TRAGEDY OF FATHER CAPON.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2486, 21 June 1909, Page 8

TRAGEDY OF FATHER CAPON.

(New York Sun.) St, Petersburg, March 10. —Materials for an interesting side chapter of contemporary history have been gathered among the debris of the Russian revolutionary junta at Geneva. Aside from the revelations of Azeff’s years of betrayal the chroniclers of the movement have divulged the facts concerning the late Father Gapon during the weeks following the Sunday rising in St. Petersburg. 1 remember well the enigmatic figure of the little cleric on the night of that disastrous day. He had been reported killed, wounded and prisoner; he was not touched. He was in a traktir (a workiVirtiTs beer and tea room) near the Finland station. His furtive exprrsion and downward look suggested more the character that is now given him than the heroic nature that would have fitted those stirring events. /

In the Savremenny Mir (contemporary world) and Russkoye Bogastvo (Russian wealth) the Social Democrats and Revolutionary Populists publish their respective versions of Gapoivs relations with their party chiefs when he appeared among them in Geneva after the suppression of the workmen s movement in St. Petersburg. Leo Deutsch, who makes the report for the Social Democrats, describes the initial astonishment and misgivings when the colony of revolutionary emigrants in Switzerland read of the workmen’s upheaval and of lather Gapuu as its leader. . A . One fine morning he completed then perplexity by appearing among them, declaring himself a comrade. He was introduced to the group and made the acquaintance of its leaders. It struck them as curious that Gapon avowed that he had never heard their names before. He added frankly that he knew nothing of the inner history of the revolutionary movement. His talk with them was copiously sprinkled with the pronoun 1; with remarks about his life, his deeds, his impressions. The comrades accepted his harmless naivete ; but they found co-operation with him difficult when he said he knew nothing about Marxism and socialist principles and was sure they were all wrong. Soon he made the acquaintance of the Social Revolutionaries, the propaganda by deed men in the foreign directorate. “These are the practical men that Russia needs/’ he said, and went over to his new friends. These, as their spokesman "A. S. now reports to their comrades and subscribers in Russia, tried to instruct him as a working member of their movement, but from the younger members lie derived the impression that he was a popular hero. He saw the two wings of the party competing for his person, and his self-conceit was developed accordingly. , Ho would not be content with the position of simple member of the party, but demanded the leadership, hirst he asked for a place in the central committee. This was refused him, ostensibly on the ground that he was uninstructed in revolutionary principles and a newcomer in the movement. Gapon thereupon resigned from the Social Revolutionary ranks and de dared that he was above parties. He set himself to organise a movement for the unification of all the elements which aimed at the overthrow of the Czar’s Government. He summoned a congress, at which the most extreme sections, impressed by the renown of Gapon s name, took part. At the first sittings of this congress the unity movement went to pieces owing to differences over the programme to be adopted. Gapon failed not so much because he underrated these differences as because lie was unable to grasp what they signified. He then swerved back to the Social Democrats and sought to reconcile those who held that their programme should include wholesale assassination of the Czar’s agents with the minority, who were for education propaganda. In this also he failed. Meanwhile, the October general strike in Russia had forced the Czar to yield the constitutional manifesto and a form of amnesty. Keenly expectant as to the future "of their movement many of the emigrant comrades, Gapon among them, returned to Russia.

Gapon first tried to revive the old workmen’s, union which he had organised and which went out on that fatal march the previous January. He was defeated in this attempt by the opposition of the Committee of Workmen’s Delegates, the body which had successfully carried through the general strike.

This was the crucial stage of Gapon’s career. The new proletarian leaders in Russia would not let him share their leadership. There is no evidence up to this point that he had consciously betrayed any movement, His chief attributes so far had been his vanity and appetite for praise, his lack of knowledge of affairs and of mental power. His elimination from the new direction of the revolutionary movement soured him. Roth Leo Dentsch and “A. S.” agreed in their reports that after his failure to establish himself among the heads of the revolution he entered into relations with Count Witte’s Government and received his means of subsistence from that quarter. He was enabled to go abroad with Government money, paid him on the railroad platform as lie left the country. He went to Monte Carlo and for a brief space treated himself to all the gilded dissipations that were going, the rest of the money he spent in Paris. He had now fallen to the depth when he would perform any Judas service for money to help him along with his pleasures. Such a man was a deadly rival of the spy Azeff; moreover, his former status in the revolutionary movement would probably tempt the political police department to pay him from the funds than Azeff looked on as his own. He was marked down for death, sentenced by Azeff, and strangled by Comrade Ratenberg, in a hired cottage at Izorki, near St. Petersburg, the day after he reached the capital.

The revolutionary historians who draw this picture of the ex-priest explain that the tragedy was the fruit of the man’s character. He never was a revolutionary by temperament. His procession to the Winter Palace did not aim at a revolution or a constitution, but purely and simply at begging from the Czar protection for the factory workers among whom he had preached against the oppression of the Government officials. A simple shepherd leading his nock, that was how he began., When the crash came and he found that if he was to fight on for his beloved factory workers he must be a silent inconspicuous wheel in the revolutionary machine his weak character collapsed. It is noted of him' that during his sojourn in the Social Revolutionary ranks in Geneva he took not only shooting but also riding lessons. me ex-factory preacher astride of a high house leading his army! Like so many other visionaries fallen on adversity he could resist everything except temptation. Of the many hundreds of thousands of photographs of the German Emperor which are shown all over the world, there is not one which shows him smiling.