Rasputin the Rascal Monk

“Poor fool!” he exclaimed, his glass of wine in his hand. “The Countess had already become a devoted disciple.”

But the Empress at once bestirred herself in fear of public indignation being aroused against the Holy Father, and telephoning to the Minister of the Interior, ordered the Count’s immediate release.

On another occasion, a week later, a young lieutenant of cavalry named Olchowski, who had been with von Rennenkampf at Brest-Litovsk, had returned to Petrograd, being met at the railway station by his devoted young wife, a mere chit of a girl, the daughter of a Baroness living at Ostroff. They returned home together, whereupon somebody slipped into his hand an anonymous letter, stating that his pretty young wife Vera had become one of the “spiritual brides” who attended the bi-weekly meetings in the Gorokhovaya. The Lieutenant said nothing, but watching next afternoon he followed her to the meeting place of the “Naked Believers,” and having satisfied himself that during his absence at the front his beloved wife had fallen beneath the “saint’s” spell, he concealed himself in the porch of a neighbouring house until after the worshippers had all departed. Then Rasputin presently descended the steps to enter one of the Imperial carriages which had called for him as was usual each day.

In an instant the outraged husband, half-mad with fury, flung himself upon the “holy” libertine and plunged a long keen knife into his breast.

But Rasputin, whose strength was colossal, simply tossed his assailant away from him without a word, and entered the carriage.

Beneath his monkish hair-shirt he had for some time, at the Empress’s urgent desire, worn another shirt which she had had specially made for him in Paris, as also for the Tsar – a light but most effective shirt of steel-mail.

Chapter Three

How Rasputin Poisoned the Tsarevitch

The dark forces established so ingeniously by the Kaiser behind the Russian throne in April, 1914, had now become actively at work.

The small but all-powerful clique of which Rasputin was the head because he practically lived with the Imperial family and ate at their table – the little circle which the Russians called “The Camarilla” – were actively plotting for the betrayal of the Allies and a separate peace with Germany. Stürmer, the Austrian who had been pushed into the office of Prime Minister of Russia by his boon companion and fellow

bon-viveur

, the mock-monk of Pokrovsky, had already risen in power. The man whose long goatee-beard swept over the first button of his gorgeous uniform, all true loyal Russians in their unfortunate ignorance cheered wildly as he drove swiftly with the

pristyazhka

, or side-horse, along the Nevski, for he was believed to be “winning the war.” Russia, alas! to-day knows that with German gold flowing freely into his pocket he was in secret doing all he could to prevent ministers arriving from Great Britain, and laughing up his sleeve at his success in ordering a mock-railway from Alexandrovsk to be built in order to connect Petrograd to an ice-free port – a line which subsequently had to be taken up and relaid!

Even our British journalists were cleverly bamboozled, for they returned from Russia and wrote in our newspapers of her coming great offensive, when they would sweep back the Kaiser’s hordes and be into Berlin ere we should know it. In Petrograd one heard of Rasputin as the Shadowy Somebody. But most people declared that he was only a monk, a pious person whom silly women admired, as women so often admire a fashionable preacher even in our own country, and further because of “something,” the Censor refused to allow his name to appear in any paper.

In Russia the censorship is full of vagaries. My own novels came under his ban twenty years ago, because as correspondent of

The Times

 I had spoken some very plain truths in that journal. I remember well old Monsieur de Stael, then Russian ambassador in London and the cheeriest of good souls, laughing when I came back from Russia at my complaint regarding the censorship. “Why!” he said, “they censor my letters to my own daughter in Nijni! Please do not think any the less of Russia for that. You have been across the Empire, into Siberia, and surely you know how far we are behind the times!”

Russia had, after all, advanced but little in those intervening twenty years, though it has produced the rascal Rasputin.

