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Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 963, 13 March 1917, Page 6

While the latest disturbances in Russia have been serious enough to call for military intervention, it must not be supposed thai they have ;my real bearing on Russia's determination to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. For some obscure reason they cannot understand, the peasants in the cities are short of food, although they know that the country is overflowing with wheat; the peasants in the country cannot buy the usual products of the towns, although Russia has never had so many factories, and such intense industrial activity—and the result of it all is a wild shout of indignation. Of course the whole difficulty is the lack of transport facilities. A'd railways have been taken over by the authorities, and as the Russian roads arc simply unmetalled and undrained tracks, these are almost impassable in bad weather. Further than that, it may not be generally known that 80 per cent of the Russian railways led before the war to Germany, so that our Ally is now' in the extraordinary position of being able to feed her enemies more easily than her own population. In any case, fully 90 per cent of the total wheat-producing land is in the hands of the peasants and small proprietors, who, though they sometimes hold the gathering of the last two harvests, positively refuse to exchange it for paper money with which at present they can buy nothing at all. Owing to large wages and the prohibition of vodka, money has never been so plentiful, and while this enables the peasant producers to hold their grain, it has led the industrial workers into all kinds of extravagances—purchases of jewellery, fine clothes- and furs—that make their wealth a curse. !t is an extraordinary position—if it were not so tragic, a ludicrous position—and now that snow has stopped altogether their tardy relief trains, the military have been.called out, newspapers have been suppressed, and Petrograd and Moscow have come perilously near revolution. The point to remember is that the trouble is purely internal and remediable. To suppose either that it is Gennanophile or the result of a national warweariness is to mistake altogether the temper of Holy Russia.