Читать книгу The Red Reign. The True Story of an Adventurous Year in Russia онлайн

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One week in St. Petersburg was enough for me to realize all this. The beginning of the end might be to-morrow. Or, with equal likelihood, it might be years away. The temper of the people was such that nothing would be a surprise.

St. Petersburg seemed to reflect the atmosphere of Moscow, which still cowered and quivered from the severe and bloody repression that followed the magnificent fight her mere handful of armed citizens maintained on the barricades for nine days against disciplined troops. Suggestive messages, distorted and censored by government officials, kept coming in from different parts of the empire, the most disquieting, perhaps, from the Baltic provinces, for there General Orloff, “the butcher,” was pressing on with his expedition of “pacification.” Telegrams from Riga and other Baltic towns which leaked through the censor were one mournful chronicle of the “pacification”:

At the Staro-Gulben 20 peasants are shot dead, at Tirsen, 6, and at Sipolena, 2. At Novo-Pebalge an estate is burned down. At Staro-Pebalge a beautiful school building has been destroyed by shells. At the Volosts of Saukin and Noutt, 13 people were shot dead by the dragoons, and 20 peasants were whipped by the “Rozgie.” Troops set fire to the Library of one landlord and all the books were burned, he himself arrested, and his daughter punished by “Rozgie.”