As soon as the danger was apparent the Russian General Staff had taken steps to send help to the Rumanian army, but the distances were great and the communications extremely defective. Nor was Russia in a position to reduce the effectives on her own front to any serious degree, for in case of urgent necessity she would have found herself unable to retrieve the divisions sent to Rumania in time. Under pressure from the Czar, however, all the available reinforcements had been directed there. The question was whether these troops would arrive in time to save Bucharest. We returned to Tsarskoïe-Selo on November 1st. The impression made by the Rumanian disaster had been great, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs had been held responsible. At the beginning of the year Sturmer had succeeded Goremykin as President of the Council of Ministers. His appointment had been badly received, and he had simply made one fault after another. It had been as the result of his intrigues that Sazonoff, who had rendered such great services as Foreign Minister, had had to resign, and Sturmer had hastened to take his place while remaining President of the Council. He was hated as much for his name as his acts. It was alleged that he only kept himself in power thanks to the influence of Rasputin. Some even went so far as to accuse him of pro-German sympathies, and to suspect him of favouring a separate peace with Germany.[45] Nicholas II. compromised himself by keeping for so long a Minister whom all suspected. It was hoped that the Czar would ultimately realise that he had been deceived once more, but we all feared that he would find out only too late, when the harm done was irremediable.[46] CHAPTER XIV POLITICAL TENSION--THE DEATH OF RASPUTIN (DECEMBER, 1916) The political atmosphere became more and more heavy, and we could feel the approach of the storm. Discontent had become so general that in spite of the censorship the Press began to speak about it. Party feeling ran ever higher, and there was only one point on which opinion was unanimous--the necessity of putting an end to the omnipotence of Rasputin. Everyone regarded him as the evil counsellor of the Court and held him responsible for all the disasters from which the country was suffering. He was accused of every form of vice and debauchery and denounced as a vile and loathsome creature of fantastic habits, and capable of baseness and ignominy of every kind. To many he was an emanation of the devil himself, the anti-Christ whose dreaded coming was to be the signal for the worst calamities.