HISTORY OF A NIHILIST.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2195, 30 April 1891, Page 4

HISTORY OF A NIHILIST.

0 A St. Petersburg correspondent a describes the recent trial of r Russian Nihilists for high treason, a declaring that the details communicated i. are worthy of implicit credence. The y ringleader of the conspirators, and ? now the chief of the prisoners, is a y woman of education, of iron will, of 9 striking beauty, and of undaunted 1 cquirage. This person, Sophia |Guns- » burg by name, narrated the eventful fc story of her chequered life t> her 3 unsympathetic judges, and narrated it in a most calm, unimnassioned, ) objective way, which the moat impartial i of historians might well envy. She ' was a Jewess by birth, she said, and > had been brought up m the Pale of i Settlement. Her parents had given i her the best education in which their lot was cast. Natural aptitude, and i the oppression that stimulates when it i does not crush, effected the rest, and , in time Sophia Gunsburg became a , sort of Jewish Hypatia of the Pale, i The religious and moral principles, ; however, instilled into her by her mother and her early teachers were soon washed away by the surge of daily life as it rolled on in the narrow channel of the Pale, wrecking young hopes and burying legitimate desires. Sophia left her birth- ‘ place, to which she ref uses the name of Fatherland, and went abroad to breathe the bracing air of freedom. In Geneva her vague inclinations and tendencies were gradually moulded into a perfect system of revenge, which has scarcely its parallel in history. Holding the Government responsible for the innumerable evils that deluge country, she determined to slay the Tzar. She resolved to gather together a select band of young men, and dazzling them by the almost irresistible charms of her beanty, to administer to each, unknown to the other, a solemn oath binding him to do her behests, and to assassinate the Emperor on a day and in the manner fixed by her. She was determined that if one failed another should take his place, and still another after him, until at last the foul deed should be done. The Emperor’s successor, too, unless he struck out a new line of policy, was to be stamped out of existence in the same ruthless way, and thus Red Terror was to struggle with White, until the evils complained of were either abolished or were intensified to such an extent that the most phlegmatic Russian peasant could no longoreudure »hem. Sophia Qunsburgh bad no difficulty in attracting a sufficent number of young Russians who were smitten by her beauty and grace, or t made enthusiastic by her eloquence Bhe sacrificed without hesitation or j. regret all that a pure woman holds ft

dear over these young Oatilines,; §be was not, however, wholly a monster ; nor was she exempt from all human weaknesses. She herself fell in love fperdumeut in love with an educated young Russian whose paramour she became, but whom she never initiated into hot political plots, so that h$ continued down to the moment of his arrest in complete ignorance of the part she was playing as regicide. One of the unsuccessful attempts on the Tzar’s life was the work of one of Sophia’s Q-unsbnrg’s body gjiards. Sophia Q-unsburg is to be kept in close solitary confinement for the remainder of her life in the dreary fortess of gloomy .Schlusselburg 1 on a black island near Lake Ladoga.