PEASANTS' MASS SUICIDE

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 34, 9 August 1921, Page 2

PEASANTS' MASS SUICIDE

A HORRIBLE TRAGEDY.

- A terrible case of mass-suicide is reported in the Bolshevik press (says a correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph). The peasants of the village of Opatovo. in the Tam'ooff province, to the number of more than 300, assembled all together, men, women, and children, in a spacious wooden bathhouse. Doors, windows, and other apertures were hermetically- sealed and nailed up. --, In the cellar firewood saturated with petro-. leum was accumulated in great quantities. Fire was set to ths building. Everybody in the building perished in, the conflagration, if not suffocated previously by the fumss. All around the buildinp; armed guards had been loft, so that the dreadful sacrifice should he carried out undisturbed. When tho awful thing was consummated the guards shot each other. A i'ew man lost their nerve at'the last moment and survived to tell the tale.

This scarcely-believable incident, remurks the conresponde.nt, takes,us back a long way. Mass-suicide is not unknown in the history of Russia. Brought to despair by administrative persecution or to escape famine and epidemic, entire villages havo committed wholesale suicide. Often this was the result of religious fanaticism. Peter 1., who was somewhat Bolshevik in the enforcing of his reforms, was illot in Northern Russia by numerous conflagrations involvinghundreds of deaths. As late as tho reign of Alexander in. a case occurred 1 in the south, when a- crowd of fanatics allowod themselves to be buried alive by their religious teachers.