Then I asked who Rasputin was. I was told that he called himself a pope, but in reality he was only a coarse and ignorant adventurer from Siberia; and they spoke with disgust of this intruder and the position he had contrived to acquire.
Rasputin, a name for ever detestable and detested by all who have a grain of feeling of straightforwardness and honesty, is perhaps the most diabolical figure of our century. Some hundreds of years ago he would have been looked upon as a sorcerer.
A native of Pokrovskoe, a little village situated in the province of Tobolsk in Siberia; a mixture of charlatan and satyr; neither monk nor priest, but simply an illiterate peasant; a poor village driver; father of three children left behind in their izba, but who later on came to school in Petrograd.
To the most depraved morals he joined a great love of vodka.
After having tried theft several times, and been sentenced to two or three terms of imprisonment, the luminous idea dawned on him one fine day to pose as a saint, thinking the occupation would be more lucrative. He therefore embarked on the life of one of those wandering monks living on alms and of whom I have already spoken.
From the depths of those strange steel-grey eyes came a light endowed with an enormous magnetism, amounting to hypnotism, it seems, and he practised this power on nearly all the women whom he met irrespective of age, surroundings, disposition, bent of mind—whether light or austere.
Naturally he employed this power to surround himself principally with women in the best society, and also with those endowed with large fortunes, this being at the same time more flattering and more practical.
The new religion, if one may so describe the lax and too easy doctrine that he preached, was, I am told, a mixture of those “religions” that flourished in the Middle Ages, and appealed to that milieu enormously. He went so far as to preach that a laxity of morals should be regarded as the sin most easily pardoned by the Almighty ... and women of the best-known families and those placed in the highest position were present incognita at these “religious” services.
During each of his so-called “pilgrimages” he continually made new disciples; sister-disciples thronged his progress.
It was at one of these meetings at Petrograd that Madame Vyruboff, of unlucky memory, who is to-day imprisoned in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul but who was then the favourite lady-in-waiting to the Empress—in fact the most intimate confidante of both the Tzar and the Tzarina—met him for the first time. This intriguer, like so many others, fell so much under his influence that she became one of his most zealous and devoted followers—later she became his mistress—and formed the project to present him at Court.