Rasputin surrounded by his female admirers. The murder room is off-limits. To see the murky basement enclave where Grigory Rasputin allegedly nibbled poisoned pirogy (the first act of conspirator Felix Yusupov's farcical if not strictly factual account of the bogus holyman's murder, or holyman's bogus murder), you must sign up for an excursion, pay a modest 2,000 roubles and return another day.
In Russia these things are never simple. But if you're curious to see how the richest family in pre-revolutionary Russia lived, there is something simple to do: take a lunchtime stroll around the first and second floors of Yusupov Palace. That means no guided tour, and no English explanations, unless you make arrangements by phone beforehand.
But you can take things at your own pace, wander and daydream -- or, if you understand some Russian, join a group of bored schoolkids who will be more interested in appraising your clothes and shoes than in hearing their aged guide's explication of the decorative art of plasterwork. Just around the corner from the Mariinsky, the yellow palace on the Moika also has a red-plush jewel-box of a private theater.
Check the posters at the interior kassa for events -- upcoming ones include a May 26 city birthday celebration and a May 30 ballet evening. Prices were 7,000 roubles (which we didn't have or we would have bought tickets on the spot). No dual-pricing system was evident -- perhaps the Russian-speaking American who made our inquiries actually passed this time. After the kassa, you're sent to the basement to check coats and acquire tapochki.
Even the felt slippers seem better quality here than at other museums (you're given two of the same color and approximately the same size) -- a fresh hopeful sign of recent restoration. Also in the tiled basement, somewhere beyond the toilets, is the notorious murder site, which some people might be tempted to take an unauthorized peek at.
A 1993 travel article actually recommended faking an emergency visit to the WC to get there -- but nowadays, attendants say, the door is locked. And at only 2,000 roubles for the death tour, why quibble? OJ Tours of LA certainly wouldn't set their prices that low. Wondering why the Russians weren't capitalizing more on Westerners' morbid curiosity, we came up with other moneymaking schemes: perhaps rent out the room for children's birthday parties, a la Chuck E Cheese? Expat parents are always looking for something fun to do with the kids.
The rooms upstairs (the attendants insist you begin with the public rooms on the second floor rather than the private ones on the first) are the usual mix of marble and gilt, crystal and bronze. In the Red Sitting Room, the striking feature is a floor patterned with an intricate central medallion like a Persian carpet.
When the room-sitter saw us looking at it, she told us that the palace was turned into a military hospital during the war, with all the attendant damages -- she mimed metal cots scraping across the parquet.
One darkly paneled room was built to house Gobelin tapestries, which have since been relocated to the Hermitage (as is true of much of the palace's original artwork). Taking their place are gloomy painted-canvas substitutes. The nearby Rotunda is more impressive, its celestial-blue dome scattered with gold stars. The room is square, but ringed with columns and dome-topped it appears perfectly circular.
In the banquet room, which seats 2,000 guests and is now a concert hall, glass banisters seem an odd touch, especially since there are no stairs. Apparently a Yusupov, in his search for expensive novelties, bought a glass staircase in France.
When he installed it at home it proved too slippery -- so the banisters were thriftily recycled as freestanding room decor. The barrel-vaulted ceiling wouldn't support real bronze chandeliers, so the ones in this room are papier-mache.
A portrait of Felix Yusupov's mother hangs in the next room. She's wearing a massive jewel known as the Peregrine Pearl, which, we were informed, is now owned by Elizabeth Taylor. (I'm skeptical -- I remember the Krupp diamond, but not the Yusupov pearl.)
Beyond are three picture galleries added onto the house in 1840 (the main part of the house was built in 1760). Nikolai Yusupov, a diplomat, had a Rembrandt and a Veronese where now there are third-rate landscapes, plastic flowers and drippy green paint. Another case of the valuables being removed to the Hermitage -- here leaving a lot of wall space to fill.
The details of the rooms are the most interesting: rose-veined marble windowsills; bronze fretwork hiding radiators; a real vine growing abundantly in one of the windows; a caryatid with bare gold feet; marble sphinxes wearing Elizabethan ruffled collars; mirrors everywhere -- emblematic of the narcissism of the aristocracy? Prince Felix, I remember reading, married the most beautiful woman in Petersburg (a niece of the tsar) and liked to dress in women's clothing himself. I started to think of Mennonites I knew who said, after touring the grounds at Pushkin, "Oh, if youve seen one palace you've seen 'em all."
The Yusupov Palace isn't overwhelming like the Hermitage or the Catherine Palace, but I came away thinking of cold empty spaces and lonely, overfriendly attendants -- I felt like I was disappointing them by leaving. Even the tapochki-keeper, as you turn in your slippers, wants to tell you more stories -- about the once-grand garden, the yacht the Yusupovs kept moored in the Moika, and how the inept conspirators had to drag Rasputin's body upstairs (head thumping with each step, presumably) to dispose of it.
At home I look up a British visitor's 1933 account of the murder plot -- would-be guides must have been telling stories back then too, when the palace was headquarters for the Scientific Workers and the Trade Union of Educationalists. Apparently Yusupov played the guitar and sang to Rasputin to lull him into eating the poisoned goodies.
When the cyanide didn't work and the monk ran off, another conspirator "shot twice and [Rasputin] collapsed. Meanwhile, the Prince was being sick in the bathroom." If the foppish scion was such an unlikely assassin, how did the plot get hatched in the first place?
Here the British visitor's insight rings true: "The conspirators had worked on one another's emotions till they had reached the state of messianic exaltation which accounts for most things in Russian history," he wrote. "All Russians are saviors by vocation."