CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 January 1918, Page 7

CONDITIONS IN RUSSIA.

CARNIVAL OF LAWLESSNESS. MISDE2SS OF THE TOVARISCI. Conditions in 'Russia finder Bolshevik rule are thus described by the Petrograd correspondent of the Morning Post:— Xot three per cent, of the population of All the Russias cares anything whatsoever about anything that can, even in this country, be called, politics, and not one per cent, has any understanding of what Western nations mean by , that term. 'Evei-y man is his own master, and most of the nation is in, the uniform which clothes alike soldiers and those now commonly known as tovarisci. The latter overwhelming, majority have been living at the .public expense in idleness for seven months past, which in Russia to-day is a minor matter. What really matters is that millions of tovarisci living in idleness without biftig subject to any kind of authority or d isciplihe have naturally developed with Extreme rapidity the rankest growths of every form of criminality. Whole regions of European Russia .ire terrorised 'by armed hands of .tovarisci, who, by hundreds and thousands, lay waste the countryside. Wholesale murder and wider ruin follow. The senseless slaughter of horses and •iattle, whose carcases are left rotting in the fields, and the destruction of breadstuffs deliberately set afiire are common accompaniments to these exploits. Worst of all, the spirit stores are now becoming special objects of attack. The peasantry join these bands and share in the pillage and debauches. One of the first uses of "freedom" in the villages wag to institute private stills. Drunkenness is alarmingly on the increase. Many people nowadays are purifying methylated spirit sufficiently to enable it to serve as drink. Thousands drink this horrible stuff without any preparation whatever. Several hundred robberies with violence are reported in Petrograd alone every day at a time when, no redress being possible, comparatively few sufferers go to the trouble of lodging a complaint. The many murders* committed With impunity daily is 'beyond all estimate. Gangs of tovarisci openly, by daylight, rob private houses and shops, carrying off, tlie proceeds when 'bulky in motor-lorries. 'For a space of ninety minutes a score or so of tovarisci held up on the main thoroughfares and robbed every passer-by of his money and valuables. Occasionally tho crowd catches two or three of these professional criminals in uniform or demoralised soldiery and makes very short work of them. Two were reduced to a mass of unrecognisable human flesh within a mile of the Winter Palace. This was close to tlie Nevsky Prospect, where a murder was committed in tlie open street by a few soldiers bent on robbing a middle-aged man who attempted resistance. AH that the wider populace of Russia understands of what is called liberty i$ that anything way be done by anybody with absolute impunity unless he is caught by an. angry mob in the perpetration of an unpopular act There is a universal consciousness of the absence of any forms of real authority anywhere. As one paper bitterly puts it to day, "there are twenty thousand rulers in place of Nicholas the Second." Soldiers freely resort to the arcades known for a good reason as the Thieved Market with saoks on their backs, and proceed to take out a- heterogeneous collection of valuable articles of vertu and domestic trifles, evidently representing the night's work of very ignorant thieves and, laying them out on the sidewalk, openly offer them for sale. The numbers offering for sale army boots and other articles of military equipment are remarkable. ■ But the valuable curio and bric-a-abrac shops are either shut or scantily provided nowadays, the owners wisely distrusting the near neighbourhood of the competing tovarisci.