RUSSIAN TYRANT.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1858, 6 September 1923, Page 2

RUSSIAN TYRANT.

GENERAL KURLOFF'S DEATH.

To Russian Liberals General Kurloff, who recently died at Berlin, was, sa-ys a correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, the very embodiment of the most ruthless forms of reaction and corruption under the old regime in their country. Their hatred of him was not mitigated by rumours that he had more than a passive responsibility for the death of their most dangerous enemy, Stolypin. When that courageous and upright, if mistakenly severe, statesman was shot at the Tsar's side in the Kieff Theatre, General Karloff, as head of the secret police, was responsible for the safety of his monarch and his suite. At the moment of the tragedy he was in the building, to which the assassin Bogroff had obtained a ticket of admission from one of his immediate subordinates, Colonel Kuliabmo. Bogroff was a recusant Social Revolutionary who immediately before the tragedy had been working for the secret police. Whether he fired the fatal bullet on the orders of his old party or his new paymasters is a question which has never been quite satisfactorily cleared up, but the secret police is believed to have feared Stolypin's determination to put a stop to its criminal employment of agents provocateurs. Even so prominent a politician as the Conservative Purishkevitch, who killed Rasputin, hinted in the Duma that Kudloff was personally responsible for the murder, but in his memoirs the General states that the presence of Bogroff in the theatre was possible only through a breach of his express orders. Anyhow, Kurloff was compelled to resign, and remained in retirement till the war, when he was dug out to arrange the evacuation of industry at Riga at the time of the German advance on that town. The manner in which he icarried out this task also brought down on him scathing criticism in the Duma and the press. From his second retirement he was called out by Protopopoff to help that crazy Minister precipitate the Russian revolution, for the outbreak of which at so early a date the two of them were mainly responsible. At the last moment, when the situation really got out of hand, Kurloff, according to his own statements, was invited by Kryshanovsky, who has been offered the Ministry of the Interior, to take over the command of all the troops in Petrograd, and by refusing this task frustrated the last plan to crush the revolution by military force. Kurloff escaped from Petrograd shortly after the Bolshevist coup, and for some time lived in Berlin on the verge of destitution. His memoirs, which he published at that time, are little more than an apology for his own actions, and threw little light on those vital phrases of the secret history of Russia, of which he probably knew more than any other survivor of the revolution. Latterly he ran some sort of detective office, which apparently was more concerned with political than private or personal affairs. He never took any part in the public life of the large Berlin colony of Russian refugees.