Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/141

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THE CRIMSON TIDE
129

ment, it accused the non-Russian elements in the population of the Empire—that is, the Poles, Georgians, Letts, Jews and many other subject peoples, as well as large sections of the intelligentsia—of liberal and revolutionary ideas and of spreading these throughout the country.

The revolutionary elements, composed of the most worth-while members of the intelligentsia, as well as of the workers and of all the professional unions, also organized themselves and elected two principal bodies to prosecute the Revolution: first, the League of the Unions, the more moderate of the two, and, as the second, The Council of the Deputies of the Workers, a body with the most radically revolutionary views and tendencies and presided over by the lawyer Khrustaloff-Nosar.

Synchronously the Union of the Russian Nation freely lavished funds in the formation of detachments composed of the ex-prisoners, criminals, beggars and those shifting individuals who, without any regular means of livelihood, spend their days around low cafés and their nights in the parks or in night refuges, frequently those watched over by a uniformed guard. These detachments soon began their activities in the cities and towns, so that the pogroms of 1905 swept like a bloody wave over some hundred or more of Russia's unfortunate urban populations, returning a significant report of over four thousand people killed and some ten thousand wounded.

One of these massacres in the city of Tomsk was entirely characteristic. It took place on October 20th and was described to me by a man who had been one of my former pupils in the High Polytechnic Institute and who was later a member of the Duma, Mr. A. A. Skorokhodoff. A large gathering of the inhabitants of the town, principally officials, professors, teachers and stu-