That small circle of Germanophiles who met so frequently in secret at Rasputin’s house in the Gorokhovaya – the scene of the bi-weekly orgies of the “Sister-Disciples” – though they were unaware of it were, with clever insinuation, being taught that a separate peace with Germany would be of greatest advantage to the Empire. They were hourly plotting, and the details of their conspiracies which have now come to light and are before me, documents in black and white, which had been carefully preserved by the monk, are truly amazing. Surely no novelist, living or dead, could have ever imagined a situation so astounding and yet so tragic, for the fate of one of the mightiest Imperial Houses of the modern world was now trembling in the balance.

That both the Prime Minister and his long-moustached sycophant Protopopoff, a political adventurer whose past is somewhat shady and obscure, were in daily consultation is plain from the reports of secret agents of the Revolutionists. The Duke Charles Michael, though heir to the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had, as part of the German Emperor’s subtle plot, become naturalised as a Russian three weeks before the declaration of war, and he, with the erotic scoundrel, was actively carding out Berlin’s set programme in the salons of Tsarskoe-Selo.

“Grichka,” the convicted thief from the far-off Siberian village, the man who had a dozen “spiritual brides” at Pokrovsky, uncouth, unlettered and unwashed, had by this time obtained such hypnotic hold upon the female portion of Petrograd society that when he deigned to accept an invitation to dine at the various palaces of the nobility he would eat from his plate with his dirty fingers and his female admirers actually licked them clean! This is absolute fact, vouched for by dozens of patriotic Russians whose names I could give.

It is contained in a plain report in cold unvarnished language in an official Russian report which is before me. Readers will, I believe, halt aghast. But such men have exercised the same powers over women – criminal lunatics always – through the long pages of history.

The heart of Russia was being eaten out by the German canker-worm. The high-born women of Petrograd were being used by Rasputin to play the Kaiser’s game.

Outwardly Stürmer, Protopopoff, the Bishop Teofan, and their place-seeking friends were good loyal Russians bent upon winning the war. In secret, however, they were cleverly arranging to effect various crises. The supply of food was held up by a ring of those eager to profit, and the Empire became suddenly faced with semi-starvation, so that rioting ensued, and the police were kept busy. Then there succeeded serious railway troubles, congestion of traffic to and from the front, “faked” scandals of certain females whom the camarilla charged with giving away Russia’s secrets to Germany. Some highly sensational trials followed, much perjured evidence was given, false reports of

agents provocateurs

 produced, and several officers in high command who, though perfectly innocent, were actually condemned as traitors, merely because they had become obnoxious to Rasputin and his circle.

One day a sensational incident occurred when Rasputin visited the Ministry of the Interior, and sought the Adjunct-Minister Dzhunkovsky, who controlled the police of the Empire.

On being shown into his room the monk insolently demanded why he was being followed by police-agents, and why his friends who visited his house in the Gorokhovaya were being spied upon.

“My duty, my dear Father, is to know what is in progress in Petrograd,” replied the Minister coldly.

“Are you not aware that I am immune from espionage by your confounded agents?” cried Rasputin in anger. “Are you in ignorance that my personal safety is in charge of the special Palace Police who are responsible for the safety of the Emperor?”

“My own actions are my own affair,” was the chill reply – for truth to tell – the Revolutionists had already imparted to Dzhunkovsky certain evidence they had collected as to the traitorous conduct of the pseudo-monk and his traitorous friends.

High words arose. Grichka, losing his temper, made use of some very insulting remarks regarding the Minister’s young wife, whereupon Dzhunkovsky sprang from his chair and promptly knocked down the “Saint.”

An hour later Rasputin, with his eye bandaged, sat with the Empress in her room overlooking the Neva, and related how he had been assaulted by the Adjunct-Minister of the Interior, merely because he had expressed his unswerving loyalty to the throne. To the Empress the unwashed charlatan was as a holy man, and such insult caused her blood to boil with indignation.

