PRIVATE LIFE IN RUSSIA.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 307, 27 June 1879, Page 2

PRIVATE LIFE IN RUSSIA.

A correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette in describing the peculiar aspect of affairs in Russia, says:—" Nobody talks of Liberalism in drawing-rooms, for there are so many conspiracies afoot. There is so much espionage, arresting, and exiling to Siberia that the most dangerous rebels are those who u*se the most fulsome adulation in speaking of the Court. An imprudent word might cost too dear at a moment when assassin- are believed to be lurking everywhere, and when the official journals are screaming in a panic to the police that they are not active nor watchful enough. Here is a little example of what the police are expected to do. After the attack on General Drenteln it was ascertained that Ihe young man who had shot at him had for some weeks previously been taking riding lessons, with a view, as it now seems, of escaping readily after his crime. So the Golos writes:—' It is astonishing that the owner of the riding-school did not feel his suspicions excited by the young man's coming daily to take lessons. He should have made inquiries, and had him watched.' Watch a man because he takes riding lessons I Why not, then, set detectives upon every person who dines daily at the same restaurant ? As a fact, it seems that the police do watch so much and so annoyingly that a prudeut man will not stop to stare at the Imperial palace, nor ask audience of a Minister, nor purchase cartridges for his sporting guns, lest he should be suspected of sinister designs. Foreigners who. come into Russia have always been closely looked after by the police; but now Russians travelling within their own country are pestered quite as much as foreigners. A boyard from the provinces comes up to St. Petersburg on business, and alights at a great hotel like Demuth's. He must exhibit his passport, vised by the authorities of all the towns where he has spent a night during his journey ; and this done he must obtain a permisde sejour from the police of the capital. While he has gone to one the officers of Third Section on this errand," detectives who have requested him to give up his keys proceed to his hotel room and overhaul every article in his luggage, confiscating his private letters at the same time for leisurely perusal at their convenience. Our tourist returnstotable-d'ho'tedinnerand enters into conversation with a fellow-coun-tryman by his side, or he goes off: to spend an evening at the Winter Garden and falls in with some strangers whom he has known in Paris. Next day he is arrested and brought to book for having been seen chatting with'people who turn out to be conspirators. It may be said that a man can avoid talking to strangers at tabled'hfite; but the provincial Russian may chance to be arrested simply because he has attended a party at the house of some great lady who has been collared by the police because she is a friend of a prince of the blood who has suddenly fallen into disgrace. When one hears of the Czarewitch being a prisoner in his own house, of another Grand Duke being exiled to his estates, and of dozens of noblemen, ladies, and even young girls being; arrested for supposed complicity with the Nihilists, it becomes obvious that tho moral atmosphere in which Russian society is now living must be one of freezing terror. People who have spent the last winter season at St. Petersburg describe it as having been funereally dull; though this city was never so crowded with wealthy families, because most of the landowners have grown afraid to live on their estates, not only because they dread Nihilist risings among the peasantry, but because they fear to have enemies at Court who might accuse them of having fomented such outbreaks. This miserable state of public uneasiness cannot last long. The Russians are an impulsive people, who love to talk and enjoy themselves. They had enough compression under Nicholas : and the present revival of this regime can only result in converting all of them into conspirators. In fact, they are all conspirators as it is ; for everybody is more or less exercised in devising means of extrication from the quandary, and it must needs be t .at many incline to means which are deprecated by the authorities. As to the Czar's intentions, nothing is known. But he is supposed to be brooding in the helpless bewilderment of a man who is afraid to touch a single brick in a cranky fabric lest the whole of it should tumble down."