to defend the empire and the honor of the Imperial dynasty, family members (and left and right wing parties in the Imperial Duma) began to plot against him, her and Rasputin. Marianne von Pistohlkors was allegedly one of two women and several men present in the palace belonging to Felix Yussupov on the night that Rasputin was lured there on 17 December 1916. "Malanya's also taking part," Yussupov wrote to his wife Princess Irina of Russia in the weeks before the murder. Pistohlkors' nickname was Malanya. She, like Grand Duke Dimitri, was later arrested by the Tsar's secret police following the murder. However, the Tsar later ordered her release. Sympathies were on Pistohlkors' side, according to her mother's memoirs, Memories of Russia 1916-1919. "When we arrived at 8 Theatre Square, where Marianne lived, we were stopped by two soldiers who let us through only after taking down our names. All the highest society was at Marianne's! Some ladies she barely knew arrived in order to express sympathy with her. Officers came up to kiss her hand." None of the male co-conspirators ever publicly denounced Pistohlkors or the other woman suspected of involvement, ballerina and film star Vera Karalli. Neither were these women prosecuted in the subsequent legal trials. According to one author, the Tsar kept their names out of the case because he did not want more public displays of sympathy for the murderers of Rasputin. He also knew that his sickly uncle, Grand Duke Paul, was very upset by Dimitri's involvement in the murder and was taking badly the Tsar's decision to exile Dmitri to the Persian front. The Tsar presumably did not want to add to the grand duke's suffering by also charging his stepdaughter. Exile In March 1918, Marianne's half-brother, the poet Prince Vladimir Paley, was arrested by the Bolsheviks and sent to the Urals. He was executed there on 18 July 1918, and his body was dumped in a mine shaft near Alapayevsk. At about this time, Marianne and her new husband, Count Nicholas von Zarnekau, made an effort to help the remaining family of the Grand Duke Paul to escape. According to the memoirs of Marianne's stepsister, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, "Once in the beginning of July [1918], late at night, when we had been long asleep, there was a knock at my door. Waking, I saw upon the threshold of my bedroom Marianne Zarnikau,