The fellow knew quite well that no word uttered against himself was ever believed by either Emperor or Empress. They were all said to be stories invented by those jealous of the Saint’s exalted position, and the wicked inventions of enemies of the Dynasty. Therefore, what happened was exactly what he expected. In a fury the neurotic Empress rose and went off to the Tsar who, then and there, signed a decree dismissing his loyal Adjunct-Minister from office, and appointing an obscure friend of Rasputin’s in his place!

In that same week another incident occurred which caused the Saint no little apprehension. His Majesty had appointed Samarin as Procurator of the Holy Synod, an appointment which Rasputin knew might easily result in his own downfall. Samarin, an honest, upright man, was one of his most bitter enemies, for he knew the disgraceful past of both him and Teofan, and further he had gained accurate knowledge of which appointments of Bishops in the Pravoslavny Church had been the outcome of the ex-horse stealer’s influence. Therefore, the arch-adventurer saw that at all hazards this new Procurator must not be allowed to remain in office, for already he had announced his intention to clear the Pravoslavny Church of its malign influences and filthy practices.

Three days later Rasputin went out to Tsarskoe-Selo, where the Emperor happened to be, and entering His Majesty’s private cabinet said in a confidential tone:

“Listen, Friend. I have a secret to whisper to thee! Last night I was with Stürmer, and he revealed that a great revolutionary plot is afoot for thy deposition from the Throne!”

“What!” cried the Emperor, pale with alarm as he sprang from his chair. “Another plot! By whom?”

“Its chief mover is the man Samarin, whom thou hast appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod,” replied the crafty adventurer. “Stürmer urged me to come at once and to tell thee in private.”

“Are you quite certain of this, Holy Father?” asked the Emperor, looking straight into his bearded face.

The monk’s grey steely eyes, those hypnotic eyes which few women could resist, met the Tsar’s unwaveringly.

“Thou knowest me!” was the “Saint’s” grave reply. “When I speak to thee, I speak but only the truth.”

That same day Samarin was removed from office and disgraced. Everyone wondered why his appointment had been of such brief duration, but that same night, the Prime Minister Stürmer and Rasputin drank champagne and rejoiced together at the house in the Gorokhovaya, while Anna Vyrubova, the favourite lady-in-waiting, was also with them, laughing at their great triumph.

Not a person in all the great Empire could withstand Rasputin’s influence. Honest men feared him just as honest women regarded him with awe. From dozens, nay hundreds, of place-hunters and favour-seekers he took bribes on every hand, but woe betide those who fell beneath the blackguard’s displeasure. It meant death to them. He was certainly the most powerful and fearless secret agent of all that the Huns possessed, scattered as they were in every corner of the globe. Yet it must not be supposed that there were none who did not suspect him. Indeed, a certain committee of revolutionaries, to whose action Russia is to be indebted, were watching the fellow’s career very closely, and some of the secret reports concerning him here as I write form intensely interesting reading, astounding even for the unfathomable land of Russia.

Within a few weeks of his triumph over the newly-appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod he discovered, with the innate shrewdness of the Russian mujik, that certain secret reports seriously compromising him had been given into the Emperor’s hand. His Majesty, in turn, had shown them to his wife. Once again, he saw himself in peril, so, before any action could be taken, he abruptly entered the Empress’s room at Tsarskoe-Selo, and boldly said:

“Heaven hath revealed to me in a vision that the enemies of the dynasty have spoken ill of me, have maligned me, and have questioned my divine power. I have therefore come to bid farewell of thee!”

The Empress, who was seated with Madame Vyrubova, and the old Countess Ignatieff, rose from her chair, pale to the lips.

“You – you – you are surely not going, Holy Father!” she gasped. “You cannot mean that you will desert us!” she cried. “What of poor little Alexis?” and the words faded from her lips.

“Yes, truly I am going! Our enemies have, alas, triumphed! Evil triumphs over good in this terrible war,” was his slow, impressive answer.

“Of Alexis,” – and he shook his shock head mournfully.

