HOLY RUSSIA!!!

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1055, 30 March 1882, Page 4

HOLY RUSSIA!!!

(Sheffield Telegraph). From the Baltic to the Black Sea a Buffering people physically and intellectually incomparably superior to the Kussiaus have been the victims of an outbreak of murder, rapine, and brutal 1 .st, compared with which the deeds done in the panic-fury of civil war in Bulgaria pale into relative innocence. There has been a Saturnalia of . slaughter and of debauchery such as ■ history offers no parallel to, ami it has > been done with the foreknowledge of, i ■and under the eyes of. and with the j direct connivance of the Government I officials. The soldiers have taken part | in the drunken orgies of the bestial I populace, and the Russian women have i held down their more comely Jewish j sisters while the soldiery inflicted upon them the worst of conceivable indigni- I ties. Robbery and unnamable ruffian- : ism, not, rapine, murder, and spoliation, have swept over IGO towns and villages; thousands of families have been rendered homeless, and children of tender years and delicate girls have been subjected to outrages under which thev have died. These deeds were not ■doue under provocation, or in panic, or iu the madening frenzy of civil war. There was no pretence of any plot on the parr of the victims, as in Bulgaria; there was no disclosure of an organised conspiracy to burn and massacre, as in Bulgaria; there was no collusion with an armed enemy, as iu Bulgaria ; there was no employment of hastilygathered irregular levies, as iu Bui garia. The riots and massacres were deliberately organised, the time for their development was fixed —even the Jews knew of them beforehand, and implored protection, but importuned in vain. Families were burnt alive in their own houses, and wives and ■daughters foully dishonored in the presence of their relatives by soldiers who should have been their protectors. Such is Russia the civiliser; such is Russia the crusader; “Holy Russia!” even that Russia which converted a prosperous Turkish province into a pandemonium, and which was in this town of Sheffield complimented by Mr. Chamberlain on that “ work of benevolence.” Where are the Atrocitists? They shall not lack for facts. The Czar’s officials have striven hard to keep the truth from being known, they have put a veto upon telegrams, they have opened and searched through letters, they have forbidden the outraged in one city to forward details to their friends in other cities in Russia; but the details are, notwithstanding; coming to hand in the form of the most horrible reading that has for some centuries appeared in any English newspaper.