince Yusupov to Le Matin, in which he defends himself against Purishkevitch and seemingly seeks the credit for the barbarous murder, which act he softens by the excuse of patriotism. Referring to the Purishkevitch article, which was current in Russia as a journal in 1918, he said: These pages were of a tendentious character. They contained many inexactitudes and their publication was the cause of the complete rupture of the friendship between Purishkevitch and myself. . . . For the whole of Russia his death was a supreme deliverance. Patriotic fervor had reached such a pitch at this moment that if those who were in the immediate entourage of the Emperor and those who had in their grasp the military and civil power had seen fit to profit by the occasion. Russia would have been saved and would have avoided the terrible fate which subsequently overtook her.

(Signed) PRINCE F. YUSUPOV.

Of even greater interest is a letter which Prince Yusupov’s father-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Micholaievitch, wrote to Le Matin:

Perhaps you [the editor] do not know that one of the assassins is the husband of my adored daughter. I do not doubt that the motives that impelled these men to kill a person whose influence was in certain respects fatal were highly patriotic ; but the act itself, the means employed, and the fear of discovery are beneath all Christian ethics and morality. For that reason I disavow this murder with all the strength of my soul, and I pray that its authors may repent, and may find the peace of a purified conscience.