“Ah, no!” shrieked the unhappy Empress hysterically.

“Listen!” commanded the deep-voiced Saint very gravely. “I must not conceal the truth from thee. On the twentieth day of my departure, thy son Alexis will be taken ill – and alas! the poor lad will not recover!”

Madame Vyrubova pretended to be horrified at this terrible prophecy, while the Empress shrieked and fainted. Whereupon the Saint crossed himself piously and, turning, with bent head left the room.

Within half-an-hour he was on his way to his twelve “spiritual brides” in his sordid house at Pokrovsky.

The Empress lived for the next twenty days in a state of terrible dread. Alas! true to the Holy Father’s prophecy the boy, on the twentieth day, was seized with a sudden mysterious illness which puzzled the Court physicians who were hastily summoned from Petrograd. Indeed, a dozen of the best medical men in the capital held a consultation, but opinions differed regarding the cause of the haemorrhage, and the Empress again sent wild telegrams urging her pet Saint to return.

Little did she dream that her favourite lady-in-waiting had six hours before administered a dose of a certain secret Chinese drug to the young Tsarevitch and purposely caused the illness which the rascal had predicted.

Time after time did Her Majesty telegraph, urging her “Holy Father” to return and save the boy’s life, signing herself affectionately “your sister Alec.” Yet the wires were dumb in reply. An Imperial courier brought back no response. The doctors, as before, could make nothing out of the poor boy’s illness, and were unable to diagnose it. The charlatan was playing with the life of the Heir of the Romanoffs.

It has, however, been since revealed by analysis that the compound sold to Rasputin by the chemist – a secret administrator of drugs to Petrograd society named Badmayeff – was a poisonous powder produced from the new horns of stags, mixed with the root of “jen-shen.” In the early spring when the stags shed their horns there appear small knobs where the new horns will grow. It is from these that the Chinese obtain the powder which, when mixed with “jen-shen,” produces a very strong medicine highly prized in China and Thibet as being supposed to rejuvenate old persons, and to act as a kind of love-philtre. When used in strong doses it produces peculiar symptoms, and also induces dangerous haemorrhage.

It is evident from evidence I have recently obtained, that on the twentieth day after Rasputin’s departure the high priestess of his cult, Madame Vyrubova, administered to the poor helpless little lad a strong dose in his food.

Day followed day; she increased that dose, until the poor little boy’s condition became most precarious, and the deluded Empress was equally frantic with grief. At any moment he might die, the doctors declared.

One night Rasputin returned quite unexpectedly without having replied even once to the Tsaritza’s frantic appeals.

He made a dramatic appearance in her private boudoir, dressed in sandals and his monk’s habit, as though he had just returned from a pilgrimage.

“I have come to thee, O Lady, to try and save thy son!” he announced earnestly in that deep raucous voice of his, crossing himself piously as was his constant habit.

The distracted Empress flew to the boy’s room where the mock-saint laid his hands upon the lad’s clammy brow and then falling upon his knees prayed loudly in his strange jumble of scraps of holy writ interspersed with profanity, that curious jargon which always impressed his “sister-disciples.”

“Thy son will recover,” declared the saint, thus for the second time impressing upon Her Majesty that his absence from Court would inevitably cause the boy’s death.

“But why, Holy Father, did you leave us?” demanded the Empress when they were alone together ten minutes afterwards.

“Because thou wert prone to believe ill of me,” was his stern reply. “I will not remain here with those who are not my friends.”

“Ah! Forgive me!” cried the hysterical woman, falling upon her knees and wildly kissing his dirty hand. “Remain – remain here always with us! I will never again think ill of thee, O Holy Father! All that is said is by your enemies – who are also mine.”

The pious rascal’s house in the Gorokhovaya, besides being the meeting-place of the society women who, believers in “table turning,” were his sister-disciples, was also the active centre of German intrigues. It was the centre of Germany’s frantic effort to absorb the Russian Empire.

