The walls of Ipatiev’s house epitomised the Revolution. One name and one effigy predominated: the name of Grishka, the silhouette of Razputin, loathsomely caricatured. One met, here and there, allusions to the “tsar-bloodsucker” and other catchphrases of the Revolution, but one felt that they were perfunctory. The one and only unpardonable crime in the eyes of the Red guards had been the preference shown by the Empress for a peasant--a common man like one of themselves. What a commentary on the blindness of the unfortunate Alexandra! Political propaganda had represented Razputin as a monster of iniquity and occult powers, whereby he held the Empress under his thraldom. The _dossier_ kills this legend--it is nothing more. Gregory Razputin was forty-five at the time of his death (1916). Till the age of thirty-four he had lived as an ordinary peasant in his native village of Pokrovskoe, between Tobolsk and Tiumen. He had a wife and three children, a comfortable home, and enough land to feed himself and family. Grishka--to use the familiar diminutive of his Christian name, as is customary in the villages--was a fair type of the Siberian peasant-farmer. They are endowed with an abundance of mother-wit, wield the vernacular with consummate skill, and are fine, upstanding fellows, able to do a day’s work or celebrate a festival equally well. Such was Gregory Razputin. Nothing indicated a future for him different from the rest. He might be expected to plough, drink vodka, beat his wife, trick his neighbours, and pray before the Holy Ikons in the usual sequence till one day the Voice or the Reaper gathered him in. One day he heard the Voice. It happened to peasants now and then in youth, sometimes in the prime of life, and often in their old age. After that they left their mundane affairs, and prepared themselves for Eternity. Grishka had been “called” when he was fourteen, and in an ecstasy had tried to mutilate himself. But he had fallen from grace. Now twenty years later, the call came again. Grishka was “converted” by Dmitri Pecherkin, a _strannik_ (wanderer), who had deserted his home in the same province of Tobolsk to pray at the Holy Places. In 1905 Razputin turned over his farm to his wife, son, and daughters, and joined Dmitri in his wanderings. Together they visited Mount Athos, Jerusalem, Kiev, Moscow, and Petrograd. I have a copy of his work, “My Thoughts and Reflections” (published in Petrograd, 1915), describing his pilgrimages. It is an assortment of stereotyped phrases, texts from Scripture, homely proverbs--just the conversation of an ordinary _strannik_. One is struck with wonderment that the “author” of such utter commonplace should have influenced the destinies of a vast Empire, or could for one moment impose upon the cultured intellect of an Empress.