IN RUSSIA.

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 35207, 18 May 1918, Page 2

IN RUSSIA.

ORGY OF PLUNDER IN PETROGRAD. BOLSHEVIK REGIME IN ITS DEATH THROES. Petrograd. By transferring the capital to Masiiow' tho Bolsheviks, .by a surprising irony of fate, are fulfilling the aneiont dreams of the Slavophiles, who never regarded Peter the Great s ambitious Germanised capital as the cardinal city of the empire, -while tho Muscovites 'are delighted, looking n>l Petrograd, in view of its recent liuiil history, as a cesspool of revolutionary intrigue. Wβ seem at tho fag-end of the revolutionary movement, and are witnessing a revival of the sabotage inseparable from all social movements based on violence. It is not now a case of sacking the Winter Palace. The Government offices on the eve of evacuation are the prey of the Russian sans-culotte, -who is stripping and ransacking tho departments of their valuable pictures and furniture and selling them for what they will fetch in tho nearest market. Sailors are carting away whole shiploads of art treasures to their homes at Kfonstadt. Tho Soviet, at its wits' end before tho menace of the new "counter-revolutionary plot" in Siberia, is powerless to suppress the vandalism.

Everything seems to point to the death fhroes of the Bolshevik regime under the Lenin dictatorship, Avhoso peace shibboleth and bombastic plans for the forming of new armies and the biiilding of 'Strategic railways are vain and empty words. The hope of raising a federation of Soviet republics from the diminishing debris of Russia becomes more than ever an unrealisable dream. Tho Bolsheviks are being gradually hemmed in, and are hunted like wild onimals from pillar to post by foes and friends.