The Star. Delivered every evening by 5 o'clock in Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Awatuna, Opunake, Otakeho, Manutahi, Alton, Hurleyville, Patea, Waverley. THURSDAY, MAY 24, 1917. CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 24 May 1917, Page 4

The Star. Delivered every evening by 5 o'clock in Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Awatuna, Opunake, Otakeho, Manutahi, Alton, Hurleyville, Patea, Waverley. THURSDAY, MAY 24, 1917. CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA.

Until two days ago the news from and about Russia was, to use a convenient phrase, the reverse of reassuring. It indicated that, politically, Russia was almost without form and void. Almost all the messages were written to the same melancholy tune, perhaps because they all came directly or indirectly from one source —the dyspeptic imagination of some woe-begone, humorless, unimaginative pessimist. One message that carried more seeming authority with it than the others suggested that poor Russia was indeed in a condition akin to that of the fallen angels, where, according to Milton — No light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe. The reader may perhaps remember that the Petrograd correspondent of the London Morning Post, writing on the 14th instant, said: "What was foreseen two months ago is now materialising with appalling rapidity. Men who have spent nearly the whole of their lives in political agitation against any existing form of government are proving themselves incapable of governing, being quite unequal to the double demands of a foreign and internal anarchy. After two months' cheap jubilation, all European Russia has become like a jellyfish, at the mercy of the winds and waves. \ Even the bread problem remains unsolved. Things have actually gone from bad to worse as regards the disorganisation of food and other sup- J plies. There is a steady exodus of inhabitants from Petrograd. Russia seems to be rolling in money, and some of the commonest forms of labor are paid for at astounding rates. Municipal street-sweepers are paid at the rate of £300 per annum, and the ' streets are worse than ever. The

peasants in the country have seized ' ill the land they want. The army is ruled by company, regimental, and divisional committees, who freely discuss the orders of their superiors. Amidst this pandemonium of freedom in all things throughout, Russia seems likely to go under. The war appears to be forgotten. A miracle must come soon to be in time." Surely nothing more pessimistic than this could have been written. It describes just such conditions as the Huns have long been trying to bring about in Russia, but which the better elements in Russian manhood and womanhood have been j able to avert; and perhaps the future historian will be able to prove that the Huns, having failed in their malignant efforts, somehow succeeded in making guileless susceptible writers body forth in imagination what they —the Huns —had failed to bring about in fact. It is at least fairly certain that the recent prophets of evil with respect to Russia must belong to the class of men who, as Mr Chesterton says, "have from the very first" believed every German bluff, trusted to every German feint, feasted German vanity and trumpeted German good fortune, fled from every German bogey, and fell into every German trap; and have actually described these tomfooleries as taking the war seriously." It would indeed be ill-advised to write with levity on so grave a subject as the condition of Russia, but we think that most of the recent news on the subject has been sadly out of proportion and lacking in perspective; too much has been made of the obvious differences and antagonisms inevitable in so vast a country that barely three months ago had a revolution which, as ft were in a twinkling, changed • its government from an iron despotism to a free democracy, and not nearly enough allowance has been made for the circumstance that it takes time for the wiser, saner and stronger elements of society to become effectively co-ordinated in the public interest, with the result of neutralising or reconciling the more erratic factors, governed by and expressive of emotion and excitement, in opposition to reflection and foresight. Shortly after the revolution became an accomplished fact an English journal observed: "Nothing that has happened in the past two and a half years has been more charged with promise for the future of civilised men than the Russion revolution. We salute the representatives of the new order with the highest hopes and the most sincere good wishes. We believe that we see before us, not one of those frothy movements which are an easy prey" to reaction, but the beginnings of a steady and wise amelioration of political and social conditions in Russia that will cast its influences into every quarter of organised huirian society. The revolution is in itself a practical demonstration of the spirit in which the Allies are fighting; it is a long step forward towards national and personal freedom, towards a root-and-branch destruction of those militaristic and autocratic forces that have their supreme source and sanction in the Prussian example. One of the best signs of all is that in its first stages this revolution on behalf of Constitutionalism and of a Russia released from Teutonic bonds came from the Russian Army. The Army, the Duma, and the Russian people all stand together. If we are asked to believe that against these sound and brave elements a camarilla of Germanised bureaucrats or the anarchial wing of Russian Labor will prevail, we answer that we cannot believe it." The work of the Germanised bureaucrats and of the anarchial theorists here referred to has certainly been causing no little trouble in the meantime, but there is fairly good ground for believing that it will not prevail, though it may continue to cause trouble yet a while from time to time, though not on a scale or with an acuteness which will result in dissociating Russia from effective co-operation with the Allies in the war against Germany, whose success would assuredly throw back Russia herself for generations and drown her new-born constitutional liberty in blood. As we conclude this article we find that views almost identical with these are held by so well-informed a , man as M. d'Abaza, the Russian Con-sul-General for Australia. "Things may be quiet for a few months, as far as actual fighting is concerned," he said in Sydney the other day, "but eventually all will be well, unless the extremists and anarchists get the upper hand. Even if that happened, however, it would mean a counterrevolution, because the nation would not stand it. In the Russian nation the farmers and peasant class constitute 90 per cent of the population. The country man may be illiterate, but he has sound common sense —he is not a Socialist. The sentiment that caused the country people of France to help M. Thiers to put down the Paris commune in 1871 would help the moderate party in Russia if the extremists temporarily took chaise ->t Petrograd."