
Many lore researchers have admired and given mystical and prophetical qualities to this strangest of people of Old Russia. Some have almost sainted Rasputin, in their admiration... but not all Russians were so enthralled by this mysterious person...Was he really just a traitor to his nation? Read on...
"I have been compelled to disguise names of those who, first becoming tools of the mock-saint, yet afterwards discovering him to be a charlatan, arose in their patriotism and-like Rajevski who here confesses-watched patiently, and as Revolutionists became instrumental in the amazing charlatan's downfall and his ignominious death.
These startling revelations of the secretary to the head of the "dark forces" in Russia, as they were known in the Duma, are certainly most amazing and unusually startling, forming as they do a disgraceful secret page of history that will prove of outstanding interest to those who come after us." --William Le Queux
Excerpt
How shall I describe Rasputin? My pen fails me. He was one of a few great charlatans of saintly presence and of specious words, fascinators of women, and domineerers of men, who have been sent to the world at intervals through all the ages. Had he lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century of our era he would no doubt have been canonised. This rough, uncouth, illiterate Siberian peasant, who had been convicted of horse-stealing, and of immorality, who had served years of imprisonment in the gaol at Tobolsk, and who had only a month before we met been flung out of a monastery in Odessa and kicked half to death by its inmates as a fraud, had actually become the most popular person in Petrograd.
With the women of the aristocracy he was well-known, but to the Imperial Court he had not risen. Yet, being a protègè of Kouropatkine, matters were no doubt being arranged, although I was, of course, in ignorance of the traitorous plans in progress.
On the following morning, according to my instructions 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.
CONTENTS
Chapter I Rasputin Meets The Empress
Chapter II Rasputin Enters Tsarskoe-Selo
Chapter III The Potsdam Plot Develops
Chapter IV The Murder Of Stolypin
Chapter V The Power Behind The Throne
Chapter VI Rasputin In Berlin
Chapter VII Scandal And Blackmail
Chapter VIII Rasputin The Actual Tsar
Chapter IX The Tragedy Of Madame Svetchine
Chapter X Traitorous Work
Chapter XI Poison Plots That Failed
Chapter XII Rasputin And The Kaiser
Chapter XIII The "Perfume Of Death"
Chapter XIV Miliukoff's Exposure
Chapter XV The Traitor Denounced
Softcover, 5¼" x 8¼", 290+ pages
Perfect-Bound - 11 point font