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

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The shop pointed out to me from the barracks windows proved to have been a small department store. I found it decidedly a “had been.” The floor space was a vast heap of merchandise that might have been tossed up by a cyclone. The shelves were stripped. The fittings of the store were twisted and broken. The proprietor, a sorrowful bankrupt Armenian, was perched on an upset counter contemplating his ruin. His nationality was an advantage to me for Ivan was able easily to satisfy him as to my status, and he opened up readily. The previous evening, just after he had closed his place for the night, a crowd of Cossacks—the same whom I had visited in their barracks—had come along with push-carts. They had smashed in his doors and windows, ransacked the whole shop, taken what they wanted of trinkets, blankets, and sewing-machines, and carried off their loot in the hand-carts, leaving behind them the pile of wreckage I saw.

Article 48 of the above mentioned proceedings of The Hague Conference reads: “Pillage is absolutely prohibited.” But under Russian military rule each commander is a law unto himself, and under commanders like General Alikhanoff each soldier is a law unto himself. The laws laid down and accepted by nations for the conduct of international wars do not, strictly and technically, apply to wars between a government and its people, but the laws of nations are merely civilized standards, and Russia, in its war against its own people, falls leagues short of these.