BANKRUPT RUSSIA.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 81832, 27 August 1906, Page 2

BANKRUPT RUSSIA.

Russia's financial condition is daily becoming more disquieting to her creditors . Her indebtedness to France alone amounts to no less than £480,000,000 sterling, of which only £80,000,000 can be shown to have been productively, invested or expended. Her gold reserve, of which we h.|ard so much at the commencement of the late war, has no staband her Budget for the current year exhibits a deficiency of £600,. 000; while her receipts frp,m, extensive railway system have shrunk by u,000,q00 sterling. l(aving been compelled io resort' to the issue of paper money, the managers of her finances witness, as a natural consequence, a steady decline in value of the printed rag that represents a rouble, and the peasant from whom, and from his vices more particularly, as the popular drink is a Sjato monopoly, the bulk of the taxation is extorted, is practically a ruined man, inasmuch as it is estimated that as many as thirty-six per cent of the agricultural classes are on the verge of starvation; while tho shrunken gold reserves only cover one-half the. amount of paper roubles in circulation. Thus" bad begins, but worse remains behind ;" for it is announced that directly the rule cf Russia departs from the hands of the autocracy, as depart it must, unless the possessors of power are .prepared for the terrible alternative of assassination, one by one, every penny of the naii-.nal debt contracted since the mass.icrc of January, 1005, will be repudiated. One of the leading French reviews asserts that "nearly all the great Russian dailies, as well as other European newspapers, have published this significant statement disguised as an advertisement, for the benefit of reckless creditors," and the Duma was to hjave notified this intention ere it was dissolved "by order of the Czar." To the most industrious and thrifty classes of society in France such an act of repudiation would prove to be a calamity too panful to dwell upon, and might, ir»' .d, precipitate a revolution m/ .it country, 30 great would be the'.age and misery of the suffer-