RUSSIAN TERROR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8372, 5 March 1907, Page 3

RUSSIAN TERROR.

DESPERATE FIGHT WITH REVOLUTIONISTS.

The special correspondent, of the London Daily Telegraph, writing on January 12th, says:— Another Saturday has been marked by a deed of blood, the victims of which were obscure members of the police, who died at their post heroically. The scene of the tragedy was the furthest and most dismal part of St Petersburg, on the right banks of the frozen (Neva, the time was two ■ hours after midnight. At the police station the constables and officers were d6zing when a colonel of gendarmes arrived with an order from the Department of Safety to surround a certain wooden house, and t6 search a flat tenanted by a young woman who kept three workmen as lodgers. The superintendent immediately summoned officers and men, who all unhesitatingly sallied forth into the obscurity of the night, and some into the gloom of death. It was the coldest time of this winter, the thermometer registering 20deg. below zero Fahrenheit, and the frost being sharpened by a strong, numbing blast. Here and there vast braziers filled with logs burned brightly in the streets, but the suspected house was plunged in silence and darkness. Entering the courtyard, the police awoke the house porter, lighted a lamp, and proceeded to the flat. Some constables were stationed in the street, others at the gate of the house, their teeth chattering, their hands carefully avoiding the metallic parts of the rifles and revolvers with which they were armed. Their figures were doubled up with cold. To the knocks delivered on the door of the flat there was no response. Louder and more frequent fell the strokes from knuckles, but the quiet within remained unbroken. Force was about to be employed, when, all at once the door swung wide open, the lamp was knocked out of the colonel's hand, j and from the darkness of the room came a series of loud reports and a hail of bullets, followed by silence and broken by moans. Then both sides fired into the blackness. The police below, unable to discern friends from foes, were panicstricken, and the foremost, having numbed fingers, were unable to fire. The three revolutionists, shooting unceasingly, reached the courtyard, and favoured by the darkness, climbed the fence and escaped. Meanwhile a crowd gathered and helped to carry away the bodies of two police officers and two constables who had been shot dead, and the house porter and a detective, both grievously wounded. In the pockets of the fallen officers lay loaded revolvers unused.