The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1909. RED RUSSIA.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2654, 9 November 1909, Page 4

The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9,1909. RED RUSSIA.

Because Russia now has a sort of constitutional Government and the revolutionists have been to some extent silenced, whilst the cablegrams have ceased to tell us of the horrible atroci.ties which filled the papers twelve months ago, we an this part of the world are inclined to believe that matters are fairly tranquil with the people of the great Muscovite nation. Uniortunately this is far from being the fact. Recently one Prince Kropotkin, penned a fearful indictment against the Czar and his “Black Hundred.” Prince Kropotkin enjoys a unique reputation throughout Europe and America. A famous scientist and writer of books, a man of high and rare integrity who has suffered for his convictions, lie has long been held in the highest esteem, and enjoyed universal respet, not least in England, which he has made his home for many years. His statements are verified by. official documents, by extracts from Russian newspapers, and by letters from trustworthy correspondents. The present conditions in Russia are so desperate, Kropotkin says, that it is a public duty to lay before the people of the United Kingdom a statement of those conditions, with the solemn appeal to all levers of liberty and progress, for moral support in the struggle for political freedom that is now going on in the Tsar’s dominions.

Throughout various provinces ci the Russian Empire .governors have been appointed, who can have people hanged, exiled, or imprisoned without trial. For the first three months of the present year 396 men and women were sentenced to death. Two . brothers named Truger, with two other men, were hanged at Odessa by mistake. Tlie executions are sometimes carried out by volunteer convicts in such, a clumsy way that the victims writhe in agony for nearly half-an-hoar, “the executioner strangling the men with his own hands.” “The question about the right of the Govqrnors-General to execute people even without sending them before a court-martial, by .simple administrative orders, having l>een contested by several members of the Senate, this High Court of Russia has again decided, a few weeks ago, that such a right of summary execution results from the Imperial Decree by which the rules of the state of siege were determined, and that therefore the Governors-General, in inflicting the death penalty by simple administrative order, are responsible only to the Emperor in person.”

After all, it is better to be hanged in Russia than to be sent -to prison, or rather it would be so but for the tortures to which prisoners are subjected before they are hanged. To escape this torture, suicides are of frequent occurrence. Some prisoners are flogged till they go mad. Flogging has been revived by the rural peasant Courts, with official encouragement. In the government of Kielf some peasants suspected of incendiarism were beaten till tbeir bones were bared, and then shut up in unheated cells. That night another fire broke out, and the wretched jirisoners were again beaten till they gave information of their soi-disant accomplice—a girl of 20. This girl received five hundred strokes !

The Russian prisons are overcrowded, and reeking with scurvy and typhus. The prison of the First Don district was built for fifty inmates; two hundred and five have been crowded into •it. The following account of a prison at Moscow is no exceptional revelation. It is given by Prince Kropotkin on the statement made by members of the Duma who served their time in this Moscow dungeon.

“In tliis prison, which contains 1,300 hard labor convicts, one-half of whom are politicals, the rooms, which are each twelve paces long by five avide, contain twenty-five prisoners and the time allowed for taking

fresh air is only fifteen minutes. Out of the dnmates placed on the sick list, 65 per cent, are attacked by scurvy;

they remain in the common rooms, all in chains, and are continually thrashed by the warders. After having beaten a man, they will put him -into the Black Hole; and the Deputies of the Duma imprisoned in this place write about a man Chertetsoff, who, after being beaten" for seven, days in succession, went mad, and died three days later.” It is evident from the foregoing that the Duma, which after all as but a shadow of real Constitutional Government, as we use the term, has not been able to materially diminish the barbarous, brutal methods which have foi a century disgraced the autocratic Russian rule. Such facts as the foregoing should serve as a Avholesome reminder to those who otherwise might be prone to overlook the magnificent privilege enjoyed by those who possess the freedom conveyed by the protection of the Union Jack.