The Death of Rasputin: What the Autopsy, and MI6, Actually Revealed
Updated: Sep 12
The story everyone knows goes like this: Grigori Rasputin ate enough cyanide to kill five men without so much as a stomach ache, took two bullets and kept moving, got beaten half to death, and finally drowned after being dropped through a hole in the ice. It's a brilliant story. Prince Felix Yusupov, the man who told it, made sure of that. It's also almost entirely his own invention, and the real account, backed by a 1916 autopsy, a forensic review published as recently as 2024, and a British intelligence letter that surfaced decades later, is stranger in a completely different way.
Quick answers
How did Rasputin actually die?
A contact gunshot wound to the forehead, according to the autopsy and a 2024 forensic review. There's no medical evidence he was poisoned or that he drowned.
Was Rasputin really poisoned?
Almost certainly not. The autopsy found no trace of poison, and the doctor tasked with lacing the cakes later said he'd deliberately used something harmless instead.
Did British intelligence kill Rasputin?
It's a genuinely contested theory, not settled fact. Several historians point to a British-issue revolver, a leaked MI6 letter and an agent's close friendship with the lead conspirator as real evidence, though MI6's own archives hold nothing that confirms it.
When exactly did Rasputin die?
The night of 29 into 30 December 1916 on the modern calendar, though Russia was still using the Julian calendar then, which puts the date at 16 into 17 December, the date most older sources use.
A peasant mystic with a direct line to the Empress
Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant turned wandering holy man who talked his way into the confidence of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra after appearing to ease the suffering of their haemophiliac son, Alexei. By the mid-1910s he was one of the most hated men in Russia, blamed for scandal, for steering ministerial appointments, and for an empire sliding toward collapse. His own daughter, Maria, later spent decades defending his memory in print, a story covered in full in our piece on her own remarkable life. This piece is about what happened on the single night that made
The conspirators
By late 1916, a small group of aristocrats had decided Rasputin had to die to save the monarchy from itself. Prince Felix Yusupov, married to the Tsar's own niece, took the lead. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the Tsar's cousin, and Vladimir Purishkevich, a hard-right politician who despised Rasputin's influence, joined him, along with a military officer named Sergei Sukhotin and a Polish-born doctor, Stanislaus de Lazovert, who was given the job of preparing poison.
Prince Felix Yusupov / Vladimir Purishkevich / Dmitri Pavlovich
The doctor who probably didn't poison anyone
Yusupov's own account has Lazovert grinding potassium cyanide crystals, lifting the tops off pink and chocolate cakes, and sprinkling in what he called doses strong enough to kill several men, then repeating the process with the wine. Rasputin, by this telling, ate and drank for over two hours with no ill effect at all beyond mild heartburn.
Years later, not long before his own death, Lazovert changed the story. He said his conscience had got the better of him, and that he'd quietly substituted a harmless powder for the cyanide rather than actually go through with it. It's impossible to fully verify a deathbed confession made decades after the fact, but it lines up neatly with the one piece of hard evidence available: the autopsy found no trace of poison in Rasputin's body at all.
What the 1916 autopsy actually found
Professor Dmitrii Kosorotov carried out the original autopsy after Rasputin's body was pulled from the Malaya Nevka River on 19 December 1916 (old style), two days after the killing. His findings didn't match Yusupov's account on a single major point. There was no poison. There were three gunshot wounds rather than the drawn-out barrage of legend, striking the stomach, the liver and the head. There was no water in the lungs, meaning Rasputin was already dead before his body ever went into the river.
Autopsy images of Rasputin
Kosorotov also noted something that gets lost in most retellings: the three bullets, in his own words, came from different calibre revolvers. Only two of those calibres can be matched to a weapon any conspirator is known to have carried that night, Yusupov's Browning and Purishkevich's Savage pistol. The third, the one that killed him, has never been definitively matched to a gun any of the acknowledged killers actually owned, which is exactly the gap the British theory tries to fill. It's also worth noting the autopsy itself was cut short before completion, reportedly on the Empress's own orders, so some questions it might otherwise have settled were simply never asked.
A 2024 forensic review of the case by pathologist Roger W. Byard, published in the journal Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology, went further. Surviving photographs show a contact gunshot wound to the forehead, meaning the muzzle of the gun was pressed directly against the skin when it was fired. That single detail unravels the whole legend: a contact wound to the head is consistent with an execution at close range, not with someone being shot from a distance while fleeing across a courtyard, which is exactly how Yusupov and Purishkevich both described the fatal shot.
The drowning that never happened
The image of Rasputin clawing at the ice, still alive, has outlived almost every other part of the myth, helped along by a persistent rumour that his hands were found freed from their ropes when the body was recovered. The autopsy contradicts this directly. Lungs with no water in them are the clearest sign a body entered water after death rather than before it. Whatever finished Rasputin off, it happened well before anyone dropped him through the ice on the Petrovsky Bridge.
