UNDER BOLSHEVISM

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 121, 15 February 1919, Page 3

UNDER BOLSHEVISM

VIVID STORY OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

TYRANNY AND CHAOS

Marsden, the "Morning 1 ' 8 l ? e ' r °S r fld. correspondent, recently sent the following telegram from that city, under date 15:— My Editor permit#'me to cimimit a breach of the best traditions of the English I ress—that part of tho Tress which is still truly English—and drop the veil of anonymity to relate purely personal experiences., They cover thirty years of viue in Russia, ten years of which were in Petrograd, which is most emphatically not Eussian now oivat any timo since its great founder left his lifowork unfinished and his nation of'.savages turned m wrong directions, without tho guidancewhich alone could make good so daring a choice of State policy: Even the last few months would easily fill volumes, and the task set me. is a practical impossibility, for ninny reasons besides the obvious. Much would have to be written in Latin an'd most would find no tvedonco in home-keeping England. . The moment we got outside Bolshevism as a system of government oven our own best-infornied officials were seriously discussing the political situation in Bussia on the basis of the supposition that Bolshevism was a definito new power in the State, capable of being discussed as such, just as- they talk of Liberalism, Socialism, •or Conservatism. Who has beeu misleading the world during those months when independent witness was ifitifled iri Russia ? . Why are these people listened to in England? They rtilo • Russia for the moment, -but never governed nor. ever .will, govern Russia. That, however, is another, story. To ■ one who. has been identified with Russia, so long it is difficult to come down to the 1 merely personal aspect of life in this great country, '

Suppression of the Truth. I sent out from my fortress prison (SS. Peter and Paul) a long account of Veome aspects of our life there. Much might , be 'added, but it would bo largely •unprintable; The principal officials— those known as such in London—were released oil October G, left Petrograd for Finland, Bergen, and home on October 10. . There still remained three officials, two of whom were in my cell, Their : commissions were in tho air somewhere between London, and Petrograd. Not only - tho :British public, but even the official world in London seems to have been '.unaware that tho time' and distance between theso capitals 0110 way was never under three'months, and often twice | that. An official'letter, from a Government Department sent me by Admiralty special messenger, under a date in January reached me on the day of its . arrival in Petrograd, that is. in the.first Week, in July. This is no isolated.or exceptional instance. Wei were reading Berlin and Cologne newspapers; in prison four days after date ivlien our latest —not regular stray—copies, of London newspapers were six , months old. Yes, we got newspapers in tho Fortress, but they failed.to add to our peace of mind. The German papers contained- news, the Russian contained .none, fpr all the newspapers in Russia had been suppressed, and only the. organs of Bolshevism appeared. They .naturally contained no news,'for tho news of. the., world was making Vast strides in tho right direction (faring ray .two months in SS. -Peter and Paul, in a direction unpleasing to the Bolshevik brigands, and was ; there 1 - J fore suppressed. • ,/

When the officials had departed we oh Bidere Ifelt extremely uncomfortabk What anyone had ever been incarcerates for remained, and still remains, a mystery. We outsiders supposed our officials had been guilty of obeying 'their orders from London, and hoped heartily that these orders implied hostile action against .the Bolshevik; brigands. But wo knew nothing. Personally I was caught because I happened tci bo present in the Embassy at the moment when the raid, was made. No charge, was ever formulated against any one of us'all, and wa outsiders certainly were innocent'as lambs. ',' We hoped our officials ''' were guilty.up to the 'neck',; and as' : Eriglish-" men- most of us felt , proud to "share wHiit f&te Might bring them.\ ' ; r!: ' •

Ope or two—none, I ,ani glad to* say, i my cell—endeavoured,' to curry favou with our' Jewish' masters. One local born passport Englishman put on papei his condemnation of.the British landing troops in the North of .Russia: another endeavoured to make capital of the fact ?that in early days he had been a mcr.i•ber of a trade union in England. lam pleasure to record . that neither of the?a miserable attempts had any success. All in my cell were staunch Britons, but we felt abandoned when-the-.officials were released. . England's honour lay in the' safety of her officials, but who were w,e?- We did not know-then, but know now, what : we very shrewdly suspected at the time, that England had never been allowed to know anything about us j that although, a full list of -the names of at least those persons taken prisoner at the Embassy was wired to England, our names had never been'published! In 6hort, we felt that England's honour havingbeen saved,, we might be shot or otherwise done to death without anybody being the wiser. - From' the moment of our arrest we had been ready for the worst, but by this time we had learned that the Bolshevik firing parties were Chinamen—former coolies . whom Kerensky had armed and endeavoured out of this material to create n defensive force. It was a nasty-thought, that Englishmen born might have to stand up before a firing party of Chinese coolies and me at the, orders of Bolshevik I Jew's. England had never given .plain orders or direct advice to quit Russia. Even when the staff of the British Embassy left nor at. any other time-'.was any definite word of guidance, to say nothing of orders, given to the English colony, let the general feeling in the official aif was in favour of departure, though no preparations anyway adequate to the crisis were ever made anywhere.

