ONE OF THE HEROINES

Evening Star, Issue 16629, 11 January 1918, Page 6

ONE OF THE HEROINES

OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. [By Madame Peurot, in the New York ‘ Tribune.’] The Petrograd papers tell us civil war has destroyed the democratic Government which was set up in the almost religious fervor of the first days. The reaction which follows every great, national upheaval has begun. There is nothing strange in all this; history but repeats itself. Thus, after the 9th of Thermidor, which felled Robespierre, the men who sat in the Council of the Nation amused themselves with instituting a counter-revolu-tion. As in the France of 1794, it is not the revolutionary spirit, but the spirit of the demagogue, which has taken hold of the Democratic Conference. The great co-operative organisations, the Council of the Zemstvos, and that of the Towns, will ask themselves if all their efforts during the long, arduous campaign, the care, devotion, and foresight they bestowed upon the nation’s wants, if it all has been in vain, if a reign of terror will succeed or utter indifference lead the people to be finally the prey of the enemy. The present moment is grave, but I firmly believe the flames will subside, and a greater and stronger Russia arise. Doubtless the two women, seated in the gallery, listening, now to one of the rare impassioned speeches, then again looking at the apathetic faces of some of the men who had come buck from the front, nominally to help the great. republic on her way, but who apparently had lost every interest in it, must have wondered, and asked themselves how it was that times had so sadly changed. , KNEW SUFFERING IN SIBERIAN EXILE. Ihese practical democrats, who had spent years among the people, who both had languished in the Siberian mines under suffering unspeakable, these two women, , ‘ii o Rrcshkovsky and Mile Spiridonova, na<l the right to ask such questions ; for one, the venerable figure to the right of the ©s trade, known all through Russia as Babushka,” the grandmother of the revolution, has devoted her whole life to the cause; and the other, still in the pride of hfe as far as years gO, is Mile Marie Spiridonova, who at 20 killed Vice-Gover-nor L ujenovsky. In these days of wholesale murder, when our men are decorated for killing Bodies—and those who kill most are most honored—it is difficult to say that Marie Spiridonova assassinated 1 , man ' vh °. accompanied by his Cosssacks, had come to the Government of iambov, obeying the orders given by Nicholas 11. to “pacify” the country—in othei words to commit wholesale murders ot its inhabitants. It was in 1905, the Wn,.° f t th f I e i Bunda y. and the feeble, tenoi-stricken Emperor of All the Ruskoe’sdn,ne ]lis P eo Ple-at TsarsnewSm -I " a ® dev »amg with his councillors new means of torture to further humiliate . oppress, and'torture the ignorant, naive masses who had believed the Little Father would help them in their misery. PEOPLE HAD RESOLVED TO DESTROY AUTOCRACY. The Tsar’s empire at that time was honey combed with revolutionary commit- / ach independent of yet almost ail affiliated with the Narodnaia Volya, the Peoples Will, which had decided to crush autocracy, at whatever cost to the individual, so that the reign of ignorance, corruption, and tyranny might oease, and tho people, after centuries of oppression, at last come into their own, Jn the small town of Tambov itself there was a voung school mistress who had been a student in one of the higher schools, which- for the last 40 years had been open to women in Russia. She was one of the politically ‘suspected” or “untrustworthy” persons, for, when scarcely 15 years old, she had interested herself in the welfnip of school children, had arranged little nietings for thorn ; and, as this fact was equivalent to a crime, under Nicholas ll.’s rule, she had been thrown into'prison. Finally she was liberated, but remained under police supervision. This 20-year-old girl was entrusted by. the Revolutionary Committee with the task of delivering 'Russia from Lujenovsky, who was passing through tho surrounding villages with his Cossacks, like tho desert wind before which everything withers. The peasants were shot, flogged to death; wholesale executions took place ; they- were tortured and maimed out of sheer, wanton barbarism. Tho people themselves did not know why they were thus dealt with, hut were in fear arid trembling, despairing at the thought of new outrages. The Cossacks, in obedience to the Vice-Governor’s