Twice each week meetings were held of that weird cult of “Believers” of whom the most sinister whisperings were heard from the Neva to the Black Sea. The “sister-disciples” were discussed everywhere.

The “Holy Father” still retained his two luxurious suites of rooms, one in the Winter Palace, and the other in Tsarskoe-Selo, but he seldom occupied them at night, for he was usually at his own house receiving in secret one or other of his “friends” of both sexes. His influence over both Nicholas II and his German wife was daily increasing, while he held Petrograd society practically in the hollow of his hand. Now and then, in order to justify his title of “Saint” he would, with the connivance of a mujik of his Siberian village, who was his confederate, perform a “miracle” upon some miserable poor person who could easily be bribed and afterwards packed off to some distant part of the Empire so that he, or she, could tell no further tales. A hundred roubles goes far in Russia. The Prime Minister Stürmer, the blackmailer Protopopoff, the dissolute Bishop Teofan, a Court official named Sabouroff, and Ivanitski, a high official in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, all knew the absurd farce of these mock-miracles, yet it was to the interest of them that Rasputin should still hold grip over the weak-minded Empress and that crowd of foolish women of the Court who had become his “sister-disciples.” Oh! that we in Britain were in ignorance of all this! Surely it is utterly deplorable.

The men mentioned, together with half-a-dozen others with high-sounding titles, were bent upon ruining Russia, and giving her over body and soul as prey to Germany. All had been arranged, even to the price they were each to receive for the betrayal of their country. This was told to the Empress time after time by Count Kokovtsov, the Adjunct-Minister of the Interior Dzhunkovsky, the Grand Dukes Nicholas Michailovitch, Dmitri Pavlovitch, and others. But Her Majesty would listen to nothing against her pet “Saint,” the Divine director, that disgracefully erotic humbug who pretended that he could heal or destroy the little Tsarevitch. When any stories were told of him, Anna, her favourite lady-in-waiting, would declare that they were pure inventions of those jealous of “dear Gregory’s” position and influence.

While Boris Stürmer, frantically scheming for a separate peace with Germany, was with his traitorous gang engineering all sorts of disasters, outrages and military failures in order to prevent the Russian advance, Kurloff, another treacherous bureaucrat, sat in the Ministry of the Interior collecting the gangs of the “Black Hundred,” those hired assassins whom he clothed in police-uniforms and had instructed in machine-gun practice.

Rasputin and Protopopoff were now the most dominant figures in the sinister preparations to effect Russia’s downfall. Rasputin was busy taking bribes on every hand for placing his associates into official positions and blackmailing society women who, having been his “disciples,” had, from one cause or another, left his charmed circle.

Protopopoff, who once posed as our friend and hobnobbed; with Mr Lloyd George, was a man of subtle intrigue. From being a friend of Britain, as he pretended to be when he came here as Vice-President of the Duma, he was enticed away by Germany to become the catspaw of the Kaiser, and was hand in glove with the holy rascal, with his miracle-working, behind the throne.

Rasputin, himself receiving heavy payments from Germany, had acquired already the most complete confidence of the Tsar and Tsaritza; indeed, to such an extent that no affair of State was even decided by the weak-kneed autocrat without the horse-stealer’s evil counsel. Loyal to his Potsdam paymaster, Rasputin gave his advice with that low and clever cunning which ever distinguished him. He gave it as a loyal Russian, but always with the ulterior motive of extending the tentacles of German influence eastward.

In the voluminous confidential report here before me as I write, the disclosures of the rise and fall of Rasputin, I find an interesting memorandum concerning a certain Paul Rodzevitch, son of a member of the Council of the Empire. Alexander Makaroff, one of the three private secretaries of the Emperor, had died suddenly of heart disease, the result of a drinking bout at the Old Donon, and at the dinner-table of the Imperial family at Tsarskoe-Selo the matter was being discussed, Rasputin being present. He was unkempt, unwashed – with untrimmed beard, and a filthy black coat greasy at the collar, and his high boots worn down at heel, as became a “holy man.”