Efforts at Concealment. A week before our.arrest, on Ausust SI the Consul, opened n list for all British desirous of leaving Russia. Personally, I kept my name carefully ofF this list either as going or staying for it was common knowledge that all records had •'sendestroyed under. Kerensky and the Bolshevik regime.' and there was no sense in calling attention to one's existence. I had contrived to keep my name off the lists of foreign residents in the district where I resided, and felt fairly safe by avoiding the streets after duslc. Indeed, but for m.v unluckv visit at an an unlucky'hour to the -.Embassy I am confident I should never have been arrested at all. Even the telegraph office knew me no more, 'for'after-Apr'l the wire was closed to us, and the only methods of getting off news were chance opnortunities when we could fr»d men Wiling to run the -risk of theii'livs in attempts to reach Murmansk: .These very soon became rarer. ' -

Our jjiinrds were alternatively the so-' called Red Guards, who are simply raw hooligans in civilian clothes, armed somewhat over-completely t and serving for the sake of their daily bread—literally bread —and about two days n week a squad of the Seraenoff Foot Guards, the famous old Guards regiment which emitted out in a few days the Moscow revolt of 1!)05. This regiment has preserved- its regimental entity as such. Its senior officers long «K0 went into hiding: The' junior officers are there. Its standards have been put in a place -of safety. The regiment is quietly awaiting better days and concentrating its powers oil the determination to live through the present chaos without losing ifs regimental organisation. Men and officers occasionally found -opportunities of talking with us when our gaolers were not about: The head gaoler had formerly been a common mechanic in the Tutiloff works, and was a most truculent personality until he found out that the English prisoners declined to bo in the slightest degree ruffled by his attempts at frightfulness. He then subsided into the usual Russian softness, even trying to pose occasionally as a friend. Human Life Cheap. In Ihe next cell-but one to our No. 70 there were five Red Guards incarcerated. They hail murdered a man committed to their custody, but were not suffering for the murder, which is no crime at ail in Bolshevik Russia. They had been sent to escort four prisoners td tho Prefecture. One of the prisoners fell by tho way, either flow oge or illness, This happened

on tho Palace Quay, a few hundred yards from our Embassy. They shot tho man and flung his body over tho parapet into the Nova, quite a routine .procedure with tho dead in Petrograd nowadays. Arriving at tho Prefecture with ono prisoner short, they told their tale, but had'no proofs to show. Therefore they were incarcerated for a brief period for breach'of discipline in not satisfactorily accounting-for the prisoner. Thej; might have been guilty, for all the proofs to the contrary, of accepting a bribe'for his escape, and this was a serious crime, calling for incarceration in SS. Peter and Paul. These miscreants fared even there much better than aiiy other prisoners, and were nowise abashed. They made day and night hideous with their bawling down echoing corridors, demanding ho.t water and tobacco and various other things. They were condemned men; we, their neighbours, had- not even been charged, This illustrates quite correctly tho chaos of tho present Jew regime.

Dutch Minister's Aid, We estimated that if our troops in North Russia actually moved, as rumour continually reported they wcrt beginning to do, we, the derelicts of official England, might be shot out of hand by Ecd Guard fanatics as anticipatory revenge before they took to their heels. 'We were better off, however, than we know. The Dutch Minister, M. Oiulendyk, never ceased his self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of the English. No official personage of an/ nationality Jw ever, I believe, knowingly gone through the humiliations that M. Oudendyk faced cheerfully in his determination to get the English free. Until all the English are clear of Russia I cannot say much about this in the public Press. But M. Oudondyk speaks Russian perfectly, and trusted to no incompetent assistants in his dealings with the Bolshevik 'bandits.. Hence a series of humiliations to tho man, to say nothing of treatment which no official was ever called upon in the world's history to bear before. Madame Oudendyk, who is an Englisliwom.in, personally brought twice weekly, our home

parcels of food to SS. Peter and Paul, and was equally indefatigable on the doriiestic sido of the problem.'' On thoso parcels of cold food wo lived entirely. This cold diet for months, combined with

the absence of fresh air and the evils of overcrowding, probably produced _ one curious phenomenon which I noticed,

namely, loss of the sense of ta<~te. Tea or coffee tasted alike, tobacco had some tasto which was independent of quality and indefinable. Soap and water alone remained a constant value, and -happily we had enough of these. Why wo were released, .unless it was to silenco the urgent and unrelaxiug importunities of M. Oudendyk, no onq knows .any more

than we know why wo wero imprisoned. Ono thing- borne very strongly in upon lis was that the prison officials were never sure whom they had with them, to say nothing of why we were there. Hardly a. day parsed for two months without our being called upon to correct or' pro vide lists of the inmates of.our cell.