orders, violated the women and young girls, using the same measures as the Kaiser's barbarous hordes have employed in Belgium and our north. WAS PROUD OP COMMISSION TO KILL. Slim, and tall, with a beautiful, expressive face,' lovely, as youth ouly r can be, with long auburn hair, and eyes which betrayed that in her dreams she already saw Russia, free, she having contributed towards it, thus was Mario Spiridonova. She suffered inexpressibly at the scenes of horror she witnessed daily, and was proud of tho task given to her. The Government officials under Nicholas ll.’b regime knew that they were in danger—that at any time a bomb or the thrust of a dagger might end their iniquitous career. But Liijenovsky’s suite was impotent to guaid him from tho revolver with which Mario Spiridonova wounded him mortally on January 16, 1906, as ho alighted from the train. Her mission accomplished, she tried to kill herself, but the charge failed. There followed a treatment of her which seems incredible, but friend's of mine who were watching her from tho distance, and her mother, who saw her weeks after, assured me the means the police officer and his Cossacks used can only bo compared- to the DARKEST DOINGS OF THE INQUISITION. She was -seized by the hair, dragged along by the arms, so that her body swept the ground. In tho police cell she underwent tho most abject tortures-—tortures so cruel and degrading that they cannot lie related, a degradation so infamous that for months afterward her life was in jeopardy. People ■who knew her before and were asked to identify her could not recognise in this lamentable wreck the girl they had admired. The report of what Marie Spiridonova underwent in that first hour alone with the officer of police and the Cossack, whose use of the Cossack whip was tho least of their misdemeanors, cannot ho put down on paper. Details which were given at the hour of the trial stirred tho whole of Russia to its very depths and filled tho world with horror. Outwardly a physical wreck, the shadow of her beautiful self, the noble spirit of the prisoner had/remamed undaunted. With prophetic words—they must come back sometimes to the discrowned Emperor of all tho Rnssias in his abandonment at Tobolsk—she turned to her judges: “I do not fear death. You may kill my body, but you cannot kill my belief that the time of the people’s happiness and freedom is surely coming—a- time when the life of the nation will express itself in forms in which truth and justice will be realised—when the ideas of -brotherhood and freedom will be no more empty sounds, but part of our everyday real life. If this be truth, it is no grief for mo to lay down my life.” Her words, which carried the conviction truth possesses, the impassioned appeal of her barrister, were ox no avail. Marie Spiridonova was condemned to death. SENTENCE COMMUTED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT. Public opinion bad been roused at the recital of what this martyred girl had suffered. ’ I remember well the day when the news came to Paris. Some' of my countrymen, among them Anatole France, interested themselves. on her behalf, and sent a. petition to the- Tsar asking that she should not be executed. It was in Nicholas ll.’s interest at that time to b© friends with France, so the judgment was changed into that of perpetual imprisonment. For months Marie Spiridonova lingered between life and death, but at last she was ready to start for the Akatui penitentiary, close to tho Arctic Ocean. The journey was a triumphant procession. With banners, and speeches she was received, not merely by the political offenders, but even by the local authorities. There is something in the heart of every Russian to which courage and nobilitv of character anneal—if you accept th®rofficial-r

dom built up by Tsardom. The year Marie Spiridonova spent at Akatui, where she found companions, girls, like herself, implicated in political aggressions, was too favorable for the Tsar’s tools. With six others, sho was transferred in the middle of winter, in open sledges, to another penal settlement, and the Governor of Chitra, to make sure that measures were as severe as he wanted, finally confined her to a prison under his own guard. It was there that the news reached her, ten years later, that she had not suffered in vain, but brought a stone to build up that greater and happier Russia to which all her thoughts had tended, for which she had be f n to give what man holds dearest her life. Marie Spiridonova had don* more!