Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/118

102 Grishka, who foretold the fall of Russia and the Imperial dynasty. It was then that people remembered the legend, all the more as Russian troops retreated in the presence of the Tsar in part towards Kostroma. The Police Commissioner of Moscow, hearing of Grishka's prophecies, had him captured and flogged to death.

Grishka's prophecy of a "God's man" and "epileptic," pronounced two centuries earlier, were revived for more than a hundred years, only to become true in a more terrible and sinister manner after Grishka, a "God's man" according to the beliefs of the Court and some Russian aristocrats of the twentieth century.