New-York tribune., 1918-09-10
The Russian Blood Bath

Refugees from Russia express aston
ishment that the outside world has SO
faint comprehension !of the horrors Of
the Bolshevist Reign of Terror. Mr..
Arno Dosch- Fleurot, himself a refugee,
writes to The World from Stockholm that
Lenine and Trotzky are shedding inno-
cent blood as it has never been shed be-
fore in Russia since the days of Ivan
the Terrible.
1t is not surprising that the outside
world has not fully sensed the blood
mania with which the Soviet dictatorship
is obsessed. The Russian Revolution was
almost bloodless. The world believed that
ideas had triumphed when the Romanoff
dynasty fell and that the new regime
would put away the barbaric methods
through which the ancient autocracy had
imposed it's will on naive and docile
people.
Lenine and Trotzky were not original
Revolutionists. They seized power as
minority factionists, preaching extreme
radicalism, just as the radical Mountain
in Paris won its fight against the milder
Girondists. Revolutions have their fash
ions. So though Lenine and Trotzky
might seek to pose as Marats and Robes
pierres, most persons outside Russia
have believed that they would be only
pale counterparts of those maddened
proscriptionists, in whose imaginatons
France could be saved only by resort to
the guillotine.
Modern civilization had made US skep-
tical of another such alteration in Rus
sia, whose wearied people, even accord
ing to Lenine and Trotzky themselves,
had only one longing-and that was to
escape from the horrors of war by pur-
chasing peace at any price.
But the inhuman passions which an
archy breeds have never become extinct.
Russia, under Lenine and Trotzky, has
been resolved into a primitive commu-
nifty where wild beasts struggle for sur
vival. And the widest beasts of all are
the men whose dictatorship, won by per-
fdy and force, is now threatened by
popular revulsion from the results of
their crimes Everything that is brutal,
oppressive and murderous i'm the nature
OF men reverting from civilization to
animalism is represented to-day in the
morbund, panic-striclSen Soviet govern
ment. The embittered, paranoiac advent
urers who have turned Russia into a
shambles slay lest they shall themselves
be slain 1t is a gamble with death-the
more revolving because all the slaughter
is meaningless, mere murder without the
least glimmer Of intelligent purpose.
Lenine and Trotzky are immeasurably
more odious than Marat and Robespierre
ever were at their worst. The latter pair
had at least q distorted patriotic pur-
pose IN view. They massacred the enc
mics of France and of the Revolution
both OF which were threatened by coali-
ton of foreign powers. They guillotined
those who sympathized with an enemy
aiming to reconquer France.
Lenine and Trotzky, on the other
hand, are the paid agents of an enemy
which has dismembered and looted Rus
sla. They are warning on Slavdom-
killing innocent men and women by the
thousands in order to rivet their tyranny
on Russia and help Germany to retain
her Russian spoils. To the sin of mur-
der they add the sin of treason.
All the representatives of the neutral
powers at Moscow have now joined in a
protest to the Bolshevist government
against the wholesale execution of civil
ians and former Russian officers. So far
as the civilized world can do so, it is
ready to pronounce sentence of out
lawry on the Moscow Terrorists.
1t is a just sentence Yet events in
Moscow may forestall it's execution.
Marat was stabbed by Charlotte Cor
day. Robespierre was sent to the guilo-
tine by the same convention which he
had dominated. Lenne and TrotZky. if
they stay in Russia, are likely to go the
same way. The mania of blood lust will
exhaust itself of its own violence.
But at what senseless and futile
cost! Out of this Reign of Terror no
Carnot can emerge to make it seem
thereafter but a step in the process of
national regeneration. 1t is not that.
The Soviet can never save Russia from
Germany or preserve what was sound in
the Revolution of 1917 Russia must be
saved from without-by timely Allied in
tervention. Her present blood bath has
no healing virtue in it. 1t is the mad