Last night I watched an interesting video on YouTube about the murder of Rasputin. As is well known, his murder was carried out by a small group of officers. Rasputin was a mystic (also a womaniser and a drunk) in pre-revolutionary Russia, who became the darling of the upper classes of Saint Petersburg, including the royal family,.
The video goes into the murder plot in detail. First they tried to poison him with cakes laced with cyanide. He ate the cakes, complaining that they were too sweet but was unaffected. Then they shot him and dumped him in the Neva River. There were three bullet holes in the body from three different calibre weapons. The video makes a strong case that the fatal head shot was delivered, not by the Russian officers, but by a British agent, Oswald Rayner. The reason for Britain’s involvement was that Rasputin’s influence with the Tsar could well have resulted in Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War with disastrous consequences for the allies.
For me, the take away impression was the utter incompetence of the Russian officers. Clearly they had been sold sugar instead of cyanide and were incapable of killing an unarmed man at close range with a loaded pistol. These men were army officers, for heaven’s sake!
Then the penny dropped. From many years ago I remembered a conversation with an American friend who had spent time at a Chilean Antarctic base. When he was there, the radio antennas were blown down in a storm and the base lost all communication with the outside world. He told me that instead of getting stuck in and urgently restoring communications as Australians or Americans would have done, the Chileans sat around and talked about it for a week.
Like Rasputin’s assassins, these men were army officers. They were also aristocrats.
We can generalise the idea of aristocrat to include anyone who regards a particular knowledge or skill as beneath them, such as Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolyn, “When I see a spade I call it a spade. I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade”.
The skill of killing another human being was beneath those Russian army officers. That was the function of other ranks.
Hi John,
Wow, what a departure topic for you. Very intriguing. Clearly the program you watched had an effect on you. As I read your post, I read officers, and in a conditioned way took that in as soldiers. But of course in those days an officer was generally from the upper class families, and not a soldier as we think of it today. So your fallen pence is right I think. Officers were the privileged playboys of the day,
Allan, It was 1916. Why weren’t they at the front?
True, but the transition may not have been at the same time in all countries? Certainly, within 2 years certain Russian classes who considered themselves privileged were quite capable of effectively murdering the Romanovs.
At Cosgrove High School in Glenorchy I had a science teacher, a German immigrant called Eddie Saur, a best friend in later years, bearded, haggard, rustic, moved to a retreat that afforded a bomb shelter in the back yard at Rhyndaston, whom I describe as Rasputin-like.