RUSSIA TROUBLE.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 25 June 1917, Page 2

RUSSIA TROUBLE.

LENINE THE MAKER OF IT. REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA IN GERMAN SPECIAL TRAIN. Despatches from Russia, says the New York Times, have been full of a name new to American readers —Lenin 0. We hear of Lenine travelling through Germany and receiving every sort of courtesy and aid from the German authorities; of Lenine haranguing a crowd from the balcony of the Petrograd home of a famous Russian dancer; of adherents of Lenine driven from one of his lectures by an infuriated mob of Russians as a protest against his pcace-at-any-price exhortations; of a parade of Russian soldiers, wounded in battle against the Germans, marching through the streets of Petrograd with banners bearing inscriptions advising “Leonine German agitation and "get back to William," their boss. All his life Lenine has been "agin the Government." Not only that —he comes from a family of chrynic rebels' One brother, while a student at Petrograd, in ISS7, was hanged for complicity in a plot to assissinate Czar Alexander 11. The man who has now leaped into the limelight as the arch-trouble-maker against the new democratic regime in Russia has been prominent among the Socialists of his native land since the early nineties. He is described as a man about 45 years old, one of the most fiery of all Russian orators, who chooses the simplest of words and phrases in his speeches. His real name is Vladimir Hitch Ulianpff, and he hails from the district of Simbirsk, in the Volga region of Russia. He first came to the fore in 1595, when lie wrote a book on. economics strongly impregnated with revolutionary doctrines, That got him “in bad” right then and there with the Czarists. From that year onward he began to spend a good part of his time away from Russia.

Lenine’s second book appeared in 1899, and is by far the best known of all his works. It is entitled "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," and placed its author in the fore-front of the Russian Socialist Party. In 1901 Lenine bobbed up as editor of the Socialist newspaper i||lskar,” (tiie Spark.) It was published in Paris, the desire of the Czar’s police to lay hands on Lenine having become so pressing as to render his residence in Russia impossible. This paper had a big circulation in Russia in spite of the fact that anyone found with a copy

iii his possession was sent to prison forthwith. In 1905 he became a candidate for the Second Duma, from the district of Potrograd, but he was defeated. He was active in the revolutionary movement of that year, which brought Red Monday, and was the most serious with which the Czar’s regime had been confronted for a long time. When the rebels had been downed Lenine again found foreign countries more healthful and resided abroad continuously—at least he did S ‘ officially ’ ’ —until events wheih have just brought him again into prominence. , At the outbreak of war he was in Cracow, the capital of 'Austrian Poland, where he was promptly gaoled as an alien enemy. But he was soon releasi ed by the Austrian authorities, whereupon he returned to his old haunts, Paris and Switzerland. “I am against him,” said a New York Russian, “and so are most Russians here; but I am convinced that he is doing what he is doing not for the Germans, but for what he thinks are the interests of international Socialism. “The bulk of the Russian Socialist's are for the continuation of the war against Germany. Lenine scornfully dubs these men ‘social patriots’ and declares that, because they do not want peace for the sake of the development of international Socialism, they are not real Socialists at all. “They retort by calling him and his crowd ‘Porajentzi 7 —the people whoi want defeat. And they heap accusations on Lenine of complicity with the Germans and ask him searching questions as to how it happened that he travelled across Germany by special train and was made much of by the authorities. 7 7 “His adherents explain this away by asserting that when he crossed Germany recently there happened to be a special train bearing Russian prisoners of war who had been exchanged for Germans held in Russia, and that Lenine was allowed to ride on the train I purely as a matter of courtesy. | “I think, it safe to say that if Le- [ nine were actually in the pay of the Germans, or really doing German propaganda work lie would have been arrested long ago.”