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Everyone knew that Rasputin's power was already, in 1912, greater than that of the Tsar Nicholas himself. Day after day ambitious men called at the house in the Gorokhovaya, to which we had now moved, all of them anxious for ministerial and clerical appointments, which he obtained for them at prices fixed by himself.
But he was not the first furious husband who had had cause to hate the hypnotic peasant. The man Striaptchef and the woman Sabler, who constituted Rasputin's bodyguard, assisted by Prince Gorianoff, quickly heard of the furrier's anger and told the monk.
This I did, and next evening the girl Bauer called. She was slim, very pretty, and dressed as she was, as a girl of the people, none would suspect her of having committed several secret murders at Rasputin's instructions. "Olga," he said, when she was shown into his room, "really you are growing prettier each day! I envy Ivan Ivanovitch, for he has good taste."
Now, Kurloff was another treacherous bureaucrat, a creature of Rasputin's, who sat in Protopopoff's Ministry of the Interior, and who later on collected the gangs of the "Black Hundred," those hired assassins whom he clothed in police uniforms and had instructed in machine-gun practice those renegades who played such a sinister part in the first Revolution.
And he chuckled within himself as was his peasant's habit when mightily pleased. Truly, that meeting with the Tsar's valet Tchernoff was quite as fateful to Russia as the meeting with the neurotic spiritualistic Empress herself. ABOUT a week after Rasputin's first audience of the Empress Alexandra, the Bishop Theophanus, confessor of the Imperial family, paid him a visit at the Poltavskaya.
Rasputin's overbearing insolence knew no bounds. Now that he was the power behind the Throne, he compelled all to bow to him, the educated as well as the peasantry. On entering a house, whether that of prince or peasant, he would invariably kiss the young and pretty women, while he would turn his back upon and refuse even to speak with those who were older.
Nevertheless, within forty-eight hours of Rasputin's conversation with the Tsar, the Church of Russia had been swept clean of all its loyal adherents, and in their places even in the bishoprics of Kazan, Tver and Odessa were appointed alcoholic rascals of the same calibre as Rasputin himself. Is it, then, any wonder that Holy Russia has fallen?
All was the creation of Rasputin's evil brain. With the Emperor and Empress absent in the South, he had, with the connivance of "No. 70, Berlin," determined to undermine the moral of the whole nation by disseminating false reports and arranging for disaster after disaster.
"Well, my dear Count," laughed the Emperor carelessly, "better one Starets than ten hysterics." This seemed to me to prove that Rasputin's presence often saved the Emperor from the hysterical outbursts of his wife. Indeed, only the previous day the monk put about a story in Petrograd to account for the Empress's hysterical state.
At Rasputin's orders I went round to Malinovsky, Assistant Director of Police, who at the monk's request telephoned to Tver to inquire what suspicions there were against the banker Ganskau.
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