The manner of Razputin’s murder is known to all. The man who killed him is no more. His diary has been published. It gives almost a complete account of the murder. One feature has escaped attention, and I mention it because it gives point to the true version of Razputin’s character as related above. The accomplices had prepared a most elaborate scheme for killing him, yet in the end it was Purishkevitch with a vulgar revolver that effected the deed. Poisoned tarts, “doctored” wine, and even a revolver shot had been in vain. The conspirators had innocently administered an antidote with the poison; the shooter’s hand had trembled so that he had failed to hit Razputin standing a few paces away. But why all this rigmarole? The fact is the conspirators were affected by the Razputin propaganda; they also believed that the man was more than mortal. Purishkevich thought that the devil was in him till the third bullet brought him down. That was an epoch-making shot. Razputin was fond of identifying his own well-being with that of Russia. In this, as in other things, he merely copied the Empress. When Khionia Guseva, incited by the monk Iliodor, who had fallen out with Grishka, stuck a knife into the “saint,” he announced that “much blood would flow” and that there would be “woe unutterable if and when he died.” But he was ever prophesying all sorts of things, good and bad, like the proverbial tipster. It suited the interested or superstitious to proclaim him infallible. Anyhow, it did not require much acumen to read the signs of coming disaster in Russia. Grishka was no fool, and he must have had a shrewd idea what his own friends and supporters were doing. But charlatanism “paid,” and he had a family to support and lots of “friends” coming for assistance, all of which flattered Grishka’s cheap little soul and kept him on his daily round of prayer and debauch. Razputin the monster is a fiction, bred in the busy brains of politicians and elaborated by the teeming imagination of sensational novelists. Razputin the saint is an imaginary product of a woman’s diseased mind. Even the stories of the sanctifying baths and other _khlyst_ (flagellant) doctrines, supposed to have been applied by a demoniacal Grishka, turn out to be imaginary. It is not unusual for the peasants in certain parts of Russia to take the steam bath in common. No strangers are admitted, and there is nothing unseemly in the practice. It was quite appropriate for a native of Tobolsk. In this and in his gross familiarities with the other sex Grishka was merely Razputin the peasant, a village satyr. CHAPTER V CAPTIVES IN A PALACE