“Do you mean because they killed the sister, you will arrest the brother?”
“You did not understand me. I was only speaking of a possibility. I was presupposing. Why do you insist on misunderstanding me?”
We came to such a good understanding that next day the brother was still free.
A considerable uproar followed this incident. St. Petersburg newspapers clamored for the court-martial of the soldier who had fired the shot. The man was eventually tried—and acquitted. Then the newspapers, echoing public sentiment, declared that the trial was a farce. The matter was not allowed to drop out of sight.
One day the regiment to which the soldier belonged was ordered out on parade and this man’s name was called. The letter was then read from the Czar, announcing that the soldier be rewarded with ten rubles, or five dollars, for having so nobly done his duty!
This closed the incident.
Governmental terrorism exists throughout the whole gamut of the Russian bureaucracy. Petty police and gendarme officers plan and execute massacres; soldiers are called upon to stand one side, or to assist in the slaughter. Knowledge of these massacres is often known in advance in St. Petersburg and sometimes they are actually arranged in the offices of the central administration.[15]
Premier Stolypin with his field courts-martial (described in detail in another chapter) has shown himself no more of a humanitarian than Trepoff, and in the Semonova incident the Czar revealed to the world his intimate familiarity with small incidents.
I have no sympathy whatever with the belief that the Czar does not know what his ministers and officials are doing. If there are details that do not reach him, he alone is at fault. The present Emperor is a traditional autocrat. It is my conviction that he acquiesces in, if he does not instigate, massacre and occasional assassination. However much one may deplore terrorism—white or red—one thing stands out clear and true to my mind, namely, the burden of responsibility lies not with the terrorists of the revolution—their acts are human if to be deplored—but rather with the infinitely more heinous assassins of the government—who are distinctly inhuman—and most of all upon him who is the ultimate head of the whole governmental terroristic organization, the arch assassin who, by a word, could end for all time massacre and murder in the Russian empire—Czar Nicholas II.