all, the hope of Russian military help, for it was in the interest of us all not to cherish illusions. In England, as in other Allied countries, many people looked upon the Revolution as a protest against the feebleness of Russian military leadership; but, in Russia, the utter breakdown of the army, of officers and men alike, was evident everywhere and in everything. I will not describe its daily progress, but I remember the painful impression presently made upon me by the women’s battalion, in which not a few ingenuous Europeans and Russians failed to see a symptom of military decline and general demoralization.
A pertinent example of the state of official Russia and of the Court was the Rasputin affair. I had heard of it in London, but in Petrograd I learned the whole story. Just imagine that the Tsarist Court and, with it, the Government of Stürmer and Trepoff, had lain under the influence of a fellow like Rasputin, coarse and almost illiterate, albeit gifted and astute, and that this had lasted six years! If religious mania is pleaded as an extenuating circumstance, the answer must be that such religion was gross and repulsive superstition. Moreover, Rasputin was not the first adventurer to whom the credulous Court had succumbed, nor did the moral plague infect only the Court. The fact is that neither official, political nor ecclesiastical society withstood Rasputin’s influence sufficiently or was capable of protecting the Tsar and Russia against it. What must the position have been, morally and legally, if murder alone could get rid of Rasputin—murder committed by a great noble, by a Conservative Member of Parliament and by a member of the Imperial Family who knew what was afoot and witnessed the deed! In reading the detailed account of the murder (by Purishkievitch himself) I can see how shallow and incompetent these people were, even in crime, and, by reason of their shallowness, needlessly brutal. The very way the deed was done reveals the decline and the demoralization of official Russia—it may sound cynical, but it is true: these people were incapable even as criminals, and were therefore the more criminal.
And what of the Imperial Family, with its swarm of Grand Dukes who wielded decisive influence in the army and in the civil administration? I admit that, mutatis mutandis, things were much the same in Austria and, to a lesser extent, in Prussian Germany. But, in Russia, the stench of the moral and political morass at Court spread also to the nobility—and to the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well. The spirit of caste, not ethical or religious motives, turned the nobles against Rasputin;