The Tsar was deploring the death of this fellow Makaroff, a person whose evil life was notorious in Petrograd, and whose young wife – then only twenty – had followed the example of the Empress, and had become a “sister-disciple.”

“Friend!” exclaimed the “Saint” with pious upward glance, for he had the audacity to address the Emperor thus familiarly, “Friend! Thou needst not seek far for another secretary; I know of one who is accomplished, loyal and of noble birth. He is Paul Rodzevitch. I will bring him to thee to-morrow as thy new secretary – and he will serve thee well.”

His Majesty expressed satisfaction, for the holy man, the holiest man in all holy Russia, as was his reputation, had spoken.

Next day the good-looking young fellow was appointed, and into his hand was given His Majesty’s private cipher. None knew, until it was revealed by the band of Russian patriots united to unmask the spy, that this fellow Rodzevitch had spent two years in Germany before the war, or that he was in receipt of a gratuity of twenty-five thousand marks annually from the spy bureau in the Königgratzer-strasse in Berlin!

By this means Rasputin placed a spy of Germany upon all the Tsar’s most confidential correspondence.

Madame Vyrubova, and the infernal witchdoctor, were already all-dominant. Stürmer and Protopopoff were but pawns in the subtle and desperate game which Germany was playing in Russia. The food scarcity engineered by Kurloff; the military scandals engineered by a certain creature of the Kaiser’s called Nicolski; the successful plot which resulted in the destruction of a great munition works with terrible loss of life near Petrograd; the chaos of all transport; the constant wrecking of trains, and the breakdown of the strategic line from the Arctic coast across the Lapland marshes, were all combining to hurl the Empire to the abyss of destruction.

One day the Grand Duke Nicholas visited Tsarskoe-Selo, where he had a private interview with the Emperor – Rasputin’s creature, the new secretary Rodzevitch, being present. The Emperor had every belief in the man’s loyalty. His Majesty, weak and easily misled, never dreamed of treachery within his private cabinet.

The words spoken by the Grand Duke that afternoon were terse, and to the point.

“The Empire is doomed!” he said. “This verminous fellow Rasputin – the man contemptuously known in the slums of the capital as ‘Grichka,’ is working out Germany’s plans. I have watched and discovered that he is the associate of pro-Germans, and that his is the hand which in secret is directing all these disasters which follow so quickly upon each other.”

“But he is a friend of Protopopoff!” the Emperor exclaimed. “Protopopoff has been to England. He has gone over the munition factories in Scotland that are working for us; he has visited the British fleet, and when I gave him audience a few weeks ago, he expressed himself as a firm supporter of our Allies. Read his speech in the Duma only the night before last!”

“I have already read it,” replied the Grand Duke. “But it does not alter my opinion in the least. He is hand-in-glove with the monk and with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Why you continue to have either of them about you I cannot imagine. If you do not dismiss them, then the House of Romanoff must fall, I tell you that,” he declared quite bluntly.

His Majesty pandered for a moment and replied – “Then I will give orders to the Censor that the names of neither are in future to be mentioned publicly.”

This is all the notice the Emperor took of the Grand Duke’s first warning. The people did not dare in future to mention “Grichka,” for fear of instant arrest.

Since the outbreak of war Mother Grundy has expired in every country in Europe. An unfortunate wave of moral irresponsibility seems to have swept the world, and nowhere has it been more apparent than in Russia.

This unwashed rascal who posed as a saint, who, by his clever manoeuvres, his secret drugs and his bribes, had become so popular with the people, was entirely unsuspected by the simple folks who comprise the bulk of Russia’s millions. To them he was a “holy man” whom the great Tsar admired and fed at his table. No one suspected the miracle-worker to be the secret ambassador of the Assassin of Potsdam. Everywhere he went – Moscow, Kazan, Odessa, Nijni,