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This may not always be just, but officers should understand the reason for it.
To you I say: Citizens, you must understandwhence springs the source of this distrust of officers, and by what is fed.
In truth, while there are such men as Yudenitch, the organiser of a league of—assassins as Balachovitch, who after gaining the confidence of the «Red Army» went over to the Whites and sold districts of the province of Pskov to the Esthonian bourgeoisie, men like Koltchak, who flogged the peasants in all the townships, districts, even the provinces occupied by him, till the victims' groans reached Petersburg and Moscow—while there are such men, it is easy to see whence comes the bitter feeling towards those who were, so to speak, of the same skin as Koltchak, wore epaulets like his, had studied the same things that he had. And so long as there are such figures as Nekliudov such as attitude is inevitable.
By the way, I must dwell on this figure a moment. I made Nekliudov's acquaintance when I was at Krasnaya Gorka, where he was commandant. When I met him I could easily account for his being in the Red Army. He was still a young man, from a fine old family which had several liberal members under Alexander II and Alexander III, had had a part in the building of the fort, and it seemed to me that he loved every stone in it. Under the Tsar he was
