they belonged to the liberal and revolutionary parties hostile to the Tsar or to the reactionary Union of the Russian Nation, forwarding his wishes and ideas. It was all quite characteristic of the Russian nature, as it has often evinced itself. I observed the same phenomenon some years later during the war with Germany and Austria, when the Russian armies perpetrated the most awful massacres and the wildest scenes of pillage in the districts of Poland, East Prussia and Galicia, in which officers from the most aristocratic and cultured families took intimate part. Later I witnessed sickening instances of this Asiatic psychology of warring nomads in the fratricidal struggle under the Soviet regime, during which the Reds and the Whites rivalled each other in blood spilling, in the destruction of the national fortune accumulated through many generations, in cruelty and in criminal ingenuity.
I do not know which of them was the worse, which the better; but I do know that they will both appear before the throne of the Almighty Judge in robes covered with the blood of their brothers and of those innocent nations and tribes which have had the misfortune, by a stern decree of Fate, to have been conquered and dominated by the Russian Empire and afterward to have been ruled by the Soviet Republic.
The blow dealt by the peasant war against the fighting power of the Tsar's Government was very sore, as it led to many protests and revolts by peasants' sons serving with the army and the fleet.
These were the waves of the great bloody tide that followed me in my eastward journey through Siberia back to Harbin.
