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

We arrived back in Petrograd on the following Friday morning, but although the Empress sent a messenger to the Gorokhovaya urging the monk to go to Peterhof at once, as she desired to consult him, he disregarded her command and did not even vouchsafe a reply. Indeed, Rasputin treated the poor half-demented Empress with such scant courtesy that I often stood aghast.

"The woman is an idiot!" he would often exclaim to me petulantly when she was unusually persistent in her demands.

Next evening, however, we went to the palace, whither another French medium, a man named Fournier, had been summoned, having, of course, been administered palm-oil to the tune of some thousands of roubles to give a "message from the dead" in the terms required by the wire-pullers in Potsdam.

I was not present at the séance, but later that night, when Rasputin was sitting alone with me over a bottle of champagne which an "Araby" flunkey had brought him, he revealed that the "message" from the Tsar's dead father had been precise and much to the point.

"Nicholas, I speak unto thee," the spirit had said. "Though thou art brave and thine armies are brave, yet thine enemies will still encompass thee. Loss will follow upon loss. The great advance will soon become a retreat, and the hordes of William will dash forward and Poland will become German. Yet do not be afraid. Trust in the good counsel of thy wife Alexandra Feodorovna and in thy Father Rasputin, whom Heaven hath sent to thee. Believe no evil word of him, and let his enemies be swept from his path. Such is my message to thee, O my son!"

As Rasputin repeated those words with mock solemnity, he laughed grimly.

The pity of it was that Nicholas, Tsar of All the Russias, believed in those paid-for messages, uttered by those presented to him as mediums and able to call up the spirit of his lamented father.

"Poor idiot!" Rasputin remarked, first glancing to see that the door was closed. "He must have something to occupy his shallow brain. That is why the Empress arranges the sittings. But Féodor," he added, "I must see this enemy of mine, Ivan Naglovski. He is not a person to be disregarded, and it seems from what you told me he has a number of important friends. We will discuss the matter to-morrow."

He afterwards dismissed me with a wave of his dirty hand, and I retired to bed in a room at the farther end of the long softly carpeted corridor.

At noon next day we had news of a terrible disaster. Precisely at half-past eleven the city of Petrograd had been shaken to its foundations by a terrific explosion, followed by half a dozen others, which shattered windows and blew down signs and chimneys in all parts of the city. At first everyone stood aghast as explosion followed explosion. Then it transpired that the great munition works at Okhta, across the Neva, opposite the Smolny Monastery, had suddenly blown up, and that hundreds of workers had been killed and maimed and the whole of the newly-constructed plant wrecked beyond repair.

I was just entering Rasputin's room at the palace when a flunkey told me the news.

When a moment later I informed the Starets he smiled evilly, remarking:

"Ah! Then that further ten thousand roubles is due to Nicholas Chevitch. If he calls when we return to Petrograd this afternoon, you must pay him, Féodor. He has done his work well. Russia will be crippled for munitions for some time to come."

On our return to Petrograd we found the city in the greatest state of excitement. The succession of explosions had caused the people to suspect that the disaster was not due to an accident, as the authorities were fondly declaring, but the wilful act of the enemy. Rasputin heard the rumour and piously declared his sympathy with the poor victims.

Yet we had not been back at the Gorokhovaya an hour when the man Chevitch called, and at the monk's orders I handed him the balance of his blood-money.

That same evening Hardt, the secret messenger from Berlin, arrived, having travelled by way of Abö, in Finland.

"I have a very urgent despatch for the Father," he said when he was ushered in to me, and he handed me a letter upon strong but flimsy paper, so that it could be the more easily concealed in transit.

At once I took him up to the monk, who was washing his hands in his bedroom.

"Ah, dear friend Hardt!" exclaimed the Starets, greeting him warmly. "And you are straight from Berlin! Well, how goes it, eh?"

"Excellently well," was the reply of the messenger from the Secret Service Department in the Königgrätzerstrasse. "Germany relies upon you to assist us, as we know you are doing. Count von Wedell has sent you a letter, which I have handed to your friend Féodor."

"Read it, Féodor," said the monk. "There are no secrets in it that may be hidden from our dear friend Hardt."

He spoke the truth. Hardt was the confidential messenger who passed between the Emperor William and Alexandra Feodorovna, and nowadays he was travelling to and fro to Germany always, notwithstanding that Russia was at war with her neighbour.

At Rasputin's bidding I tore open the letter, but found it to be written in cipher.

Therefore I sat down at the little desk and at once commenced to decode it. It was in the German spy-cipher, the same used all over the world by German secret agents—the most simple yet at the same time the most marvellous and complicated code that the world has ever known.

