Leningrad, 28 December 1925: the death of Sergei Yesenin

On 28 December 1925, a district warden of the Leningrad militia named Gorbov drew up an act of inspection in Room 5 of the Hotel Angleterre, at Saint Isaac’s Square. The room was on an upper floor of a building then operating under the name Internatsional. The body of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, thirty years old and the most widely read Russian lyric poet of his generation, was hanging from a vertical steam-heating pipe. The right wrist was cut. The next day, in the mortuary of the Obukhov Hospital, the forensic pathologist Aleksandr Grigorievich Gilyarevsky performed an autopsy and recorded the cause of death as asphyxia from compression by a ligature, with petechiae and lower-limb discoloration consistent with prolonged suspension. The official conclusion was suicide. The case was closed within forty-eight hours.

It did not stay closed. In 1989, against the glasnost-era opening of the Soviet press to alternative accounts, the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences, known as IRLI or Pushkin House, convened a commission under the chairmanship of the Yesenin specialist Yury L’vovich Prokushev. Its final report, completed in the early 1990s, concluded that the 1925 ruling stood. In the same window the post-Soviet press began to carry a counter-thesis. An MVD investigator, Eduard Aleksandrovich Khlystalov, argued from the surviving 1925 photographs that the death scene was staged. A Saint Petersburg historian, Viktor Ivanovich Kuznetsov, argued from the Hotel Angleterre’s guest registers that Yesenin’s name was not on them. The poet Stanislav Yur’evich Kunyaev took the same line in a long biography. The thesis they share is that the OGPU killed Yesenin and arranged the room.

That is the case. A 1925 official file that ruled suicide. A 1989 to 1993 official re-examination that re-affirmed it. A continuous post-Soviet contest that has not produced a declassified document but has not gone away. The poet’s death has been re-litigated, in print and in public, for a hundred years.

The documented account

Yesenin was born on 3 October 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan Governorate, to a peasant family. He became the foremost figure of the post-revolutionary peasant-poetry current and co-founded the short-lived Imaginist movement in 1919 with Anatoly Mariengof and Vadim Shershenevich. The principal works of his career fall within nine years: Radunitsa (1916), Inoniya (1918), Pugachyov (1921), Moskva kabatskaya (1924), and Anna Snegina (1925). The confessional late poem Cherny chelovek, “The Black Man,” was published after his death.

The private life of the early Soviet years was turbulent. He was married first to the actress Zinaida Reich from 1917 to 1921, then to the American dancer Isadora Duncan from 1922 to 1923, and in the autumn of 1925 to Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. He drank heavily. In late 1925 he was admitted to the Gannushkin psychiatric clinic in Moscow and was discharged on or around 21 December 1925.

He travelled to Leningrad in the final days of December 1925, with most sources giving 24 December as the date of arrival, and checked into the Hotel Angleterre at Saint Isaac’s Square, in Room 5. Friends who visited him in the room during his stay included the young poet Wolf Iosifovich Erlich, the writer Georgy Ustinov and his wife Elizaveta Ustinova, and others from the Leningrad literary circle.

According to Erlich’s 1930 memoir Pravo na pesn’, “The Right to Song,” Yesenin handed him a folded piece of paper on the evening of 27 December 1925 and told him not to read it until later. It was an eight-line poem, “До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья,” “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye.” It was reportedly written in the poet’s own blood, because there was no ink in the room. The autograph was passed by Erlich to investigators the day after the death. It was first printed in the Leningrad evening paper Krasnaya Gazeta on 29 December 1925.

On the morning of 28 December 1925, Elizaveta Ustinova went to Room 5, received no answer, and asked the hotel commandant to open the door. Yesenin’s body was found hanging by a cord or strap from a vertical steam-heating pipe; sources differ on the specific item. The right wrist had been cut. The body was photographed in situ. Erlich and others were present in the room after the discovery.

The initial police report, the “act of inspection,” was drawn up later that day by N. M. Gorbov, district warden of the Leningrad militia. It concluded that Yesenin had hanged himself. An autopsy was performed on 29 December 1925, in the mortuary of the Obukhov Hospital, by Aleksandr Grigorievich Gilyarevsky, who died in 1931. The autopsy report attributed death to asphyxia from compression of the airway by a ligature, noting purplish discoloration of the lower limbs and petechiae consistent with prolonged suspension. The official conclusion was suicide.

The body was transported by train to Moscow. A public funeral was held on 31 December 1925, and Yesenin was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery, Ваганьковское кладбище. Press estimates put attendance in the tens of thousands. Pravda, Izvestia and Krasnaya Gazeta covered the death and the funeral through January 1926. Leon Trotsky published a memorial article in Pravda in January 1926. A reported wave of imitative suicides among young Soviet readers in 1926 prompted Nikolai Bukharin and others to publish polemical articles against what they termed “Yeseninshchina,” and several of the poet’s most despairing late works were suppressed for years.

