“We must kill him!” they shrieked in return, and the whole band rushed for the stairs. When they opened the door Rasputin was crawling on hands and knees up the stairs. His face was diabolic. What followed does not make pleasant reading. They tried to kill him, crawling toward them, using every weapon they could grasp--revolvers, swords, daggers, clubs, heavy chairs, even their boots. They shot and beat him until he was senseless, but even then he did not die. They tied his hands and feet and regardless of possible risk of detection they loaded the senseless body into a motor car, drove to the Neva, a considerable distance, and threw the still breathing thing through a hole in the ice. There Rasputin died. That is the way Prince Yussupoff tells it. The world knows how the Czar had the body embalmed and buried, and how he and all the royal family walked in the funeral procession. It was the intention of the Empress to build a costly tomb over his grave, perhaps a church. They usually built a church to commemorate assassinations of royalty, and the poor, half-demented Empress of Russia regarded Rasputin as greater than royalty. Perhaps if the revolution of February had not succeeded the church would have been built, loaded with gold and art treasures, as those Russian churches are, and might in time have become a shrine in which the superstitious would pray for miracles. But the revolution did succeed, and one of the first things they did was to unearth the corpse of Rasputin and give it another burial. I heard several accounts of that burial, all of them horrible. One account has it that the body was burned. It doesn’t make any real difference. Rasputin had to be killed, and he was. The burial was nothing unless you find something symbolic in the uneasy character of the man even after he was dead. It does indicate, strangely, the sinister nature of the whole Rasputin episode.