The Family Romanov by Candace Fleming

Author:Candace Fleming [Fleming, Candace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89864-8
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

By late 1916, Russia was reaching the point of no return. Hundreds of thousands of men continued to die in a war that now seemed pointless to many. Away from the fighting, the country was falling into economic chaos, and the tsar’s government was crumbling.

The Russian people blamed much of it on the empress and her starets. Obscene pamphlets about them began circulating around Petrograd. Cartoons showed Rasputin as a puppet master who had the imperial couple on a string. By fall 1916, anger against Rasputin reached the boiling point. People everywhere believed he was the actual ruler of Russia. Despite censorship laws forbidding criticism of either the tsar or his government, the newspaper the Siberian Trade Gazette boldly called Rasputin a “thief” and a “half-educated peasant.” Across Russia, citizens began calling the government “the Reign of Rasputin.”

In the Duma, too, members publicly raged about the starets. “Dark forces are destroying the Romanov dynasty,” shouted deputy Vladimir Purishkevich during a legislative session in December 1916. Purishkevich, who had never before breathed a word of criticism against the tsar, now pounded furiously on his desk. “If you are truly loyal to Russia, then on your feet. Have the courage to tell the tsar … an obscure [starets] shall govern Russia no longer!”

The hall erupted into wild cheering. Only one man did not leap to his feet—Prince Felix Yusupov, the dashing and rich husband of Nicholas’s favorite niece, Irina. Instead, he paled and trembled as he realized what needed to be done. There was only one sure way to break the empress’s dependence on the starets. Kill him.

But Yusupov couldn’t do it alone. So he begged Purishkevich, as well as the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, to help. He also asked an army physician, Dr. Stanislaw Lazovert, and an army officer named Sergei Sukhotin to join them. “We will be heroes,” he told the men. “The Empress will land in an asylum within two weeks of Rasputin’s death.… And if the Emperor is freed of the influence of Rasputin and his wife, everything [will] change; he [will] be a good … monarch. And … we will have saved the empire.” Inspired by Yusupov’s words, the men threw themselves into murder plans. For the next four weeks they plotted. By December 29, all was ready.

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