Rheta Childe Dorr

Inside the Russian Revolution Rheta Childe Dorr

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 Excerpt: ...they held a strong enough club over the poor Emperor when they threatened to desert him in a troubled and uncertain time. He was absolutely forced to agree that only the principal plotters should be banished to their estates, and the others should be left unpunished. Afterward, when we could talk about it at all," Mme. Virubova resumed, "I reminded the Empress that the day before Rasputin was murdered that Yussupoff boy had telephoned to me asking me to arrange for him to see the Empress. She had declined to see him, and we both believe that if she had received him he would have killed her and then, very likely, me also. We are convinced that there was a great assassination plot all laid. But there is no proof." This, then, is how the Rasputin murder appears in the reverse. Prince Felix Yussupoff did not look like a wholesale assassin to me, but, then, neither did Anna Virubova look like a poison plotter. Evidently you have to be accustomed to the atmosphere of courts to judge these things. I don't judge anybody in this grewsome drama. I leave that to history. I asked Mme. Virubova why the court cliques plotted against the Empress. "It was inevitable," she replied. "The Empress came there, a stranger, a poor, beautiful, painfully shy young girl. She did not know how to flatter or win favor. She was studious, and she was devoted to her husband and children. They needed her devotion--oh, far more than the ordinary family needs that of the mother. You have heard, I suppose, some of the atrocious slanders that have been circulated about the Empress. One of these had it that she encouraged the Emperor in his weakness for alcohol because she wanted to keep him in a muddled state of mind and herself be the real ruler of Russia. The ex...