Spring Martlet 2017

“He sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws. His eyes were bursting from their sockets, blood oozed from
his lips. No words can express the horror I felt. This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart,
must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil. It was the reincarnation of Satan himself who held me
in his clutches and would never let me go till my dying day.” (Felix Yusupov, Lost Splendour)
The Assassin in the
Computing Room
December 2016 marked the centenary
of the violent death of the ‘Mad Monk’
Rasputin. Neither mad, nor a monk other
than by affectation, the Siberian peasant
Grigory Rasputin had risen to be the trusted
confidant of the last Russian Imperial couple
even as Russia tottered through a ruinous
war and into the maw of revolution. Decisive
was not just his powerful personality and
‘magnetic’ eyes, nor the prevailing vogue for
spiritualism, but the Empress Alexandra’s
implicit conviction that Rasputin had
the power to calm the sickly heir to the
throne and actually ease the symptoms of
his haemophilia. Her indebtedness could
not have been explained publicly without
disclosing the frailty of the succession. This
left Rasputin with a growing popular image
as a debauched hell-raiser, and the Empress
sullied by bawdy association, while patriotic
aristocrats, exasperated by Rasputin’s
growing power to meddle with impunity in
affairs of state, blamed him for the paralysis
besetting the Tsar and sought deliverance in
this moment of Russia’s mortal danger.
Rasputin himself had no direct connection
with Oxford, nor even Cambridge, but one of
his potential adversaries – the author of my
opening quotation – was a Univ man. He came
up in 1909 and was a prominent presence
here for three years before returning to
Russia, marrying the Tsar’s niece and becoming
embroiled in the grisly doings alluded to.
When young Mr Elston, or ‘Mr Elkins’, as he
was often known among the College staff,
signed the College Register in 1909 in his
rather shaky Latin, he revealed himself as Felix,
Count Sumarokov-Elston of St Petersburg,
hence scion of probably the richest family
in Russia, soon to inherit the title Prince
14 THE MARTLET | SPRING 2017