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, and other cities, he was fierce in his hatred of the Kaiser, and while cleverly scheming for the downfall of his own people, he was yet at the same time urging them to prosecute the war.
A man of abnormal intellect, he was a criminal lunatic of that types which the world sees once every century; a man whose physical powers were amazing, and who though dirty and verminous, with long hair unbrushed and beard untrimmed for a year at a time, could exercise a weird and uncanny fascination which few women, even the most refined, could resist.
The terms upon which Rasputin was with the Empress it has been given to me to reveal in this volume. They would have been beyond credence if the German spy who had been placed as secretary to the Emperor, had been loyal to his unscrupulous employers. But he was not. Money does much in these war-days, and in consequence of a big payment made to him by Rasputin’s enemies, the patriots of Russia—and they were many—he intercepted a letter sent by the Empress to her “Holy Father” early in 1916—a copy of which I have in the formidable dossier of confidential documents from which I am culling these curious details.