[44] It was only subsequently that I learned that, to overcome the resistance he met with at Bucharest, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sturmer (who had succeeded Sazonoff), had promised that Russian troops would be sent to Rumania. He had not referred to G.H.Q. first.
[45] History will one day settle what part Sturmer played. If he did not actually work for a rapprochement with Germany, though everything seems to show that he did, he none the less did his country irreparable harm through his criminal negligence and utter lack of scruples.
[46] The very education of a sovereign makes him entirely unfitted for the task before him, and yet it is impossible to make good the defect afterwards. The larger the part he plays in government the less he knows of what is going on. To keep him away from his people he is given nothing but mutilated, distorted, and “cooked” reports. No one can realise the resisting power of those about a throne, the invincible apathy of a bureaucracy steeped in traditional observance and routine! Whatever strength of mind, whatever tenacity a sovereign may display in finding out the truth, does he ever really succeed? Napoleon had been through the school of life, and raised himself to a throne by sheer genius and audacity, but his fate was the same as that of other rulers. In the last years of his reign did he still know what was happening in France? Had he still a sense of reality?
[47] It really seems that a perverse fate intervened to protect Rasputin. One day the Czar was given a document in which the excesses of the staretz were set forth highly circumstantially. In reading it the Czar observed that on the day and hour at which one of the acts mentioned in the document were alleged to have taken place Rasputin had actually been at Tsarskoïe-Selo. Nothing more was required to convince the Czar that the whole report was simply a tissue of lies.
[48] The Grand-Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna had founded a small religious community, of which she was the Superior, at Moscow. She lived there retired from the world, devoting all her time to prayer and good works.
[49] I had all these details from the lips of Mlle. Schneider, reader to the Czarina, who had once been in the household of the Grand-Duchess Elizabeth, who had always remained very fond of her.
[50] The circumstances of Rasputin’s death are to be found in the newspapers of the time. I will briefly recapitulate them here. His death was the result of a plot in which some of the participants were the Grand-Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Czar, Prince Yussoupoff, whose wife was the niece of Nicholas II., M. Purichkevitch, a monarchist deputy in the Duma, and Dr. Lazarevsky, who accompanied him. The Grand-Duke wished to show by his presence that it was not a case of an act of rebellion against the Czar, but merely the execution of a miscreant whom the nation had judged and found guilty of abusing the confidence of his sovereign.
Rasputin was killed on the night of December 30th. Prince Yussoupoff had gone to fetch him in his car very late in the evening, and brought him to his house. They first tried to poison him, but as the poison was slow in taking effect, Prince Yussoupoff and the deputy killed him with revolvers. His corpse was thrown into the Neva and was picked up two days later.
[51] I am referring, of course, to the articulate portion of the nation. The untutored masses cared nothing about him, and among those who knew of his existence a large number were favourable to him. Many considered his death an act of vengeance on the part of the courtiers who were jealous of their privileges. “The first time that one of ourselves gets to the Czar, he is killed by the courtiers,” they said.
To the moujik the great criminals were those who came between the sovereign and his people, and prevented him from extending his favours to them. There was a popular saying that “the Czar gives, but his servants withhold,” in which the peasant expressed his faith in the goodness of his Czar and his hatred of those around him.