RUSSIA AND POLAND.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3594, 5 October 1920, Page 5

RUSSIA AND POLAND.

SOVIET ALARMED. | o ‘ j DESERTIONS FROM RED ARMY. i Received 5.50 a.m. j LONDON, October 4. j Reports from Moscow show that the i Soviet is thoroughly alarmed at the increasing number of desertions from the Red Army. Drastic measures have | been taken to secure new registration of able-bodied men, with dire threats I of punishment for those who seek to ‘ evade military service. Received 12.45 p.m. j i LONDON, October 4. I The Manchester Guardian’s' special I correspondent, recently in Moscow, i telegraphs from Riga a confirmation j of the numberless direct reports that Bolshevism has reached a most extreme crisis. Anti-Bolshevist activities in Petrograd, wkh assassination of commissaries, reflect the temper of the country. The Polish war, from being at first a popular war in modern Russia, has become unpopular, and the people want peace at any price. A terrible winter, with famine as so-' vere as in 1891, but on*a wider scale, amidst a population exhausted by war and starvation, threatens to be a dreadful horror if Wrangel, succeeds in cutting off supplies from the southeast. Thus, Bolshevist strategy is to permit the Polish advance to spend itself in the devastated north, whilst the Bolsheviks are concentrating their forces against Wrangel, Meanwhile, the terror directed from Moscow is intensified, and much depends on Avhether the secret police and senior officers' of the army who have long accepted the Bolshevist regime as a temporary government only, will think i the time has come to dislodge It. j POLAND AND LITHUANIA. ' l ARMISTICE CONCLUDED. Receved 12.45 p.m. WARSAW, October 4. A Polish-Lithuanian armistice has been concluded, but the demarcation line is not yet known.