The keys to the code were in twelve sentences that one committed to memory. Hence no code-book need ever be carried. The cipher message, in its introduction, told its recipient the number of the sentences being used—a most ingenious mode of correspondence.

With the paper before me I discovered that in sentence number eight I would find the key. The sentence in question, a proverb something like "Faint heart never won fair lady," I wrote down, and then at once began to decipher the cryptic message from Berlin.

And I read out the following:

"Memorandum No. 43,286.

"From No. 70 to the Holy Father

"If the blowing up of the Okhta Munition Works is successful, endeavour to get your friend C. [Chevitch] to do similar work at the new explosive factory at Olonetz, where a sub-inspector named Lemeneff is one of our friends. Tell this to C. and let them get into touch with each other.

"We approve of C.'s suggestion to destroy the battleship Cheliabinsk, and it is suggested that this be carried out at the same price paid for Okhta.

"From what we are informed you are in some danger from a man named Naglovski, who has shown himself far too curious concerning you of late. Steps should be taken against him.—Greetings,            W."

The initial, I knew, stood for von Wedell, one of the directors at the Königgrätzerstrasse.

Rasputin heard me through, and, taking the cipher message, applied a match to it, after which Hardt, having swallowed a glass of vodka, left us.

But the monk, as a result of that message, was at once aroused to evil activity, and by means of a clever ruse invited Ivan Naglovski to dinner next day. He accepted, hoping, of course, to discover more concerning the monk, and quite unconscious that Rasputin knew of his hostile intentions. To dinner there were invited the Prime Minister, Boris Stürmer, and a sycophant of his named Sikstel. Stürmer was in uniform and Sikstel in civilian attire. Naglovski, I found, was a youngish man, who, when I introduced him, appeared highly honoured to meet at Rasputin's table the Prime Minister of Russia, while the monk went out of his way to ingratiate himself with his enemy. Naglovski and his friends had been preparing a plot either to expose or assassinate the monk, hence the head of the conspiracy was congratulating himself that the plot was unsuspected by anybody.

The dinner passed off quite merrily until, of a sudden, Stürmer, addressing his fellow-guest, said:

"News has been conveyed to the holy Father that you and your friends have formed a plot against him. Is that true?"

Naglovski started and turned pale. For a moment he was taken entirely off his guard.

"Ah!" went on Stürmer in his deep, thick voice, Rasputin having risen to go to the sideboard, "I see it is true. Now, what can you gain by endeavouring to belittle the efforts of our dear Father for the salvation of Russia? Think. Are you patriots? No. Well," he went on, "the reason the Father has invited you here to-night is to come to terms with you. For a list of your friends—a secret list that will be afterwards destroyed—the Starets will pay you twenty thousand roubles, and, further, I will give you a diplomatic appointment in one of the embassies abroad—wherever you desire."

"What!" cried the young man. "You ask me to betray my friends to that blasphemous rascal!" and he pointed his finger at Rasputin, who moved aside. "Never! I refuse! And, further, I tell you," he shouted, rising as he spoke, "I intend to expose the mock-saint and his conjuring tricks; the criminal miracle-worker who, according to secret information I have just received, was the actual instigator of the terrible disaster at Okhta. This is what my friends, when I reveal to them the truth, will expose."

As Ivan Naglovski uttered his biting condemnation Rasputin had crept up behind him, and drawing his revolver suddenly cried in a loud voice:

"Enough! You don't leave this house alive. Gregory Rasputin knows how to crush his enemies, never fear. All your friends will share your fate. Take that!"

And he fired, the bullet striking the unfortunate man in the back, where it entered a vital spot.

Two hours later the body of Ivan Naglovski was discovered on some waste ground out at Kushelevka, on the other side of the city. Though the Director of Secret Police guessed what had occurred, he pretended that it was a complete and unfathomable mystery—and a mystery it has ever remained until this present exposure.

CHAPTER XI

POISON PLOTS THAT FAILED

By the spring of 1916 Rasputin, though constantly revealing himself as a blasphemous blackguard, had become the greatest power in Russia.

His name was whispered by the awe-stricken people. All Russia, from the Empress down to the most illiterate mujik, accepted him as divine and swallowed any lie he might utter.

The weekly meetings of the "sister-disciples" were becoming more popular than ever in Petrograd society, and there were many converts to the new "religion."

One evening a reunion for recruiting purposes was held by the old Baroness Guerbel at her big house in the Potemkinskaya. The yellow-toothed, loud-speaking old lady had been persistent in her appeals to Rasputin to hold one of his meetings at her house, and he had, with ill-grace, acceded. On fully a dozen occasions the baroness, who was a close friend of old Countess Ignatieff, had interviewed me and endeavoured to enlist my services on her behalf. At last the monk had said to me: