Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/31

Rh He disappeared without a trace, and only later did it leak out that he was a paid agent of the secret police and as such had brought the Revolution to a disastrous head in this incredible manner. After his treacherous acts the ranks of the idealistic revolutionaries were rapidly depleted by the gallows, by the activities of the penal detachments under Generals Min, Rennenkampf and Trepoff and by the sentences of the Russian tribunals, prostrating justice before subservience to the orders of the Government authorities, which peopled Siberia and the prisons with these new victims of the crimes and violence of the Tsar's Government.

Gapon, however, did not escape real justice. The revolutionists ran him to earth, seized him and hung him in a solitary house in the outskirts of the little town of Terioki in Finland. Engineer Rutenberg was his executioner.

The news of the massacre of the peaceable petitioners by the Guard of the Tsar spread over all the great immense spaces of Russia, reaching Poland, Pamir and the Pacific. The indignation and despair of the intelligent layers of society had no limits. The peasants, however, remained indifferent. Following the January massacre, the scum of the Russian towns took a vigorous part in the movement against the revolutionary centres of activity, receiving from the police money and orders to destroy the "hydra of revolution." In many of the towns and cities murders of cultured people and of non-Russian citizens began to occur. This scum of mankind, schooled by the horrors of the Russian prisons, under the pay and protection of the secret police killed with impunity those who were considered dangerous for the Government of the White Tsar, Nicholas II, just as in later years they slew the enemies of the Government of