Rasputin the Rascal Monk
At Tsarskoe-Selo, however, all were in deadly fear. Even Anna Vyrubova viewed the situation with greatest alarm. She wrote to him an hour after Miliukoff had denounced him, as follows:
“Her Majesty is prostrated. All seems lost. The Emperor departs for the front again at midnight. He fears a rising in Petrograd, and is regretful that M. (Miliukoff) was not suppressed in time to save us. Someone, he says, has blundered. If you would save yourself go instantly upon a pilgrimage. Describe a vision that will allay the people’s anger and give them further confidence in you. M. has denounced you as a mocker of God and a mere juggler with woman’s credulity. Our dear Empress knows you are not. But she must continue in that belief. Shall Alexis be taken with another seizure? If so, prophesy the day and hour. I await word from you in secret, and ask your blessing. – Your sister, Anna.”
The suggestion in this letter is, of course, that a dose of the secret drug be administered to the poor little Tsarevitch at an hour to be previously prophesied by the mock-monk. The Matter was, however, on the alert. On receipt of the letter he went at once to the Palace, abruptly leaving the camarilla who had assembled to plot further, and to save themselves and their own fat emoluments by more juggling with the security of the Empire.
To the Empress, whom he found in her négligé in her boudoir, with Anna in sole attendance, he said:
“Truly, O Sister! our enemies seek to encompass us! But God is our strength. As surely as the Russian people have denounced me, so surely will God in His wrath send His punishment upon the Heir to the Throne. Miliukoff, who has sought the protection of Satan himself, has spoken his poisonous words against me. Therefore I go to-morrow upon a pilgrimage to retire and to pray for the future of the Empire, and the forgiveness of those who have dared to speak ill of one sent by God as the Deliverer.”
“No! No!” gasped Her Majesty, starting from her chair in pale alarm. “You will not leave us at this juncture – you will not, Holy Father, leave us to our fate?”
“It is decreed,” he said in that low hard voice of his. “I have witnessed a vision even an hour since – I have heard the Voice! I must obey. But,” he added seriously, “I tell thee, O Sister! that near five o’clock in the morning of the day following to-morrow thy dear son will be visited by God’s wrath. He – ”
“He will be again ill!” gasped the unhappy woman, who believed that the bearded man in the black kaftan before her was sent by Providence as Russia’s deliverer. “Surely you cannot mean that! You will pray for him – you will save him. Remember he is my son – my all!”
“Truly I mean what I have spoken, O Sister!” was his reply. “But I will pray for his recovery – and all can be achieved by the sacrifice of the flesh and by prayer. God grant his recovery!” he added piously, making the sign of the cross and raising his mesmeric eyes heavenwards.
At this the hysterical traitress in her pale-pink gown edged with wide Eastern embroidery of emeralds and turquoises, fell upon her knees and kissed the scoundrel’s knotted, unclean fingers, while her faithful Anna looked on and crossed herself, muttering one of the prayers in the blasphemous jargon of the “sister-disciples.” The failure to assassinate Professor Miliukoff had brought home to the camarilla and also to the spy-bureau in Berlin – acting through Swedish diplomatic channels – that the Grand Dukes Nicholas, Serge and Dmitri, together with their small circle of staunch friends of the nobility, were determined to place them in the pillory.
The agent of Germany, Skoropadski, a friend of the notorious Azeff, of the Russian Secret Police, whose exploits before the war were often chronicled, had betrayed his employers. Commencing life as a Russian agent provocateur, employed in Warsaw against the Revolutionists, and consequently a most unscrupulous and heartless person, he had entered the service of Germany with Protopopoff’s connivance and had been the means of the ruin and downfall of dozens of patriotic Russian officials. By virtue of his office as spy of Germany he knew the double game that the Prime Minister, Stürmer, was playing at Rasputin’s instigation. Documents passed through his hands, and often he passed in secret between Petrograd and Berlin and vice versâ, posing as a Swede and travelling by way of Stockholm.
He was an expert spy, and ready to serve any paymaster. Furthermore, he had a grudge against Rasputin because one of his own lady friends had joined the cult of “Believers,” and thus had his hatred been aroused. Therefore, when the little band of patriots at the head of which was the Grand Duke Nicholas approached him in secret, he was at once ready to place the most damning documentary evidence in their hands – those papers which Professor Miliukoff had flashed in the faces of the Duma.
