“It shall be done,” replied the Emperor quietly. “Father, I am glad you have, told me.” Indeed, owing, to the false statements of pro-German police officials, General Brusiloff was within an ace of arrest a week later. The Minister Nekrasov, however, received his dismissal, Protopopoff being one of his enemies, and in that manner was the monk playing Germany’s game.
Thus the evil power of this arch-scoundrel was paramount. By his influence men were made and broken daily. Indeed, to-day dozens of men who because of their suspicion of the saint’s “divinity,” incurred the blasphemer’s displeasure are, languishing in gaol in various remote parts of the Empire, while German agents occupied some of the “highest offices in Russia,” while the head of the Church of holy Russia had been appointed by the unwashed blackguard himself.
As proof of this interview at Livadia, the dossier of Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian Cagliostro, which is before me, contains the following letter:
“Rizhsky Prospect, 37.
“My dear Father,—I have heard that you have left upon a pilgrimage to your own monastery in Siberia. May God be with you, and bless you. To-day my title of Excellency is officially announced. My bankers have passed to yours the sum of 30,000 roubles. There will be a further sum of 10,000 roubles passed if you will kindly send me, under cover, those two letters of the Countess Birileff. I await your reply.—Ivan Scheveleff.”
Rasputin’s mania for filing his correspondence is the basis of our true knowledge of his astounding career and activity, for the next folio in the dossier is a copy of a blackmailing letter he wrote a few weeks after his visit to the Crimea, to the man Sergius Timacheff. It reads as follows:
“Friend,—It is now many days since His Majesty appointed you Privy Councillor of the Empire, but I have received no word from you or from your bank as we arranged. If I receive nothing by next Thursday, the facts concerning your son’s implication in the Platanoff affair (the blowing up of a Russian battleship in the Baltic by German agents) will be passed on to the Admiralty. If double the sum we arranged passes to my bank before the date I have named, I shall remain silent. If not, I shall take immediate action.—G.”
The “holy” blackmailer was becoming more and more unscrupulous. Behind him he had the Emperor and Empress, soothed to sleep by his marvellous cunning and his mock miracles. Incredible as it seems, he was able to evade all the many pitfalls set for him by his enemies, because he swept them all from his path by Imperial orders and stood forth alone as the “Holy Father,” sent by Providence to create a new and prosperous Russia.
He had no fear of death. He wore a shirt of mail, and the Palace police, the same ever-alert surveillance as that placed upon the person of the Tsar himself, kept a watchful eye upon him, though through Protopopoff they had orders to relinquish their watchfulness at any moment the “Saint” deemed it necessary.
He frequently deemed it necessary if he held his conferences with Stürmer, Protopopoff, Anna Vyrubova, and the small camarilla of persons who were being so richly rewarded by mysterious incomes from estates they did not possess—or, plainly speaking, by money from Berlin.