The Minister of Evil: The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia

Badmayev, a small, ferret-eyed man, his features of Tartar cast, came and dined with us, after which Rasputin signed a cheque for twenty-eight thousand roubles, a sum to which "the doctor" was entitled under an agreement. Well did I know that the sum in question was payment for his active assistance in supplying certain drugs of which the monk in turn declared that he himself held the formula. The drugs—which he pretended to be the secret of the priests of Tibet—were those which he doled out in small quantities to his sister-disciples, and which produced insensibility to physical pain, drugs which were so baneful and pernicious that the monk always warned me against them, and never took any himself.

After dinner, at which they both drank deeply of champagne, the monk and his friend went out to spend the evening at a low-class variety theatre, while I was left alone until midnight.

In consequence I visited some friends in the Ivanovskaya, and returned to Rasputin's at about a quarter-past twelve. Twenty minutes later he returned in a hopeless state of intoxication; therefore I did not speak to him till next morning.

Such was the fellow's vitality that he was up before six o'clock. At seven he went out, and returned about nine, when he called me to his den.

"Féodor," he said, "I wish you to leave to-day for Vilna, and go to the Palace Hotel there. Remain until a friend of ours named Heckel calls upon you."

"Who is Heckel?" I asked, surprised at being sent upon such a long journey in that sudden manner.

"A friend of Hardt and myself. Do not be inquisitive—only obey. When Heckel calls please give him this letter," and he handed me a rather thick letter in an official cartridge envelope of the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "Heckel will tell you that he is from 'Father Gregory.' He is tall, fair, and rather slim—a German, as you may guess from his name. Your train leaves at two-forty this afternoon. Be careful of that letter and to whom you deliver it in secret. Heckel, after finding you at the hotel, will produce an English five-pound note and show it to you. That will be his passport. If he does not do so, then do not give him the letter."

That afternoon I left for Vilna by the Warsaw express, and after a long journey through the endless pines and silver birches duly arrived at the hotel indicated, and there awaited my visitor. He arrived next day, a fair-haired, slim man, just as Rasputin had described him, evidently an agent-provocateur from Berlin. After he had been ushered into my bedroom by a waiter, he greeted me warmly, and inquired if I had anything to hand him.

To this I made an evasive reply, in pretence of being in ignorance of his meaning, whereupon he said in German:

"Ah! I forgot. You wish first to establish my identity," and laughingly he produced from his wallet an English five-pound note, which he showed to me.

In consequence I handed him the letter from the Ministry, which he placed unopened in his pocket and then left, while that same night I returned to Petrograd.

Three days later I learned the truth.

Ivan Botkine, the trusted secret agent of the Prime Minister Kokovtsov, who had left Berlin on the twenty-second for Petrograd, had been found dead in one of the sleeping compartments on the arrival of the train at the frontier station of Wirballen. His pockets and valise had been rifled, and an inquiry had been opened. Though the doctors disagreed as to the exact cause of death, it was apparent that one of the dishes he had eaten in the restaurant car an hour before had been poisoned.

Further, I have since established the horrifying fact that the mysterious letter from the Ministry which I handed to Heckel in Vilna contained a secret poison! That it was used to remove poor Botkine, Rasputin afterwards admitted to me. Such were the methods of the camarilla who were ruling Russia!

CHAPTER VI

RASPUTIN IN BERLIN

Truly, our Russia was a country of blood and tears under the last of the Romanoffs. Its creed and its motto was "Gallows and Siberia!"

No man's life was safe under a régime run by scoundrels, of whom "Grichka," my chief, was the worst.

An unlimited secret fund was placed at the disposal of the Ministry of the Interior for purposes of the Secret Police, and when I say that Rasputin controlled that Ministry as well as the Emperor himself, it can easily be understood that all who were loyal Russians were "suspect," and denunciation throve on all sides. The Okhrana recruited its agents from all quarters. That is why one was never sure that the stranger who denounced Rasputin and his friends was not an agent-provocateur.

Every Russian subject of any note, and every foreign traveller, was watched, not because of his disloyalty, but because Rasputin and his camarilla, including the Empress, feared lest he should discover how they were daily betraying Russia and its Tsar.