The anger of Stürmer and Protopopoff was now at a white heat. The latter, as Controller of the Secret Police, made every effort to arrest the artful Pole, but he happily escaped, and is now believed to be in Paris.
Such was the story, revealed here for the first time, of the manner in which the Revolutionists were able to present to the people’s representative the infamous acts of the monk Rasputin and his official “creatures” who wore their tinselled uniforms, their tin decorations and enjoyed titles of “Excellency.” Traitors have been in every land since the Creation; and, as I examined this amazing dossier collected by the patriotic party in Russia, with its original letters, its copies of letters, its photographs and its telegrams in the sloped calligraphy of their senders, I marvel, and wonder who in other countries are the traitors – who while pretending to serve their own kings or their presidents are also serving the Mammon of Germania?
I pen these chapters of the downfall of Tsardom with unwilling hand, for I have many friends in Russia and, as a traveller in the Land of the Tsar over many thousands of versts, I have grown to know – perhaps only slightly – the hearty, homely and hospitable Russian people. I have suffered discomforts for months among those clouds of mosquitoes on the great “tundra,” and I have travelled many and many weary miles over the snows of winter, yet never did I think that I should sit to chronicle such a débâcle.
Notwithstanding the tears of the Empress, the villainous Rasputin, having arranged with Anna the hour when she should drug the poor little Tsarevitch, departed on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of Tsarytsine.
Facts concerning this journey, when he fled from the wrath of the people, have just been revealed by his friend the monk Helidor, who having learnt the manner in which he betrayed the Empire, has come forward to elucidate many things hitherto mysterious.
Helidor, who is a man of high intelligence and true religious principles, has stated that at Rasputin’s invitation both he and Monsignor Hermogène joined “Grichka,” as he terms his dissolute friend, upon the pilgrimage. Rasputin the traitor was received everywhere as an angel from Heaven. The people of all classes prostrated themselves and kissed his unclean hands. In Tsarytsine during two days he entered many houses, where he embraced all the good-looking women, but discarded the old and ugly. He was often drunk and riotous.
On entering the monastery at last he isolated himself for four days on pretence of prayer, but he was assisted in his religious exercises by a good-looking young nun with whom he openly walked in the monastery grounds.
Tired of the retirement and the nun’s companionship, he travelled to his native Siberian village of Pokrovsky, Helidor accompanying him.
“During our journey, which was a long one,” Helidor says, “I tried to discover some testimony to the sanctity of my companion. I only found him to be a most uncouth and dissolute person, whose constant talk was of women, and who drank incessantly. I had been mystified by him until then, but I realised that even having been denounced in the Duma, he was quite undisturbed, for his egotism was colossal, and he constantly declared to me that he was the actual Autocrat.”
Helidor’s description of the so-called “monastery” at Pokrovsky is interesting as being from an authentic and reliable source.
“We arrived there at last,” he declared in an interview the other day. “It was a mean Siberian village half hidden in the Siberian snow, for the winter was unduly early. I observed my host closely, for I now knew him to be a traitor and a charlatan. The ‘monastery’ as he called it in Petrograd, and for which hundreds gave him subscriptions, was not a religious house at all, and it had never been consecrated as such. Rasputin himself was not even a monk, for he had never been received into the church.”
In describing this “monastery” for which the monk had filched thousands upon thousands of roubles from the pockets of his neophytes in Petrograd, Helidor says:
“It was a large house, which had only recently been furnished luxuriously. It was full of holy ikons, of portraits of women, and of magnificent presents from their Majesties. The occupants of the place numbered a dozen women, mostly young, garbed as nuns and performing daily religious observances.”
Apparently the establishment was a Siberian “Abode of Love,” much upon the lines, as the Smyth-Piggott cult, yet Helidor has declared that what struck him most was the open hostility of the mujiks towards the “Holy Father.”
“They are annoyed, my dear brother Helidor, because you have come with me from Petrograd,” the “saint” declared in excuse.
But Helidor noticed that Antoine, the Archbishop of Tobolsk, who visited him, betrayed the same marked hostility, while the people of the village all declared without mincing matters that Grichka, whom they had known as a convicted horse-thief and assaulter of women, was merely a débauché.
Again came wild telegrams from the Empress. The “Saint’s” prophecy had been fulfilled and the Tsarevitch had been taken seriously ill at the exact hour he had predicted.
