wonderful "monastery," and to which Petrograd society had subscribed so
freely. He therefore sent Her Majesty a message--the first response she
extracted--to the effect that he was leaving for Petrograd as soon as it
was possible to fulfil his Divine "call."

In the meantime I had been introduced by Boris Stuermer, whom I met almost
daily, to Stolypin, a friend of Rasputin's principal disciple in
Petrograd, Madame Golovine, and to Monsieur Raeff, who afterwards, by
Rasputin's influence, received the appointment of Procurator of the Holy
Synod. At Stuermer's fine house there were, in the absence of the Starets,
constant meetings of Raeff, General Kurloff, the Chief of the Political
Police, and a beetle-browed official named Kschessinski, who was director
of that secret department of State known as "the Black Cabinet," a suite
of rooms in the central postal bureau in Petrograd, where one's
correspondence was daily under examination for the benefit of the corrupt
Ministers and their place-seeking underlings. In addition, at these
dinners, followed by the secret conferences, there attended a certain
smart, well-set-up officer named Miassoyedeff, a colonel stationed at
Wirballen on the East Prussia frontier, and who had received gracious
invitations from the Kaiser to go shooting and to hob-nob with him. This
man afterwards became a spy of Germany, as I will later on reveal.

Kurloff, as head of the Political Police, had, before my appointment as
secretary to the Starets, been my superior, and therefore I well knew the
wheels within the wheels of his department. Naturally he was
hand-in-glove with the director of the Black Cabinet, the doings of which
would require a whole volume to themselves, and to me it was evident that
some further great and deep laid plot was in progress, of which Rasputin
was to be the head director.

One day in the Nevski I met Mitia the Blessed, the Starets who ran
Rasputin so closely in the public favour. I saw he was hopelessly
intoxicated, and was being followed by a crowd of jeering urchins. I did
not, however, know that Stuermer and his friends had arranged this
disgraceful exhibition of unholiness in order to discredit and destroy
Grichka's rival. Five minutes later I met the Bishop Theophanus walking
with the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who, like myself, witnessed the
degrading sight, and from that moment Mitia the Blessed no longer
exercised power, and was not further invited to the sal