| Variations of Name | Felix Felixovich Yusupov, Count Sumarokov-Elston |
| Biography | Prince Felix Yusupov was a Russian aristocrat from the Yusupov family who is best known for participating in the assassination of Grigori Rasputin and for marrying Princess Irina Alexandrovna, a niece of Tsar Nicholas II.
Felix led a flamboyant life. As a young man, he cross-dressed, wearing ball gowns and his mother's jewelry to public events. From 1909 to 1913, he studied Forestry and later English at University College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, and established the Oxford Russian Club. Yusupov was living on 14 King Edward Street, had a Russian cook, a French driver, an English valet, and a housekeeper, and spent much of his time partying. At some time, Yusupov rented an apartment in Curzon Street, and met several times with the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who lived in Hampstead.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Yusupov and his wife were briefly detained in Berlin. Irina asked her relative, Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, to intervene with Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser refused to permit the Yusupov family to leave but offered them a choice of three country estates to live in for the duration of the war. Felix's father appealed to the Spanish ambassador in Germany and won permission for them to return to Russia. Felix was able to avoid entering military service himself by taking advantage of a law exempting only-sons from serving.
In 1916, Felix, Dmitri, Vladimir Purishkevich, assistant Stanislas de Lazovert, and Sukhotin killed Rasputin in the Moika Palace under the pretense of a housewarming party. Yusupov mentions in his unreliable memoirs, he offered Rasputin tea and petit fours laced with a large amount of potassium cyanide. After an hour or so, Rasputin was fairly drunk. Still waiting for Rasputin to collapse, Yusupov became anxious that Rasputin might live until the morning, leaving the conspirators no time to conceal his body. Yusupov went upstairs and came back with a revolver. Rasputin was hit at close range by a bullet. The wounds were serious, and Rasputin would have died, but he succeeded in escaping outside. A second bullet from a distance with a firearm lodged into his spine. Rasputin fell and his body taken inside. It is not clear whether Yusupov beat Rasputin with a sort of dumb bell, or Purishkevich shot him point-blank into the forehead. The conspirators finally threw the corpse from Bolshoy Petrovsky Bridge into an ice hole in the Malaya Neva. |