“Nikki has returned. Both of us are in deadly fear,” she telegraphed. “Kousmin (the Court physician) cannot diagnose the malady. Come to us at once, Holy Father, I pray to you, come and save us. Give your blessing and your sympathy to your devoted sister. – A.”
At the same time His Majesty sent a telegraphic message to the man who made and unmade Ministers and who ruled all Russia at home and in the field. It was despatched from the Winter Palace half-an-hour after the message of the Empress, and read:
“Friend, I cannot command, but I beg of you to return instantly to us. We want your help. Without it, Alexis will die, and the House of Romanoff is doomed. I have sent the Imperial train to you. It leaves in an hour. – Nicholas.”
Of this summons the villainous ex-thief took no notice.
Helidor says: “He showed me the telegrams and laughed triumphantly, saying, ‘Nikki seems very much troubled! Why does he not return to the front and urge on his soldiers against the advancing hosts.’ The greater our losses the nearer shall we be to peace. I shall take care that ignorant Russia will not win against the causes of civilisation and humanity.”
“Civilisation and humanity!” This illiterate and dissolute peasant, who each night became hopelessly intoxicated and who in his cups would revile his paymasters the Huns and chant in his deep bass voice refrains of Russian patriotic airs, was actually the dear “friend” of the Tsar of All the Russias! The vicious scoundrel’s influence was reaching its zenith.
To Western readers the whole facts may well appear incredible. But those who know Russia, with its complex world of official corruption and “religious” chicanery, are well aware how anything may happen to that huge Empire when at war.
After a fortnight’s silence, during which the sinister hand of Anna Vyrubova regularly administered that secret drug to the poor, helpless son of the Emperor, Rasputin, with amazing effrontery, dared again to put his foot in Petrograd. On the night of his arrival the Tsaritza, awaiting him anxiously at Tsarskoe-Selo, sent him a note by Ivan Radzick, the trusted body-servant of the Emperor for fifteen years, a note which the miracle-worker preserved most carefully, and which ran as follows:
“Holy Father, – I await you eagerly. Boris (Stürmer) and Frédéricks are with me. Things are increasingly critical. Hasten to us at once and cure poor little Alexis, or he will die. The doctors are powerless. I have had urgent news from Berlin. Miliukoff must be removed, and so must Kerensky and Nicholas (the Grand Duke). Boris has arranged it. You have the means. Something must happen to them within the next forty-eight hours. Nicholas has handed Nikki an abominable letter of threats. The British Ambassador is wary and knows of this. His despatches to London to-night must be intercepted. I am sending the car for you, and await in eagerness once again to kiss your dear hands. – Your devoted sister, Alec.”
Chapter Eleven
Bamboozling the Allies
As a result of the denunciation in the Duma of “Russia’s dark forces,” Boris Stürmer was deprived of the Premiership and appointed by the Tsaritza’s influence to a high office in the Imperial household, where he could still unite with Baron Frédéricks in playing Germany’s game.
A few days after this re-shuffling of the cards, M. Trepoff, the new Premier, made a reassuring statement to the Duma, in which he said: “There will never be a premature or separate peace. Nothing can change this resolution, which is the inflexible will of the august Russian sovereign, who stands for the whole of his faithful people.”
How Rasputin and the camarilla must have chuckled when they read these words of reassurance!
On the very day that declaration was made the monk had received a telegram in cipher from Stockholm, whither it had been first sent from the Königgratzer-strasse in Berlin, and which, de-coded, reads as follows:
“Gregersen (a well-known German agent who had actively assisted von Papen in America) is arriving at Archangel upon a munition ship from New York. You will have early news of him. See that he is placed under P.’s (Protopopoff’s) protection. He will bring you four boxes. Do not open them, but see they are stored carefully. Hand them to our friend R. (Professor Rogovitch, of Samara, a bacteriologist and friend of Rasputin). – Number 70.”
The monk had “early news” of the arrival of the spy Gregersen, for on the day following the receipt of that advice of his coming, the ship upon which he had travelled from New York blew up in Archangel harbour, and no fewer than one thousand, eight hundred persons were killed or injured! Gregersen arrived at the Gorokhovaya that same night, and there met Protopopoff, who furnished him with false papers, upon which his photograph was pasted and sealed.
The four wooden boxes which the spy had brought from America, and which contained the bacilli of anthrax and bubonic plague, were, two days later, handed by the monk to the Professor. But the latter, carelessly handling them when opening them, became infected with anthrax himself, and subsequently died in great agony. By the scoundrel’s timely death Russia was spared an epidemic of those two terrible diseases, it being the intention of Rogovitch and Rasputin to infect with plague the rats in Moscow and other cities.