The evidence

The defensible evidence falls into three classes, each well documented and each contested at different points by different readers.

The 1925 documentary file. The Gorbov act of inspection of 28 December 1925, held in Saint Petersburg archives and widely reproduced in the post-Soviet specialist literature, is the foundational document. The Gilyarevsky autopsy report of 29 December 1925 is the second. Together they are the basis of the 1925 ruling. The in situ photographs of Yesenin’s body and of Room 5, taken on the morning of 28 December 1925, were widely published in the Soviet press at the time. They are referred to here only as documentary evidence and are not reproduced. The autograph of “До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья,” reportedly written in the poet’s blood, was passed by Erlich to investigators a day after the death; the manuscript is most commonly cited as held at Pushkin House. Wolf Erlich’s 1930 memoir Pravo na pesn’ is the establishment first-person account of the last evening. Leon Trotsky’s Pravda memorial of January 1926 is the contemporary high-Bolshevik reading.

Physical traces. The grave at Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow has been continuously marked since the Soviet period. A death mask, attributed to Sergei Konenkov and others, was taken from the body in Leningrad; a dent in the forehead area is cited by murder-theory proponents as evidence of antemortem trauma, an interpretation contested by forensic specialists. The original Hotel Angleterre was demolished on 18 March 1987 after several days of unsanctioned public protest on Saint Isaac’s Square (16 to 18 March), one of the first sizable open demonstrations of the late Soviet period. The current Angleterre Hotel, by the architect A. I. Prybulsky, opened on the same site in 1991. The original Room 5 no longer physically exists.

The 1989 to 1993 IRLI commission. Pushkin House, ИРЛИ, convened the commission in 1989 against the background of glasnost openings of the Soviet press to alternative accounts. It was chaired by the Yesenin specialist Yury L’vovich Prokushev and drew in literary scholars and forensic specialists. Its final report, completed in the early 1990s, concluded that the 1925 ruling of suicide stood and that the post-Soviet murder hypotheses below were not supported by the surviving documentation or by re-examination of the photographic evidence. A Russian Federation forensic-medicine review commissioned in connection with the IRLI work read the 1925 photographic and autopsy material as consistent with suicidal hanging. The named authorship of that re-examination is not cleanly attested in English-language sources, and we attribute it institutionally rather than to any single specialist.

The post-Soviet contestations. From 1989 onward several Russian writers, working from copies of the 1925 documents and the in situ photographs rather than from physical remains, have argued in print that Yesenin was murdered and that the suicide was staged. Eduard Aleksandrovich Khlystalov, a Colonel of the MVD and a Moscow Criminal Investigation Department investigator, published the first sustained murder argument in the Soviet press in 1989 and developed it across editions of Tainy otelya “Angleter,” “The Secrets of the Hotel Angleterre.” He pointed to alleged anomalies in the photographs: that a rope tied to a vertical pipe would have slipped under load; that the right arm appeared raised in a way inconsistent with simple hanging; that a dark mark above the right eyebrow could be read as a penetrating wound. Viktor Ivanovich Kuznetsov, historian at the Academy of Culture in Saint Petersburg, published Tainaya gibel’ Esenina, “The Secret Death of Yesenin,” in 1998. He argued, from the surviving 1925 Hotel Angleterre guest registers as he read them, that Yesenin’s name does not appear on them, and that the poet was held and interrogated in a Cheka building elsewhere in Leningrad in the days before his death. We report that as Kuznetsov’s published claim, not as an independently verified fact. Stanislav Yur’evich Kunyaev, editor of Nash Sovremennik from 1989, co-authored with his son Sergei a biography of Yesenin in the Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudei series (1995), with a closing chapter on the murder hypothesis.

The shared thesis is that the 1925 autopsy was cursory; that the photographs show injuries exceeding what a self-inflicted hanging would produce; and that the political climate (Yesenin’s late despairing verse, his alienation from official Bolshevism, his psychiatric admission, OGPU monitoring of literary figures) makes a staged-suicide murder plausible. One strand of the literature has extended the hypothesis to name the Cheka officer Yakov Blyumkin as the operational killer and Trotsky as the political authoriser. That naming is speculative and is not supported by any declassified document in any of the sources reviewed here.

