Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/138

126 My fellow-travellers from Russia said that in Russia itself the people laboured under no illusions. The war was regarded as lost; the Tsar and the Government were hated. The hypocritical politics of the Tsar, through which his "beloved nation" was criminally deceived, made him especially detested. After the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese, representatives of different elements and classes of the whole people formulated and presented to Nicholas a petition, in which the Government was accused of inefficiency and a parliament demanded. This document closed with the warning words:

"Oh, Tsar, do not delay! In this terrible hour of national catastrophe your responsibility before God and Russia is unspeakably great!"

In response to the petition the Tsar promised the promulgation of a decree providing for a parliament: but, when the passions and emotions of the people had cooled somewhat, he procrastinated and only afterwards, when new explosions revealed the indignation of his subjects and the whole country had become a vast network of revolutionary societies and parties, did he yield to the demand for a parliament, attaching the almost nullifying proviso that it should have only advisory powers without any rights of legislation.

At the same time the political police were everywhere active, making arrests, banishment and the death sentence daily phenomena. When I finally learned, while still in St. Petersburg, that a general strike as a protest and as an accompaniment to a universal request for a parliament was in contemplation for the whole of Russia, during which the employees of all the railways, steamship lines, factories and offices, as well as those of the post and telegraph services, were to go out, I understood that the Revolution, whose birth I had witnessed at the beginning