THE POSITION IN RUSSIA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 13935, 18 December 1905, Page 6

THE POSITION IN RUSSIA.

We have all been raising the revolutionary flag in Russia during the past year, and it must be said in extenuation that the cable messages have given us ample excuse. The Muscovite Empire has been shaken from north to south, from west to east since that red Sunday in January. Famine and pestilence have stalked over the laud, and red murder and civil war, and there is not a division in European Russia that has not seen rioting and slaughter in the streets or farm-burn-ing and rapine among the fields. Mutinies have occurred in all the parts of the Baltic and the Black Sea. There have been ghastly massacres in Odessa, and racial war in Caucasia, and in the Far East Vladivostock and Harbin, the great Russian cities, have been for days in the hands of ‘the mutinous soldiery. Every industry and public service has been disorganised by strike. There is , not a department in the Empire where revolutionary conditions have not prevailed; the Government has been making concessions to the proletariat‘and sacrificing high officials to the populace in sheer panic; and the Czar has been compelled to grant the Empire a constitution and representative institutions. Yet in all this, we are told now, there has been no organised revolutionary movement. Indeed a member of the famous Revolutionary Committee, interviewed in London, declared that Russia actually was not ready for revolution and that the demonstrations of the past few months, were demands for reform, not attempts to overthrow the Government. Speaking of the groat railway strike which seemed at this distance to be part of an organised plan, the revolutionist said it was “not the expression of the deepest- desires of the Russian people.” “There has been very little organising effort in it,” lie continued. ‘‘Then again the workmen are not well armed. In Finland there are, it is true, 30,00-0 rifles, in the Caucasus 20,000, and distributed throughout the remainder of Russia there are about 20,000 more, but two-, thirds of these weapons-are of obsolete patterns, and for each rifle there are only thirty cartridges.” “The real struggle lies in the future,” he said again. “ Money has not come for ward so freely as the advocates of reform expected, and it is unwise to exaggerate. This movement cannot gain anything that is either lasting or substantial. This strike is a demonstration, effective if you will, but not an effort of revolution.” All strikes in Russia end in one way. The workers have no funds to fall back on, and starvation is the only alternative to returning to work. Further strikes, therefore, cause suffering without giving the workers any adequate return in the shape of civil or political freedom, and the members of the Revolutionary’ Committee are said to be discouraging rioting and striking as sources of needless suffering. Father Gapon has been expressing similar views during the past week, and though it is anticipated that there will bo fighting on tbs anniversary of Red Sunday, it is not likely that an organised attempt at revolution in- the full political sense of that term null bs witnessed in Russia for at least a year. These present disorders are but -the expression of the common discontent; the effort at reform will oome later.