The Passing of Plehve.

Northland Age, 4 October 1904, Page 3

The Passing of Plehve.

M. de Plehve was certainly one of the great figures—l had almost said one of the great adventurers —of history. Nobody knew his real origin. Some people said that he was a Jew, some that he had been brought up in the Catholic faith. His blood was certainly partially German ; in other words, he was less of a Russian than nine-tenths of the people of Russia’s 150,000,000 ; and yet he came to be the ruler of Russia in a more real sense than even the Tsar. * A man who could get to that eminence must have been no ordinary man; indeed, when one reflects that he stepped into the shoes of a man who had just been assassinated; that he took up the office which has most to do with the suppression of, and, therefore, with the open war with anarchy and Nihilism; when it is further remembered that there is no proof of his ever having relaxed a second in the pursuit of his ends or the persecution of his enemies, it must be seen that he had that iron courage and inflexible resolution which mark the leaders of men. To no one is his assassination a surprise ; as I have seen it put almost brutally in ono paper, the event, when it came, was so anticipated that it had already, like movements in the market, been “ discounted.” And yet, there he went his way; with detectives before and behind him; with detectives sometimes riding on horses and sometimes on bicycles in his neighbourhood—with murder and blood almost in every breath of air he breathed—there he went his way, cool, imperturbable, unshaken in his convictions. Physically he does not seem to have been the kind of man one should have expected. He was rather pleasant than otherwise when it came to private intercourse, and he had a method of expounding his views which showed that he spoke in all the fervour of a complete faith in bis own convictions and in bis own methods. And withal he was cool, suave, almost monotonous, in his exposition of his views.—“ M.A.P.”