The overture was a strange and squalid tragedy. Noxious weeds grew in the shadow of the Oriental despotism of the Russian Court, and for years the Government had been at the mercy of a religious impostor and libertine called Rasputin. The trouble, remarked a Russian General, was not that Rasputin was a wizard, but that the Court laboured under the superstitions of a Russian peasant; and Rasputin, who had some mesmeric power, used it to gratify his avarice, immorality, and taste for intrigue at the expense of Russian politics and society. At last, on 29 December, he was doomed by a conclave of Grand Dukes, Princes, and politicians who informed the police of what had been done. The deed was enthusiastically celebrated next evening by the audience at the Imperial Theatre singing the national anthem; but the body was buried at Tsarkoe Selo in a silver coffin, while the Metropolitan said mass, the Tsar and Protopopov acted as pall-bearers, and the Tsaritsa as one of the chief mourners. The last days of the old regime in France, with their Cagliostro and the Diamond Necklace, produced nothing so redolent of corruption or so suggestive of impending dissolution. Rasputin was a symptom, not a cause, and the dark forces in Russia were not eradicated by his removal. Rather they were roused to further action, and on 8 January Trepov gave place to Prince Golitzin, a mere agent of obstruction, while Protopopov proceeded with his measures to provoke disorder. The Duma was prorogued and machine guns made in England were diverted from the front to dominate the capital. The Russian revolution was, in fact, as much forced upon the Russian people as war was forced upon ourselves and America. Le peuple, wrote Sully three centuries ago, ne se soulève jamais par envie d'attaquer, mais par impatience de souffrir; and in Russia even hunger and Protopopov barely provoked the people to action. The revolution occurred not so much because they rose, as because the bureaucracy fell, and it was not so much a change from one government to another as a general cessation of all government through comprehensive inaction. The Petrograd mob did not storm a Bastille like that of Paris in 1789; it merely paraded the streets and declined to disperse or work, and the act of revolution was simply the refusal of the soldiers to fire. It was not the new wine of liberty, but the opium of lethargy that possessed the popular mind, and relaxation loosened all the fibres of the Russian State. Action came later with the Bolshevik reconstruction, but for the time dissolution was the order of the day--a dissolution that was due less to the activity of destroyers than to the decay of the body politic; and the over-government of Russia by bureaucracy and police precipitated a violent reaction towards no government at all.