The fact can never, of course, be disguised that the Tsar was fully cognisant of Rasputin’s evil influence at the Imperial Court, though it seems equally certain that he never suspected him to be the arch-plotter and creature of the Kaiser that he really was. Before the war, Nicholas II had lived a hermit’s life at Tsarskoe-Selo. Every foreign diplomat who has been stationed in Petrograd since his accession knows that he was the echo of everyone’s opinion except his own. The flexibility of his mind was only equalled by its emptiness. Personal in everything, weak, shallow-minded, yet well-intentioned, he had long been interested in spiritualistic séances and table-turning. Indeed, the most notorious frauds and charlatans who brought psychical studies into disrepute have had the honour of “performing” before His Majesty, and have even received decorations from the hands of the gulled Emperor. It is, therefore, not surprising that this bold and amazingly cunning Siberian peasant known as “Grichka,” with his mock miracles – worked by means of drugs supplied to him by the fellow Badmayeff, another charlatan who represented himself as an expert upon “Thibetan” medicine and who had a large clientèle in Petrograd society – could so gull the Emperor that he actually consulted “the Holy Father” upon the most important matters concerning the State.
Through the critical Year of Grace, 1916, when the future of the world’s civilisation was trembling in the balance, the Allies lived utterly unsuspicious of this astounding state of affairs. Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay were in ignorance of the deeply-laid plot of the Emperor William to crush and destroy that splendid piece of patriotic machinery, “the Russian steam-roller.” We in England were frantically making munitions for Russia, and lending her the sinews of war, merely regarding the erotic monk as a society tea-drinking buffoon such as one meets in every capital.
The truth has, however, been revealed by the amazing results of diligent inquiries made by that patriotic little band of Russians who united at the end of 1916 to rid the Empire of its most dangerous enemy, and have placed their secret reports in my hands. The Emperor, though exceedingly rancorous, and though in appearance a quiet, inoffensive little man, was yet capable of the utmost cruelty and hardness. He has been responsible for some terrible miscarriages of justice. His callousness is well-known. After the catastrophe of Khodinska, which cost the lives of nearly two thousand of his subjects, he danced the whole night at a ball given by the French Ambassador, while on reading the telegram which told him of the disaster of Tsushima, which cost Russia her whole fleet and the loss of so many precious lives, he made no remark, but continued his game of tennis in the park of Tsarskoe-Selo.
Those of his personal entourage wondered. They asked themselves whether it was stoicism, indifference, or a strength of mind abnormal. It was neither. Throughout the whole career of Nicholas II his only thought had been to flee from danger, and to leave to others the task of pulling the chestnuts from the fire.
Rasputin and his shrewd and clever fellow-traitors knew all this, and were acting upon the Emperor’s weaknesses, more especially upon His Majesty’s belief in spiritualism and his fear to thwart the imperious declarations of his German-born wife. Alexandra Feodorovna, the complex neurotic woman who had begun her career as Empress by determining to exclude from Court all ladies with blemished reputations, and all those black sheep who creep by back-stair influence into every Court of Europe, had now under Rasputin’s influence welcomed any of the monk’s lady friends, however tarnished their reputations.
There can be no doubt that the Empress’s nerves were not in a sound condition. True, she was in constant communication with Germany, and her actions showed her readiness to betray Russia into the hands of her own people. This fact the world ought to take into consideration. The Empress is the most interesting character-study in the world to-day. We can have no sympathy with those who are traitors, yet it has been clearly proved that the horrors of the Revolution had left a deep impression on her mind. She had no fatalism in her character, and she lived in daily dread of seeing her children and husband murdered. She had no courage. Her highly-strung nature took more seriously to the soothing effect of the evil monk Rasputin’s teaching than would the mind of a woman of normal calibre; hence, while “Nikki” her husband believed implicitly in “dear Gregory’s” advice, she also believed him to be the heaven-sent deliverer of Russia, to wrest it from disaster, and to give to the poor little Tsarevitch good health as Heir to the Romanoff dynasty.
Those latter days of 1916 were truly strenuous ones in the Imperial household. On December 8th the Emperor had left for Moscow, and to him the Tsaritza telegraphed in their private code, as follows:
“Tsarskoe-Selo, December 8th, 11:30 a.m.