I have been, at Rasputin's orders, many times in the central bureau of the Secret Police in search of the index-card of some person who had fallen beneath the monk's displeasure. In these indices and in the corresponding files the persons concerned were, I found, never designated by their own names, but by code-names that could be telegraphed if necessary from city to city. Thus the Deputy Cheidze (since become famous) was registered under the name of "drawing-room" (gostini), Lenin (also since famous) as "symbol," Miliukoff as "grass," and the traitor Soukhomlinoff as "glycerine."

Those were indeed terrible days in Holy Russia—days when the innocent were sent to their death, while Rasputin, the religious fraud, laughed and drank champagne with his high-born devotees, who believed him, even in this twentieth century, to be divine!

I remember that on May 16th, 1914, when the political horizon was cloudless and no one dreamed of war, I sat in the visitors' gallery of the Duma, having been sent there by Rasputin to listen to the debate and report to him.

The labour leader Kerensky, who afterwards became Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government, rose and from the tribune proclaimed the infamy of the police. He did not mince matters. He said:

"The most notorious jailers of the period of Alexander III. knew how to respect in their political enemies the man who thought differently, and when they shut him up in the fortress of Schlüsselburg they would sometimes come to chat with him. And some of those martyrs, those men struggling for liberty, have been able to return to us with the glamour about them of twenty years' hard labour. But now, the sons of those famous jailers do not hesitate to seize young men of seventeen or eighteen and make them die slowly, but surely, under the blows of the knout, under the strokes of the rod, or by the burns of a red-hot iron. Are we not returning to the days when political prisoners were walled up alive? And you imagine, gentlemen, that you can claim for this country the civilising mission of a European nation!"

He spoke of a man whom I knew well, one of the most sinister persons in all Russia, a man who, like Rasputin and Stürmer, accepted German gold. The man's name was Evno Azef, upon whom unfortunately the French Government bestowed the Legion of Honour.

Before he went to Paris, Azef was a close friend of Rasputin and of Stürmer. He was a criminal of the worst type, an expert in crime, though he was a recognised agent of the Russian Political Police. And yet so clever was he as an agent-provocateur that he actually managed to get himself elected as director of the Terrorist organisation of Petrograd, and as a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Party!

In my presence he one night, when in his cups, boasted to the merry monk what he had to his credit as a revolutionary. He organised the murders of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, and of the Grand Duke Sergius. It was he who prepared the attempted murders of Admiral Dubassof, the Governor-General Guerchelman, and the attempt on Nicholas II. The latter was with Rasputin's knowledge and consent! Perhaps Alexandra Feodorovna knew of it. Who knows? That she was not so devoted to "Nikki" as she pretended is well known to everyone who was at the Imperial Court at the time. Happily, however, the plot failed because of circumstances which Azef could not control.

The scoundrel also assisted in the drawing up of the plans for the military mutinies at Moscow, Viborg, and Kronstadt, while he knew beforehand of the preparations for the assassination of General Sakarof, and of Governor Bogdanovitch at Ufa, as well as a number of Terrorist crimes which succeeded.

One of his crimes in conspiracy with Rasputin I will here relate, because it is a mystery which has long puzzled the London police.

On the morning of January 11th, 1909, the London newspapers contained a report of a strange discovery. Four days before there had arrived at Victoria Station a young French lady, dark-haired and extremely good-looking, who took a cab to a small but highly respectable private hotel in the vicinity. There she gave the name of Mademoiselle Thomas, and her profession as governess. Next morning a tall, thin young foreigner called for her, and they went out together, she returning very late that night apparently exhausted after a long motor journey. Next day she remained in her room all day. On the third day an elderly man called, and she went out with him, being absent about a couple of hours. On her return she went straight to her room and nothing was seen of her further until the next day at noon the chambermaid failed to arouse her by knocking. The police were informed, the door was forced, and Mademoiselle Thomas was found dead. She was lying upon the floor fully dressed.

