Rasputin the Rascal Monk

In the following pages I have attempted to take the reader behind the veil of the Imperial Russian Court, and to disclose certain facts which, in this twentieth century, may appear almost incredible.

As one who knows Russia, who has traversed the Empire from Virballen to the Pacific coast, and who has met personally both the ex-Emperor and his consort, as well as many of the persons herein mentioned, I confess that I myself have often been astounded when examining the mass of documents which this dirty Siberian peasant--the convicted horse-stealer who rose to be the secret adviser of Nicholas II--had happily secreted in the safe in his cellar in the Gorokhovaya, in Petrograd, so that the real truth of his traitorous dealings with the Kaiser might be chronicled in history.

I had hoped to be able to reproduce many of the cipher telegrams and letters in facsimile, but the present shortage of paper has precluded this, and it could only be done if this book were issued in expensive form.

To me, it seems best that the British public should have access to it in a cheap and popular form, and hence I have abandoned the idea of facsimiles.

I here publish the story of the mock-monk's amazing career as a further contribution to the literature upon Germany's spy system and propaganda so cleverly established as an insidious adjunct to her military attack upon the civilisation of our times.

The conversations herein recorded have been disclosed by patriotic Russians, the truth has been winnowed out of masses of mere hearsay, and the cipher telegrams and letters I have copied from the de-coded originals placed at my disposal by certain Russians, Allies of ours, who desire, for the present, to remain anonymous.

William Le Queux.

Devonshire Club, London, S.W.

November, 1917.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE CULT OF THE "SISTER-DISCIPLES."

The war has revealed many strange personalities in Europe, but surely none so sinister or so remarkable as that of the mock-monk Gregory Novikh--the middle-aged, uncleanly charlatan, now happily dead, whom Russia knew as Rasputin.

As one whose duty it was before the war to travel extensively backwards and forwards across the face of Europe, in order to make explorations into the underworld of the politics of those who might be our friends-- or enemies as Fate might decide--I heard much of the drunken, dissolute scoundrel from Siberia who, beneath the cloak of religion and asceticism, was attracting a host of silly, neurotic women because he had invented a variation of the many new religions known through all the ages from the days of Rameses the Great.

On one occasion, three years before the world-crisis, I found myself at the obscure little fishing-village called Alexandrovsk, on the Arctic shore, a grey rock-bound place into which the black chill waves sweep with great violence and where, for four months in the year, it is perpetual night. To-day, Alexandrovsk is a port connected with Petrograd by railway, bad though it be, which passes over the great marshy tundra, and in consequence has been of greatest importance to Russia since the war.

While inspecting the quays which had then just been commenced, my friend Volkhovski, the Russian engineer, introduced me to an unkempt disreputable-looking "pope" with remarkable steel-grey eyes, whose appearance was distinctly uncleanly, and whom I dismissed with a few polite words.

"That is Grichka (pronounced Greesh-ka), the miracle-worker!" my friend explained after he had ambled away. "He is one of the very few who has access to the Tsar at any hour."

"Why?" I asked, instantly interested in the mysterious person whose very name the Russian Censor would never allow to be even mentioned in the newspapers.