—the Russian peasant The propaganda injected into this great mass of over a hundred million of unlettered, trampled and desperate human souls was like a burning torch flung into a mow of hay.
In a trice the whole country was aflame. The Revolution had become a peasant war and, fired to secure their rights, these half-serfs began to raid the estates of the big landowners, robbing the houses, carrying off the stores of grain and flour, driving away the stock and, in many cases, taking over the management and alleged ownership of the landlord's fields. In these acts the destroying, criminal instincts of the Russian mass had free and fatal vent.
Later I personally witnessed some of the results of this peasant uprising at "Manuilovo," the estate of Mr. S. M. Pavlovitch in the Government of St. Petersburg. Here the palatial, historic country residence, containing many mementoes of one of the greatest Russian story writers, Karamzin, who formerly lived there, was completely demolished. The furniture was hacked to pieces, irreplaceable pictures were cut in ribbons, great mirrors were smashed and the books made fuel for a bonfire in front of the great mansion. Thoroughbred horses were hamstrung, hunting dogs were hung, while blooded cattle and prize sheep were slaughtered for meat. Similar acts were perpetrated in forty-nine of the governments of European Russia and were especially violent in the Baltic provinces, where the Lettish peasants put to the sword their masters, the German barons, who were the descendants of the Teutonic Knights and had come under the domination of Russia with the conquest of these western regions.
This river of blood and destruction had its sources in the psychology of the Russians, regardless of whether