When the order came for the release of a man the head gaoler bawled along all the corridors the name of the happy candidate until someono answered to the name. A certain Frenchman, Professor Mazon, caused me many thrills, From a pathetic inscription on the walls of No. 70 it appeared that M. Mazon had in-

habited it not long before us. For quite a week his name was'bawled daily along the corridors, and under the illiterate handling of- our gaoler I mistook it for my own name often enough. Towards tho end of my stay something like regular enq'uete6, and called by that name, took place. Printed papers were handed in for each prisoner to fill up, with such particulars as name, birthplace, age, profession,••when arrested, by whom and what for, with other curious

inquiries amounting to a census of the prison. Nothing ever resulted from these erquetes; and ■ prisoners weile continually being lost or mislaid. Some were shot by night in tlw underground cells below us. Others wero more quietly got rid of by turning a few Chinamen with knives upon the' helpless victim in a dark cell. When tho gaoler • called "Pact up and be ready"-there was rejoicing in the cell. It meant, change and could not mean anything worse. But sometimes the order was' simply to dress and come along. "leave your things." That meant a> firing- party' or Chinamen with knives. :

Our friends of the Semenoff Guards used to tell us some of tlio official Imppenings of our . dull abode ns well as news of the outer world. Neither the one nor the other was very enlivening' until the news 'began and continued to come in of the German retreat. Very little'of this grand news reached us, but it sufficed. The Semenoff Guards became increasingly friendly, and some half-dozen times during my two months even allowed our cell doors open for a. quarter of an hour, and we walked in the stuffy corridor with shaky knees. There were four cells of English,, some containing Russians also, but my own, happily, wns all English until'the officials left and the contents of several: cells were clubbed into one to make mote room for'the ever-increas-ing number of arrests. ■

Ten Thousand There, was continual, shifting of prisoners as drafts were sent off to Kronstadt to 1m slot, most of the Bolshevik dirty work at that .time being-done there out of sight, or p'assed on to other prisons, barracks, and other places for safeguarding. The Bolshevik brigands had, when left, over ten thousand persons tinder lock and key on any or no pretext. Very wealthy people bought themselves out, - not once but several times. As they are all now in places- of safety, there can be no harm in mentioning the two young Counts Olstifieff and their mother, whose quarters were raid-' ed every time her sons went into SS.' Peter and Paul, and sometimes when they got out again. When I left the poov lady was sleeping at a different address every night. One domiciliary visit of the Bolshevik Commissary and his gang produced some amusement. After robbing-the Countess of everything of value they could find, including a huge chest of family silver, the brigands demanded the jewellery, which they declared the Olsnfieff family must' have. After some manoeuvring the Countess showed these ignorant Commissaries a box of loose stones, containing handfuls of anything .from diamonds and sapphires to aquamarines .: and other semi-precious stones. The Commissary, who quite exceptionally was not a Jew, naively begged the Countess to nick him out the really valuable jewels. Ha went away with n handful of certainly not the Olsufieff diamonds, sapphires, or emeralds. The lady ! was leaving for the Ukraine the'day after I left Petrograd, and her two sons were-already safe across the frontier. The Bolshevik troops are not soldiers and cannot guard a fron tier oven against civilian enterprise. The young Count and his newly-married wife swam across the River Sestra into Finland, one dark'night. ■.'■■■

Frontier Escapes. "IT is the best way out, and infinitely to be preferred-to the cruel incompetence displayed in the manner of sending British refugees out of Russia. The irre. gular roiite is quite simple and rapidly becoming a beaten track. Our party of hapless refugees—men, wom»n, and children—spent eighteen honrs cooped in railway carriages at the Pctrogrnd terminus before starting. Two young Englishmen who had been occupied in war work in the far South of Russia, and had spent five months working tlieir way out, who took the train at the same terminus and arrived at the frontier sfa< tion twenty-four hours after wc had been entrained, found lis still undergoing formalities there, and reached the first station' in Finland, free men, at the. same time. They simply walked hnlf a milo away from the frontier station in a direction parallel to the frontier, engaged a local Finn to provide a boat, ami woro following him at a discreet distance when they met a Red Guard,' who inquired for their passes. They showed some Kerensky notes,'and for a sheaf of these worthless noles. nominally about five pounds sterling, tho Red Guard sentry allowed them to proceed. Tlicy discussed the . advisability of killing tho blackguard, but decided that violence in such, a case might only make the route more difficult for others.

Contrary to the 'universal belief outsido Russia, the Emperor Nicholas is not dead, and the power which replaces the Emperor Nicholas on the throne will command All the Russias _ for generations.