Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/217

Rh the victims of the Japanese war out of consideration) more human lives than 89,000 have already been sacrificed by the fault of the government. Consider all the victims, beginning with the thousands who perished on the Hodynskoe Field at the coronation of Nicholas II; consider the premature deaths in Siberia and in the prisons; and consider all those who have been slaughtered in pogroms Does the tsar know all that is done in his name? Does he countersign thousands of death sentences without reflecting what these terrible figures mean? Whether he knows or not, whether he reflects or does not reflect, in any case the official defenders and legalist supporters of tsarism will find it hard to continue their justification of absolute monarchy. Yet this was the tsar who summoned the peace congress at The Hague.

I am aware that the blame for all that happened does not attach to the tsar and his government alone. A large section of society, cultured as well as uncultured (for the officials instrumental in carrying out the white terror belonged to the intelligentsia), demanded and cooperated in these brutal methods of repression. The white terror was supported by a vigorous agitation in the press. The reactionary journals, which during the years 1904 and 1905 had joined with the others in clamouring for reforms and legality ("Novoe Vremja," "Svět," "Graždanin," etc), had now become the journalistic and literary defenders of blood-stained reaction.

In 1906 was constituted the terrorist League of the Russian People, with its branch organisation, the Party of Active Struggle against the Revolution, whose reactionary agents and organisations, composed of the dregs of society, became notorious throughout the world after the Kishinev pogrom, under the name of "black hundred." Those only who have read at least one issue of one of the party organs, such as the "Russkoe Znamja" or the "Věče," can fully grasp the limitless barbarism of these groups; but some idea can be gleaned from the antisemitic journals of Vienna and Prague, which borrowed freely from the columns of the "Russkoe Znamja." In the Reichsrat, Brežnovský, through his interpellation of December 17, 1906, rendered accessible the contents of a Russian pamphlet entitled The Secret of Jewish Policy, its Methods and its Results, ascertained with the Aid of Science and of Pseudo-liberalism. It need hardly be said that Russia, like other countries, possesses also a silk-hatted mob. There were to be