worst possible "Black Hundred" methods.[1] The soldiers, encouraged by the High Command, looked upon the unfortunate population of Western and Southwestern Russia and of the occupied territory of Austria as legitimate booty; they looted the shops and violated the people. The facts shocked Russia. Russian society was disgusted and filled with shame. All the high ideals which Russian progressives had associated with the war were brutally violated. They had gone to war to free the peoples of Austria from the Hapsburg yoke, only to put them under the regime of the "Black Hundred"; and on the way the war with the Huns was being transformed into a continuous pogrom by the soldiers in the Western provinces of Russia. Thus there was no limit to the depression and humiliation of thoughtful Russians. But apart from their humiliation, they were alarmed above all on account of the inevitable influence of this state of affairs on the morale of the soldiers. It was poisoning the soul of the Russian soldiers; it was dangerously affecting the simple mind of the peasant soldier.[2]
- ↑ "Among the heaviest criminals of the old regime, it appears that we have hitherto forgotten one more gang of political marauders—those who, under the leadership of Count Bobrinslci and Bishop Eulogiy, flocked to Galicia after our victorious army, robbing and oppressing the population who gave the Russian army a friendly welcome and who, thanks to their crimes, followed the retreating army with altogether different feelings. Every honest Russian has blushed with shame in reading of even that minute part of the exploits of that gang, which has found its way to the press through the obstacles of censorship."—"Den," March 21, 1917.
- ↑ "… But the front is not a homogeneous domain. If the best youthful forces of the people are concentrated there there are also entrenched the noxious breed of the old order, and it is hard to say whose part has been more fatal in the last three years; that of the outcasts of reaction in the rear or that of the outcasts of reaction at the front.
"For it is just at the front that a wild bacchanalia of pogroms and banishments, of wholesale slaughter and murder of peaceful and innocent inhabitants, took place. Acting from here, the high command filled the history of the last three years with the horrors of St. Bartholomew's Eve, of the inquisition and the crusades, which struck millions of Russian citizens dumb with horror."—"Den," Petrograd, March 15, 1917.
