ey
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 Schluesselburg 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 Stuermer, 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