“Gregory says that Zakomelsky is proposing a resolution denouncing him at the Council of the Empire to-morrow. At all costs this must be prevented. Boris and Frédéricks agree. You must stop it. – Alec.”
To this there was sent a reply, the copy being on record:
“Moscow, December 8th, 10 p.m.
“Quite agree with undesirability of allowing Z. to criticise, but cannot see how I can prevent it, unless by arrest. I am communicating with a certain quarter. Shall return to-morrow. – Nikki.”
Apparently the Emperor, whatever steps he took, was unable to secure the arrest of the Leader of the Centre, for on the following day, at the meeting of the Council, the resolution was moved by the Baron Meller Zakomelsky, who recognised M. Trepoff’s honest and sincere desire to combat the so-called “dark forces,” but warned the Prime Minister that the method chosen by him was wrong. The only effective weapon, he said, was light, and the Duma and the Council called on the Government to join them in revealing and denouncing the notorious sinister influence. The whole of Russia awaited the eradication of the plague which was corroding the State organism.
This resolution apparently stirred into action the forces gradually arising to combat the camarilla, for on December 13th, Baroness Mesentzoff, wife of Baron Paul Mesentzoff, chamberlain and councillor of State, and a fair-haired “sister-disciple” of Rasputin’s, sent him a letter of warning which is in existence, and of which I here give an English translation.
It was handed to him late at night at his home in the Gorokhovaya. Seated with him in that little sanctum into which his neophytes were admitted by his discreet body-servant, and drinking heavily as usual, were Stürmer, the ex-Premier, and a man named Kartchevsky, a renegade, who was actually at that moment secretary to General von Beseler, the German Governor-General of Warsaw.
The letter read as follows:
“Holy Father, – I have been with Anna (Madame Vyrubova) and Olga (the Tsar’s daughter) an hour ago. I have told them to warn Her Majesty the Empress of a desperate plot against you. Do beware, I pray you, of Youssoupoff, and of the Grand Duke Dmitri. There is a conspiracy to kill you!
“Your pretended friend Pourichkevitch dined with me to-night, and he, too, intends that you shall be removed. We all pray that no harm shall befall you. But I send this at once in warning. I shall be at the séance tomorrow, when I hope to have an opportunity of speaking with you alone. A young friend of mine, Nadjezda Boldyieff, daughter of the General at Kiev, is anxious to enter our circle. So I shall bring her with me. But do, I beg of you, heed this warning, and avoid all contact with the persons herein named. – Your sister, Feo.”
The monk, who was in his cups, as he usually was after midnight – according to his servant’s statement – handed the letter to Stürmer with an inane laugh. And stroking his beard, said with his extraordinary egotism:
“Enemies! Why do these silly impetuous women warn me? I am careful enough to look after myself. I rule Russia – at the orders of the Emperor William! The Tsar is only Tsar in name. The Emperor is myself, Gregory the monk!”
“But Pourichkevitch is dangerous,” declared the traitorous ex-Prime Minister. “He is the fiercest member of the Extreme Right, and our friend Protopopoff has lately received many reports concerning him through the Secret Police.”
“If so, then why is he not imprisoned?” asked Rasputin. “Protopopoff is far too hesitating. A few compromising documents introduced into his house, a police search, an arrest, a word to the Emperor – and he would have an uncomfortable little room beneath the lake in the Fortress of Schüsselburg. No, our friend Protopopoff is far too weak. He dallies too much for the public favour. What is it worth? Personally, I prefer their hatred.”
“And yet you are the great healer – the idol of the working-class, just as Gapon was long ago!” laughed the ex-Premier.
“Yes, I am their Grichka,” laughed Rasputin in his drunken humour. “It is true, my dear Boris. There is but one Tsar, and it is myself – eh?” And he chuckled as he drained his glass of champagne, and laughed at the warning sent him by the woman who had sat at his knee and who had given over her whole private fortune to him, just as a dozen other society women in Petrograd had done. If his “sister-disciples” failed him in funds, then he simply held their letters and blackmailed them till he drove them to desperation, and in six known cases to suicide. The fears of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna for the safety of her pet monk in whom she believed so devoutly, seem to have been aroused by the warning given by the Baroness Mesentzoff, for next day there came to him an urgent telegram from Gatchina, where the Tsaritza had gone on a visit to the Dowager Empress. It read:
