TEACHER+CHALKBOARD

The censors did their best to hide him. They daubed ink over newspaper columns with stories that referred to him; the black blotches were called caviar. Readers knew whom the caviar was protecting, and they invented stories of their own. A society hostess, irritated that her guests talked of nothing else, put up a printed sign in her dining room: "We do not discuss Rasputin here." But they did; nothing would stop them. The talk was at the top. "Dark Powers behind the Throne! German influence at Court! The power of Rasputin! Infamous stories about the empress!" the British ambassador's daughter, Meriel Buchanan, noted of drawing room conversation in her diary. It ran unbroken to the city's lower depths. "The filthy gossip about the tsar's family has now become the property of the street," wrote an agent of the Okhrana secret police. Crude cartoons passed hands of Rasputin emerging from the naked empress's nipples to tower over Russia, his wild eyes staring from a black cloud of hair and beard. Gambling dens used playing cards in which his head replaced the tsar's on the king of spades. A caricature icon showed him with a vodka bottle in one hand and the naked tsar cradled like the Christ child in the other, while the flames of hell licked at his boots and nude women with angels' wings and black silk stockings flew about his head. A photograph of him with a collection of society women was reproduced by the thousand. Mikhail Rodzianko, a leading politician, said he was horrified to find that "I recognized many of these worshipers from high society"; he himself had "a huge mass of letters from mothers whose daughters had been disgraced by the impudent profligate." AFTER READING THE ABOVE AND VIEWING THE CARTOON: PLEASE POST TWO QUESTION ON THE QUESTION BOARD.



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