Wolf Erlich’s later fate. The principal first-person witness to Yesenin’s last evening was arrested by the NKVD on 19 July 1937 during the Great Terror, accused of involvement in a “Trotskyist terrorist group,” and executed on 24 November 1937. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1956. So was Zinaida Reich, Yesenin’s first wife and then the wife of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, killed by NKVD operatives in her Moscow apartment in 1939, days after Meyerhold’s arrest. Both facts are documented and reported here neutrally.

The 2005 exhumation question. Against continued advocacy by Khlystalov, Kunyaev and others, members of Yesenin’s family appealed to President Vladimir Putin in May 2005 for a renewed official investigation, including an exhumation of the remains at Vagankovo. No exhumation took place. No church or state body has acted on the renewed call, and no Russian state body has reopened the 1925 case.

Hypotheses and open questions

Each of the five readings below is labeled as a hypothesis and is presented with what the record supports and what it does not. The Cold File does not, in its own voice, assert any of them as fact, and it does not assert in its own voice that any state security organ killed Yesenin.

A. Suicide by hanging (the 1925 official ruling, re-affirmed by the 1989 to 1993 IRLI commission). For: the 1925 Gorbov militia act; the 1925 Gilyarevsky autopsy report; the farewell poem given to Erlich on the evening of 27 December; the in situ photographs of Room 5; Yesenin’s documented depressive state, alcoholism and December 1925 psychiatric admission; Erlich’s 1930 memoir; the IRLI commission’s working from the original 1925 file and the accompanying institutional forensic re-reading, both of which concluded that the 1925 ruling stood. Against: the post-Soviet contestations on photographic grounds; the criticism that the 1925 autopsy itself was cursorily written. This is the controlling official finding both in 1925 and after 1993.

B. OGPU-staged murder (the Khlystalov, Kuznetsov, Kunyaev reading). For: the alleged photographic anomalies enumerated by Khlystalov; Kuznetsov’s published claim that Yesenin’s name is absent from the 1925 guest registers; OGPU monitoring of Soviet literary figures in the 1920s; Yesenin’s documented late alienation from official Bolshevism; the fact that Erlich, the key witness, was himself shot during the 1937 Terror. Against: the IRLI commission, working from the original 1925 file and supported by an institutional forensic re-reading, concluded the suicide ruling stood; the alleged anomalies are contested as artefacts of suspension, lividity and the photographs themselves; no document from any OGPU, Cheka or NKVD archive has been declassified that records an order against Yesenin; the naming of Blyumkin as killer is speculative and unsourced. The thesis is reported here strictly as the published claim of named writers. The accusation, where reported, is institutional, against the apparatus, not directed at any living person.

C. Accidental death during a struggle in the room. For: post-Soviet readings of the photographs that report bruising and a head mark suggestive of antemortem trauma; Yesenin’s documented late history of intoxicated quarrels. Against: no contemporary 1925 witness statement describes a struggle on the night of 27 to 28 December; the position of the body and the presence of the farewell poem do not fit a struggle scenario; the IRLI commission did not find the photographic record consistent with accidental death.

D. Murder by a personal antagonist, not OGPU directed. For: speculative reading only. Against: no named suspect with motive and opportunity has emerged in the documentary record; no witness statement places an antagonist in the room that night.

E. Suicide encouraged or facilitated by a third party. For: speculation, partly grounded in the observation that several friends had visited Room 5 in the last days. Against: no specific witness account supports facilitation; Erlich’s 1930 memoir places himself elsewhere at the time of death.

What remains unknown

The defensible record ends where it ended in 1925, supplemented by a Pushkin House re-reading that did not move it. The precise sequence of events in Room 5, between Erlich’s departure on the evening of 27 December and the discovery of the body the next morning, is reconstructed only from the in situ photographs and the autopsy. Whether modern forensic methods applied to the original photographic plates would change the reading of the death position, the cord configuration, and the marks on the face and neck has never been tested. Whether any OGPU, Cheka or NKVD operational file referring to Yesenin’s surveillance in 1925 exists is unknown; the relevant FSB archives are only partially open, and no such file has been published. Whether the farewell-poem autograph was written in the poet’s blood, as Erlich stated, has not been confirmed by direct forensic examination of the manuscript in any published source.

A hundred years on, the Hotel Angleterre of 1925 is gone. The autopsy doctor died in 1931. The witness who carried the farewell poem out of the room was shot in 1937. The first wife was killed by the NKVD in 1939. The 1989 to 1993 commission, working from what survived, found the 1925 ruling held. The murder thesis, advanced from 1989, has not produced a declassified document and has not gone away. Suicide is the official finding. The contest over that finding is the published Russian-language record of the last thirty-five years.

Leningrad, 28 December 1925: the death of Sergei Yesenin

The documented account

The evidence

Hypotheses and open questions

What remains unknown

Sources

Primary

Secondary