The electrocution of the murderer, Petrovitch, already described, furnished me with a valuable opportunity which I was quick to seize.
I have not extenuated this act, and I will not defend it. I content myself with recording that this man had been the principal instrument in promoting the Russo-Japanese war, and the principal obstacle to peace. In this he was acting as the paid agent of a foreign Power, and was therefore guilty of high treason to his own country. On these grounds my execution of him, although irregular at the time, has since been formally ratified by the highest tribunal of the Russian Empire, the Imperial Council of State.
A justification which I value still more, consists in the fact that the removal of this man proved the turning point in the history of the war.
Within a month of his death I had the satisfaction to be made the medium of an informal overture for peace. The negotiations thus opened have proceeded with great secrecy, but before these lines meet the public eye, I have every hope that the calamitous struggle in Manchuria will have been suspended indefinitely.
To return:
Owing to the secret life led by the deceased man, it was some time before his absence from his usual haunts excited remark.
When it became evident that something must have happened to him, people were still slow to suspect that he had come to a violent end. Many persons believed that he had been ruined by the ill-success of the war, and had gone into hiding from his creditors. Others supposed that he had been secretly arrested.
Some of his fellow-plotters in the Russian capital imagined that he had fled to Germany to escape the penalty of his treason. In Germany, on the other hand, I afterward learned, he was supposed to have been sent to Siberia by order of the Czar.
For weeks the “Disappearance of M. Petrovitch” was the general topic of discussion in the newspapers and in private circles; but no one came near guessing the truth.