THE STATE OF RUSSIA.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVII, Issue 262, 9 November 1906, Page 4

THE STATE OF RUSSIA.

We rieed not be expected to take seriously or literally all the items of European intelligence that reach us by cable. But there is something very impressive in the terse statement that "no revolutionary organisation now exists at Moscow, all the principal leaders having been arrested."' It is certain that the reactionary party have been making stupendous efforts to crush the revolutionaries, since the dismissal of the Douma; and the process of summary imprisonment or oven of summary execution has been applied wherever it has seemed necessary to the Czar and his advisers. Trepoll, it is true, is dead : but his system is still in full working order, and if we are to accept the statements of Russian officials without discount, we must believe that Nicholas 11. has been no less successful than Alexander HI. in crushing the

more violent section of the revolutionary party. When Vera Zassulich inaugurated the Russian "terror by shooting the first Trepoll' nearly thirty years ago; the lives of the Russian Royal Family and the nobility seemed to hang in the balance. Rut after the terrorists ha i

achieved the culminating point of their ambitions by murdering Alexander 11.. the party of reaction made its power felt. Within five years Alexander 111. had stamped out the terrori.tr. so effectually that the Nihilist movement practically collapsed: and it is only within ihe last live years that the Anarchist

section of the revolutionaries has again made headway. It is quite possible thai Nicholas 1.. has been for the moment as successlul as his in starupiit" out terrorism. But even if this be so. we cannot regard his victory as likely to impede permanently the onward prof_ess of the great movement toward constitutional liberty iv Russia.

Another fact trom which the filenus

of the Autocracy appear to draw consolation is the prominence now attained in Russia by the so-called Party of Peaceful Regeneration. The nucleus 01

tins section is the old "right wing" of the Russian Liberals, the -O.istituuonal Democrats who were discredited and su-

perseded during tbe violent agnation that preceded tlie calling of the L'otmia. These Constitutional Democrats have all along endeavoured to combine loyalty to the Throne with the propagation of views entirely inconsistent with the existence of the Autocracy in ._ts present form The Czar not unnaturally regards them as rebels against his supreme authority; while the more extreme revolutionaries reject their teaching as impracticable and "doctrinaire.'' But if the Autocracy can be saved by peaceful means, it is upon this section of the people that it must depend. The Party of Peaceful Regeneration has therefore been encour. g;-d of late by tne Czar and bis Ministers, in the hope of counter-balancing the violent ''kit wing" of the ievolutional ies and also with the object of thwarting by

indirect means any steps that would seriously prejudice the privileges of the Tin one. Naturally we lind the leader* of this party protesting against "a policy of revolutionary anarchy,' as one of the most serious obstacles to the great wcrk of constitutional reconstruction. And it must be admitted that the Douma, however good its intentions may have been, left the Czar practically no alteinative. The tone adopted by the speakers was so aggressive, and the measures passed were so deliberately hostile to the Czar that it was impossible for the Crown to recogaise .is continued existence. "A National Assembly," says Dr. Dillon, by no means an unfriendly critic, "ought not to borrow the methods of a mere mrb meet n? It .hould have lauded the monarch for the step he had already taken, and encouraged him to take another in the same direction. It could and should have proved to him that he might, with safety to his people and his dynasty, turn from the self-interested bureaucracy to a disinterested and patriotic d mocracy." There probably was too much "dreary and truculent eloquence" about the session of the Douma. But the point on which the extreme revolution-

Aries lay stress is the fact, apparently ignored by Dr. Dillon, that the bare existence of the Autocracy is incompatible with the rights and liberties that the people of Russia are now justly demanding. And if this be true the convocation of a new Douma will be as futile as the last; and the efforts of the Party of Peaceful Regeneration are foredoomed to absolute and final failure.