The Minister of Evil | Page 4

given me by
my new chief, I called upon him at the small ground-floor flat which he
occupied in the Poltavskaya, close to the Nicholas Station. The house,
the remaining rooms of which were unoccupied, was a dark
forbidding-looking one, with a heavy door beneath a portico, and
containing deep cellars into which nobody ever penetrated save the
Starets himself.
On the morning of my first visit there, I was, from the beginning, much
mystified. The dining-room was quite a luxurious apartment, so was the
"saint's" study--a den with a soft Eastern carpet, a big writing-table, a
high porcelain stove of chocolate and white, and silk-upholstered
settees. From this den a door opened into the "holy" man's
sleeping-room, an apartment of spartan plainness save for its big stove,
a replica of the one in the study.
The household, I found, consisted of one other person, an old Siberian
peasant woman of about sixty, named Anna, who came from
Pokrovsky, the "saint's" native village. She acted as housekeeper and
maid-of-all-work.
That first morning spent with Rasputin was full of interest. He was a
dirty, uncouth, illiterate fellow who repelled me. His hands were hard,
his fingers knotty, his face was of a distinctly criminal type, and yet in
my bewilderment I remembered that General Kouropatkine had
declared him to be sent by the Almighty as the Protector of Russia.
His conversation was coarse and overbearing, and interlarded by
quotations from Holy Writ. He mentioned to me certain ladies in high
society, and related, with a broad grin upon his saintly countenance,
scandal after scandal till I stood aghast.
Truly the "saint" was a most remarkable personality. From the first I
had been compelled to admit that whatever the Russian public had said,
there was a certain amount of basis for the gossip. His was the most
weird and compelling personality that I had ever met. Even Stolypin
had been impressed by him, though the Holy Synod had declared him
to be a fraud.

My work consisted of reading to him and replying to letters from
hundreds of women who had become attracted by his peculiar distorted
emotional religion, many of whom desired to enter the cult which he
had established. As secretary it was also my duty to arrange for the
weekly reunions of the "sister-disciples," held in a big bare upstairs
room, in which hung a holy ikon and several sacred pictures, and in
which the mysteries of his "religion" were practised.
Ere long, I found that to those weekly séances there flocked many of
the wealthiest and most cultured women in Petrograd, who actually
held the ex-horse-stealer in veneration, and believed, as the peasants
believed, that he could work miracles.
One afternoon, after I had been nearly a month in Rasputin's service,
Boris Stürmer, a well-known Court sycophant, with bristling hair and a
sweeping goatee beard, was brought to the monk by Kouropatkine.
Both were in uniform, and after ushering them into Rasputin's study I
felt that some dark conspiracy was on foot.
They remained in council for nearly an hour when I was called into the
room, and to me, as the monk's right hand, the plot was explained so
that I could assist in it.
To me the German Stürmer, who afterwards rose to be Prime Minister
of Russia, was no stranger. Indeed, it was he who, inviting me to be
seated, explained what was in progress.
"It is necessary, Rajevski, that the Father should meet Her Majesty the
Empress. He is our saviour, and it is but right that he should come to
the Imperial Court. But he cannot be introduced by any of the ordinary
channels. Her Majesty must be impressed, and her curiosity aroused."
I bowed in assent, little dreaming of the devilish scheme which,
instigated from Potsdam, and paid for by German gold, was about to be
worked. Already Germany had decided to conquer Russia, and already
the far-seeing Kaiser had watched and recognised that he could use
Rasputin's undoubted influence in our priest-ridden country for his own
dastardly ends.

"Now," continued Stürmer, stroking his beard as he looked at me. "We
have just discovered that Her Majesty intends to pay a visit incognita
next Friday to the shrine of Our Lady at Kazan, in order to pray for the
birth of an heir to the Romanoffs. We have therefore decided that our
Father shall go to Kazan, and be found by the Empress praying before
the shrine beseeching the Almighty to grant Her Majesty her fond
desire. He will appear to her a perfect stranger uttering exactly the same
prayer as that in her mind."
"They will not speak," Kouropatkine added. "Our Father will
apparently take no notice of her save to glance into her face, for why
should he recognise in her the