The medical evidence at the inquest was that the pretty French governess had been dead fully eighteen hours. Upon her or in her small hand-luggage there was nothing to establish her identity. That she had taken poison was the opinion of the expert medical witness. Yet the poison could not be established. Apparently it was a case of suicide, for the laundry marks and names of the makers of her clothing had been deliberately removed.

One thing, however, was extremely mysterious. Upon the marble top of the washhand-stand in the bedroom the police found some scrawled words in a character they could not decipher. Experts were brought in, when it was found that the writing was in Russian character, and the words were: "The holy Starets is–"

This conveyed nothing to the London police, who, of course, knew nothing save that a "Starets" in Russia is a "saint."

Therefore the experts at Scotland Yard were, after much patient investigation, compelled to dismiss it as one of London's unsolved mysteries.

Now for the truth.

One night, a year before, when I had returned with Rasputin from Tsarskoe-Selo, we found awaiting us the somewhat dandified man of a hundred aliases and as many disguises, the notorious Azef. He greeted us both warmly, and being a close friend of Rasputin, the monk took him into his cosy little den, where for over an hour they remained closeted together.

I was one of the few who knew the secret of Azef's crimes. Indeed, when I entered the room while the pair were talking I heard him ask with a laugh:

"What if we give him a taste of the necktie of Stolypin—eh?"

"It certainly would be best, my dear Evno," the monk agreed. "That is if you think the accusation can be well made."

"Trust me," laughed the great agent-provocateur. "A denunciation, the discovery of papers—you have those of Buchman in your safe, by the way, and they could be used—arrest, trial, and the necktie! It would be quite easy, and his mouth would be closed."

"He is growing dangerous," growled Rasputin. "What you say is perfectly true."

Then turning to me, he said:

"Féodor, bring those papers which Manuiloff brought me a week ago—the papers used for the arrest of Professor Buchman in Warsaw."

I obeyed, well knowing how that file of incriminating correspondence with an Anarchist group in Zurich had been forged by Stürmer's secretary Manuiloff, and how it had been found among the professor's effects.

"The necktie of Stolypin," was Azef's playful allusion to the ever-ready gallows to which he, plotting with Rasputin, Manuiloff, Guerassimof, and others, was so constantly sending innocent persons. Truly, Russia was a strange country even before the outbreak of war.

The immediate object of Azef's activities, combined with Rasputin's, was at Germany's direction to extend the Terrorist action and thus cause trouble and unrest in the Empire. By every fresh success he obtained more money from Berlin, and at the same time strengthened his privileged position in the ranks of the Terrorists, while his worth was increased in the eyes of both the Minister of the Interior and of the Emperor. The scoundrel's revolutionary career and his police career were inseparable. He was a Terrorist to-day, a police official to-morrow, but, like Rasputin, a secret agent of Germany always!

Terrible as it may seem, the Okhrana, with the connivance of the Wilhelmstrasse, and with the Empress's full knowledge—of this there is no doubt, because documentary evidence exists which proves it—caused the highest personages in Russia to be murdered or hanged in order to prove to those lucky ones who survived how necessary was the organisation for their own existence!

A hundred dramas could be written upon the intrigues of Grichka and Azef. Some of them were amazing; all were disgraceful. The life of the most upright and honest man or woman was not safe if marked down by the pair of scoundrels. The attempt upon Admiral Dubassof, in which Count Konovnicin met his death; the attempt upon General Guerchelman, Governor-General of Moscow; the assassination of General Slepzof at Tver, with half a dozen other murders of the same kind, were all the work of Azef. Why? Because both Azef and General Guerassimof, chief of the Secret Police, were in the toils of Germany. The Wilhelmstrasse paid well, but threatened exposures if this or that person were not removed. Hence Azef, as one of the heads of the Terrorists, received his orders through Rasputin, and, obeying, was paid his blood-money.

Many of the dastardly crimes which Azef, aided by the monk, committed at Germany's orders will never be known. Hundreds of innocent persons were arrested, and when the police searched their homes the most incriminating documents were found concealed—documents which when produced they had never before seen. Hundreds of men and women were hurried to Siberia, and hundreds of others were sent to rot in jails and fortresses, while upon dozens there was placed "the necktie of Stolypin."