RUSSIANS AND COSSACKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12909, 4 July 1905, Page 4

RUSSIANS AND COSSACKS.

There is ho longer any doubt that the mass of the Russian people is saturated with revolutionary ideas, and that neither army nor navy is to be relied upon to uphold the Tsarocracy against attack. The terrible doings at Odessa may be repeated in any other of' the great Russian cities, . for though the presence of a warship in mutiny aggravated matters at the Black Sea port, military mutiny may arise in any quarter now that the reservists are beginning to disobey orders. The weakness of the Russian revolution lies in the evident lack of general plan and concerted action, every local uprising being thus limited in its scope and having its energies wasted jn the wildest excesses,' while the organised forces of the Government are still being directed upon co-ordinating lines. It remains to be seen whethei the autocracy will be able to stamp out the fires of revolt as they appear, or whether they will spread until the whole political edifice is swept away in a universal conflagration, after which the moderate reformers may be able to establish constitutional order and proceed with the construction of a democratic state. Meanwhile, the Russian autocracy is evidently relying more and more upon the Cossacks and less and less upon its

regular troops in the desperate and unscrupulous effort it is making to retain the power it has so long abused. We may be sure that these Tartar horsemen will be the main support of the new "police" organisation which General Trepoff, Chief of Police at Moscow, has invented and the Tsar approved. That this new scheme will be utterly reactionary in its character goes without saying, for General Trepoff is among the bitterest enemies of all reform. But a ruthless dragooning that might have cowed all Russia a year ago,may prove only a maddening irritant in the present temper of the population and provide the impulse required to bring the wavering military into line with the revolutionists. The Cossacks, as they have shown in a hundred places, can be trusted to obey any order which gratifies their Tartar instincts, but their barbarities must horrify the regular troops and the reservists, and palliate to all patriotic Russians the frenzied excesses of the revolutionists. They furnish about 200.000 men, the.various tribes holding their extensive lands on the Don, the Dnieper, and other regions, by universal military service. They are irregular cavalry, pure and simple, of Tartar stock and primitive customs, finding their own horses and equipments, and having neither racial nor social sympathies with the rest of the Russian people. The small part they have played in Manchuria has been the subject of considerable comment by military experts, but it is now plain that they have been generally retained in Russia for the purpose to which they are now being put. It is ' aii* appalling indictment of Tsaroeracy that, while the Russian Government has been posing as the champion in Manchuria of Western civilisation against Asiatics, it has planned to employ the brutal descendants of the Tartar hordes in defeating the movement to, establish in European Russia institutions and liberties common to the whole of the Western nations.