By the clever ruse of establishing his cult of “sister-disciples” he had so secured the ears of the weak-kneed Emperor and his consort, that whatever views he declared to them they at once became law. So amazingly cunning was he that he realised that the only way in which to retain the hold he had established at Court was now and then to absent himself from it, first making certain “prophecies,” the fulfilment of which could be effected by his secret friends.
As often as he uttered a prophecy and left Petrograd upon one of his erotic adventures—to found provincial circles of the cult of Believers—so surely would that prophecy come true. He foretold the downfall of one official, the death of another upon a certain date, a further relapse of the Tsarevitch, and so on, until their Majesties held him in awe as heaven-inspired. In the high Court circle of which he was the centre, this “Holy Father” could do no wrong, while his most disgraceful exploits, scandals unprintable, were merely regarded as mundane pleasures allowable to him as a “saint.”
No reign since the days of the Caesars was more fraught by disgraceful scandals than those last days of the régime of the ill-fated Romanoffs. The Roman empresses were never traitors as the Tsaritza most certainly was. Can any one have sympathy with the once-Imperial, afterwards exiled to Siberia—that same zone of that illimitable tundra to which the Tsar of all the Russias had exiled so many of his innocent and patriotic subjects, men and women who fought for Russia’s right to live, to expand, and to prosper? Let us remember that in Siberia to-day lie the bones of a hundred thousand Russian patriots, persecuted under the evil régimes of Alexander and of Nicholas. In the days of the ex-Tsar’s father I went to Siberia, and I visited the convict prisons there. I saw convicts in the mines chained to wheelbarrows by forged fetters, and I saw those poor tortured wretches who worked in the dreaded quicksilver mines of Nertchinsk, their teeth falling out and their scalps bare. Of what I myself witnessed, I years ago placed on record in black and white. Those reports of mine will be found in the public libraries of Great Britain. But to-day they do not concern the reader of this book only inasmuch as they furnish proofs, with others, of the oppressive hand of the Romanoffs upon the devoted and long-suffering people of Holy Russia—“Holy”—save the mark! The erotic rascal Rasputin was in himself a striking example of the men who control the Paroslávny Church.
This mock-pious blackguard, to whose artful cunning and clever cupidity has been due the death of hundreds of thousands of brave Russians of all classes in the field, held the fortunes of the great Empire within the hollow of his dirty paw.
The contents of the big dossier of his private papers disclose this satanic scoundrel’s double-dealing, and the true terms in which he stood with the Wilhelmstrasse.
To me, as I study the documents, it is astounding how accurately the Germans had gauged who were their actual friends in Russia and who were their enemies. Surely their sources of information were more astounding and more complete than even the great Stiebur, the King of Spydom, had ever imagined.
It sterns that while Rasputin was living a dissolute life at the “monastery” he had established in his far-off native village of Pokrovsky, he received many telegrams from Tsarskoe-Selo, both from the Emperor and Empress, urging him to forgive his traducers and to return. To none of these he responded. One day, however, he received a telegraphic message which came over the wires as a Government one, marked “On His Imperial Majesty’s Service,” from Madame Vyrubova. Its copy is here before me, and reads:
“Return at once to Petrograd. A dear friend from afar, awaits you. It is most urgent that you should come back at once. There is much to be done.—Anna.”
Such an urgent summons showed him that his presence was required. He knew too well that the “dear friend” was a German agent sent in secret to see him.
Therefore he bade farewell to his dozen “sister-disciples,” the head of whom was the opulent “Sister Vera,” sister of the dissolute Bishop Teofan whom Rasputin himself had created. Teofan was a fellow-criminal of his who had been imprisoned for horse-stealing in Tobolsk, and now he wore richly embroidered ecclesiastical robes and bent the knee before the altar daily.