Purishkevich's own account doesn't add up either
Yusupov wasn't the only conspirator to publish his version. Vladimir Purishkevich released his own book on the murder in 1918, and it broadly backs Yusupov's colourful sequence: the failed poisoning, a first shot from Yusupov, Rasputin somehow reviving and bolting for the courtyard, then Purishkevich himself firing the shots that finally brought him down as he ran. It's a dramatic scene, and it's also flatly inconsistent with a contact wound to the forehead, which cannot happen to a moving target at a distance. Two conspirators told versions of the same story that agree with each other and disagree with the body.
Britain's fingerprints on the case
The theory that British intelligence had a hand in the killing sounds like exactly the kind of embellishment this piece has spent several sections debunking, except that it comes with its own real, if contested, documentary trail. Oswald Rayner, a British Secret Intelligence Service officer stationed in Petrograd, had been close friends with Yusupov since they were both students at Oxford. Several historians, including Michael Smith in his history of MI6 and retired Scotland Yard commander Richard Cullen, argue that the fatal shot to the forehead came not from Yusupov's or Purishkevich's weapons but from Rayner's own service revolver, a British-made .455 Webley, a very specific type of gun that Russian conspirators wouldn't typically have been carrying.
The most striking piece of evidence is a letter, not a rumour. On 7 January 1917, Rayner's colleague Stephen Alley wrote to a fellow British officer, John Scale, reporting that their objective had clearly been achieved and that a few awkward questions were already being asked about wider involvement, using Rasputin's intelligence-service codename, Dark Forces. Alley closed with a line that's since become the centrepiece of the whole theory, noting simply that “Rayner is attending to loose ends.” Whether that phrase describes a cover-up of British involvement or simply an officer tidying up loose diplomatic threads after a Russian affair depends entirely on who's reading it.
The strongest pushback against the theory comes from inside MI6 itself. Professor Keith Jeffery of Queen's University Belfast, given unrestricted access to the organisation's surviving files, said publicly that he found no evidence to support British involvement, stating plainly, “I would have expected to have found some trace of that.” MI6's own surviving records genuinely contain no document that directly confirms any British agent pulled a trigger that night, and that absence of proof cuts both ways for anyone trying to settle the question for good.
A body that didn't get to rest either
Rasputin's remains were buried privately at Tsarskoye Selo on the Empress's orders in January 1917. It didn't last. Once the monarchy fell, the new revolutionary authorities had the grave dug up and the body burned in March 1917, a small, almost administrative erasure that gets left out of most retellings entirely, perhaps because it's far less cinematic than poison and gunfire.
Police autopsy pictures of the murdered Rasputin.
The prophecy, and what actually followed
Rasputin was said to have left a letter for the Tsar warning that if he was killed by nobles rather than common people, the Romanov dynasty itself would fall within the year and his family would be killed by the Russian people. Whether or not Rasputin really wrote those exact words, the timing that followed was uncanny. Nicholas abdicated within three months, in the February Revolution of 1917, and the Bolsheviks seized power soon after. In 1918, the Tsar, his wife and their five children were executed in a cellar in Yekaterinburg, a killing covered in full detail in our account of the Romanovs' final day. Whatever the conspirators believed murdering Rasputin would save, it didn't.
What happened to everyone involved
Felix Yusupov escaped Russia after the revolution and lived out the rest of his life in Paris, where his 1953 memoir kept his own version of events in print and profitable for decades. Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was also exiled, eventually marrying an American heiress. Vladimir Purishkevich stayed in Russia and died of typhus during the civil war in 1920. Of the alleged British side of the story, Oswald Rayner returned to a quiet life in Oxfordshire and reportedly burned his own papers before he died in 1961, telling friends only informally that he'd been present the night Rasputin died.
Why the myth won anyway
None of the forensic detail has done much to slow the legend down. Rasputin's death has been dramatised in 1930s Hollywood films, in Hammer Horror's Rasputin: The Mad Monk, and, most enduringly, in Boney M.'s 1978 disco hit that turned a contested political assassination into a singalong. Deliberate myth-making by a self-interested killer isn't a new trick either. It's roughly the same instinct behind an entirely different kind of long-running deception, Kim Philby's three decades spent fooling MI6 from the inside: control the story convincingly enough, for long enough, and the official record starts repeating your version back to you.
FAQ
Did Rasputin's body really show signs of castration?
Some contemporary and later accounts claim it did, but this detail rests on far weaker evidence than the gunshot wound and is treated with real scepticism by modern forensic reviewers.
Why does the date of the murder sometimes appear as 17 December and sometimes 30 December?
Imperial Russia used the Julian calendar, thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar most of the world uses today. Both dates describe the same night.
Did the doctor who performed the autopsy know about the British theory?
No. Kosorotov's 1916 autopsy simply recorded what he found. The MI6 theory only emerged from British records and forensic re-examinations published decades later.
Is there any chance Rasputin really did survive the poison and gunshots for a while, as Yusupov claimed?
Modern forensic reviewers consider it very unlikely. A contact wound to the forehead points to a single close-range killing shot, not a prolonged struggle.
You might also like
Maria Rasputin: Lion Tamer, Author, and Daughter of 'The Mad Monk', The Final Day of the Romanov Family: What Really Happened in That Cellar and Kim Philby: The Cambridge Spy Who Fooled MI6 for Three Decades
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