Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/173

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THE FICKLENESS OF POWER
161

General Linievitch was kept in a continuously disagreeable correspondence with the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior.

Meanwhile life ran along for a short period in an unwonted calm for our much-harassed region. Unfortunately, however, the monarchists and the political police sent out from Russia desired and sought trouble, in order to afford them excuse and opportunity for initiating the repressive measures which had, for the time, been pushed off into the future. For this purpose they elaborated an unscrupulously clever plan, under which the Union of the Russian Nation entered into compacts with the gangs of hunghutzes which were always near Harbin and other large Manchurian centres, promising them secret assistance and protection from pursuit. This plan quickly demonstrated its practical value, as attacks on military and railway stores began. Several such supply depots were ransacked and burned, and St. Petersburg was then gravely informed that the soldiers, under the pernicious influence of the Union of Workers, did not perform their duties and thus brought upon the State these dangers and losses. Other denunciations even went so far as to state that the hunghutzes were in the pay of the leaders of the Union of Workers and that these leaders were using them to acquire large sums of money with which to pay for their escape and sojourn abroad until the revolution in the Far East should have been liquidated by the Tsar's Government and its active protagonists forgotten.

In Harbin bands of these hunghutzes attacked the houses of Sass-Tisowski and Goltzoff, members of our Union, killed their wives, pillaged everything and got safely away without ever being traced. Similar attacks were made in Hailar and Tsitsihar against leaders of our affiliated units, resulting in the death of some of these.