Suddenly my heart gave a bound. A pleasant-looking, grey-haired man, in gold-rimmed spectacles, and carrying a big bundle of papers, had entered by the back way, and was walking to his seat. It was M. Miliukoff! He had had my anonymous letter, and had come in by the back way, being followed by his bearded, bald-headed friend. Once again had I been able to warn him of danger.
The Government was now dancing upon a volcano.
The sitting opened, the President Rodzianko made a speech in which he criticised severely the policy of the Stürmer Government, and everyone realised the seriousness of the situation now that the President of the Duma came out against the Prime Minister.
"The Government must learn from us what the country needs," said Rodzianko fiercely. "The Government must not follow a path different from the people. With the confidence of the nation it must head the social forces in the march toward victory over the enemy, along the path that harmonises with the aspirations of the people. There is no other path to be followed."
Then the President went on to declare that, though there was no discord among the Allies, yet there was no trick that the enemy would not play with the treacherous object of wrecking their alliance. "Russia will not betray her friends," he declared, "and I say she, with contempt, refuses any consideration of a separate peace."
The speech was greeted with thunderous outbursts of applause, while Stürmer, who was present, rose and left after its conclusion.
Then, when the applause and cheering of the Ambassadors of the Allies had died down; Paul Miliukoff, the brilliant leader of the Constitutional Democrats, rose gravely and began to speak.
That speech, which the camarilla had vainly striven strenuously to suppress, proved historic, and was mainly the cause of Stürmer's overthrow. Boldly and relentlessly he showed his hearers the favour with which the Teutons regarded Stürmer and the consternation caused in the Allied camp by his activities. Reading extracts from German and Austrian newspapers, he brought out the fact that the Central Powers regarded Stürmer as a member "of those circles which look on the war against Germany without particular enthusiasm"; that Stürmer's appointment to the Foreign Ministry was greeted in the Teutonic countries as the beginning of a new era in Russian politics, while the dismissal of Sazonov produced in the Entente countries an effect "such as would have been produced by a pogrom."
The crowning sensation, however, was what he revealed concerning Stürmer's connection with the blackmailing operations of his private secretary, Manasevitch-Manuiloff, who, a few weeks before, had been arrested on a charge of bribery. The secretary told the directors of a Petrograd bank that proceedings were being instituted against them by the Ministry of the Interior for alleged trading with the enemy, and offered to suppress the affair "through influential friends" for a large consideration.
The representatives of the bank had special reasons to get even with the "dark forces," and especially Protopopoff, since the retired Minister of the Interior, A. N. Khvostov, was a brother of the bank's president. Khvostov owed his dismissal to a plot to kill Rasputin, which was investigated by Manuiloff. The directors of the bank, therefore, accepted the fellow's offer, handing him over a large sum of money in marked notes.
