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Updated: May 2, 2025
WITHIN a fortnight of the mock monk's audience of the Tsar he found himself installed in a fine suite of rooms in the Palace at Tsarskoe-Selo, one apartment being assigned to myself as his secretary. Rasputin's ascendancy over the Imperial couple became daily more marked. I was the onlooker of a very curious and clever game.
After our drive back to Rasputin's house the monk, flinging himself into a chair and lighting a cigarette, thoughtfully remarked: "That puppet Erchoff will later on regret that he denounced me a year ago. His term of office is at its limit." The mock saint was possessed of an almost supernatural intuition.
Within ten minutes she had written out a cheque for the whole of her private fortune, while at the monk's dictation I wrote out a declaration that his allegations were false, a document which he signed and handed to her, together with Lachkarioff's original statement. Even then Rasputin's cunning was not at its limit. Lachkarioff's usefulness to Germany in Russia was at an end.
Rasputin's bearded face relaxed into that strange, sardonic grin of his as he replied: "I know Menchikof. He is harmless. The only man we may fear is Burtsef. He knows far too much of the police organisation and the deeds of our provocating agents." "I agree. But he lives in Paris, and hence the Okhrana cannot lay hands upon him.
"The traitor has gone back to his English pay-masters!" said the Starets. "I have written here the order for his arrest and the confiscation of his property." And he placed before the Emperor the document I had written. To Rasputin's dismay, however, His Majesty seemed disinclined to append his signature.
Monsieur Felix Violle, a Frenchman who had become a naturalised Russian, and who carried on business as a wholesale furrier in the Nevski in Petrograd, had a very pretty young wife. One day, at one of the weekly reunions of the sister-disciples, this young woman was brought by Madame Vyrubova's sister, she having expressed her desire to enter Rasputin's cult.
Yet one afternoon, while I sat writing at Rasputin's dictation in his elegant sitting-room in the palace of Tsarskoe-Selo, the Empress, who was dressed ready to go for her daily drive, burst angrily in, saying: "Nikki has just appointed that hateful money-grubber Kokovtsov! I tried all I could to prevent it, Father. But I have failed!"
I was present at the beginning of the change. It was the evening of Rasputin's murder. The town of course talked of nothing else it had been talking, without cessation, since two o'clock that afternoon. The dirty, sinister figure of the monk with his magnetic eyes, his greasy beard, his robe, his girdle, and all his other properties, brooded gigantic over all of us.
I replaced the telephone receiver with a heavy heart. Yet another innocent man was to die as victim of Rasputin's overweening vanity and evil influence in every quarter. When I entered and told the monk, who was already in bed in a half-drunken state, he merely turned over and continued snoring.
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