NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16260, 10 July 1918, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

" One detail of the situation in Siberia, to which we referred yesterday, was the presence considerably eastward of Lake Baikal of an Austro-German cavalry brigade and four infantry regiments, who had been successful in driving SemenofF, tho anti-Bolshevik Cossack commander, back to the Chinese border. It appears from the latest pa pel s to hand, tnai these Austrians and Germans are war prisoners. There are said to be 20,000 of them., fullv armed, and thev are described as the ibief j source of the Bolsheviks' strength -n : Eastern Siberia. Four thousand of ' them are Magyars, led by- a renegade j Russian who acted treacherously towards Kerensky when tho latter was in power. It is also said that 40,UL)0 Austrians, who were prisoners of war, are in the neighbourhood of Omsk. The curious position has therefore arisen in Siberia that Russian libertr is being contested by two opposing forces of ex-war prisoners, the Czecho-Slovaks, formerly tho subjects of the Emperor Karl, now fighting against the combined forces of Austrians and Germans, who aro supporting the bolsheviks. ' If one can judge from the somewhat •scanty and contradictory news received from Russia, the Allies seem to have intervened just in time. So far the Czecho-Slovak movement in Siberia has proved stronger than the Bolsheviks and their Anstro-Gernian friends. Tho weakness of the latter force may bo judged, as a British correspondent in Russia points cyt, by the fact that the Czechs are able to hold some 1500 miles of the TransSiberian railway, . or at least stretchcs of it, including a number of tho chief towns along the Hue. Busii ness in these cities appears, for the present, to be dead, nothing being done anywhere except at Vladivostok, the Allied warships are a guarantee of order. The rest of Siberia is given. . up to desultory warfare, the terrorism i of bands of robbers, and Bolshevism, which blights and destroys everything I with which it comes in contact. | Siberia is not the only part of Russia where German domination is being seriously menaced. ' To-day's cablo3 tell of the growth of the revolt in th e Ukraine, wiiero the peasant troops outnumber the onemy. l'nis rising is admitted by at leaot one prouiiuent uerinan paper to Oe surely tue consequence ot tiie ueniaiiua oi tue CV-iiiicti eis lor cureais and otnor loousams, ana it might well be added ox Utjiuiau niutuous oi oppression. Tne anu-Cxerwan leeiuig was strengthened in April by the action )t General Jiichhorn, commanding the German troops in the Ukraine, 101 bidding meetings, threatening tlie newspUptifS Willi SUppiOiMUll, UUU piOWiSiUiJ offenders against His regulations the "justice'' ot Gorman courts-martial. When the Parliament, the Rada, plucked a P courage to discuss tiiese oiut>rs and object to them, Gorman soldiers surrounded a. .1 entered the bui;ding, and a German officer, shouting "Hands up!". arrested one of th© Ministers, and ousted the members. The Rada had guaranteed, by the terms of the peace treaty, to supply the Central Powers with a huge quantity of grain before May Ist. Largely owing to the resentment caused among the peasants by German methods, they were able to deliver only one-tenth of the promisod amount. Tiie anti-Gorman teelmg showed itself, according to a correspondent wn.o wrote on May 2nd, >n the difficulties of collecting grain (oven then Austria was unable to raise the bread allowance;: in a thousand exploits of small bands of revolutionaries, who sometimes were able even to seize and make away with whole trains of food. already on the way to Germany; in an endless series v of sporadic peasant ris mgs, which made i-fc, unsafe for tho Gcr mans to movo except in considerable companies, andv in arrests by various' associations of persons prominent in helping the Germans,

We dro told to-day that the Ukraine Government have ordered the restitution of lands to their former owners, and have promised a complete scheme of agrarian reform. This looks like more blundoiTng by Germany, for the order follows the lines of one issued by General Eichhorn two months ago, in which he communded the peasant! v to return all property and effect* taken from the ianunoluers and to begin as quickly as possible the cultivation of the great estates. Tli e order, wiiich protected th® interests of the landholders, who are mostly Poles and Russians, was opposed vigorously by the Rada, whicj a res ,olution refusing to permit interference by the German, Austrian, or Hungarian Commanders in the political, social or economic life of the I kraine, and declaring that von Eichhorn's intervention would result onlv m disorganisation, rendering impossible the consummation of the terms of the economic treaty between th e Ukraine and the Central Powers. The Minister of. Agriculture directed the peasants to disregard the order. Now apparently the Government ha" turned round and ordered the peasants i.- 2 ® 8 Jh® Ger mans wish, an action which is little calculated to allay the anti-German feeling in the Ukraiije, or to furnish the Germans with the grain which they so much need.