Russia’s Revolutionary Struggle

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 16, 1906

Russia’s Revolutionary Struggle

It is difficult for us at this distance to realize the real situation in Russia. It is declared that “with the dissolution of the Douma the Russian revolutionary struggle enters upon its second phase—that of irrepressible conflict.” Some idea of the disturbed condition of affairs may be obtained from the following paragraph taken from an editorial in the Outlook:—

The records of the Russian ministry of the interior show that there were eighteen thousand political offenders in provincial prisons on the day when the Douma assembled, and that in the first month thereafter nine hundred and ninety-seven were exiled, two hundred and twenty-three of them to Siberia. This is at the rate of twelve thousand exiles a year. In a speech in opposition to capital punishment, Representative Kuzmin Karavaiyef told the Douma, on the sixteenth of last May, that the government had put to death six hundred persons—mostly politicals—in the preceding five months. All these arrests, banishments, and executions took place after the czar issued his famous liberal manifesto of Oct. 30, 1905, guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and inviolability of personal rights. If the government found it necessary to imprison eighteen thousand persons, exile nine hundred and ninety-seven, and put six hundred to death, while preparations for a national assembly were in progress, or while that assembly was actually in session, we may imagine what its task will be when the people learn that the Douma has been forcibly dispersed, and that there is no longer any prospect of radical reform. The prisons of the empire will not be large enough to hold the active enemies of the czar, much less the millions who will give them encouragement and aid.

Just what the outcome of this terrible condition of affairs will be we do not know, but we do know that there are abundant evidences in all parts of the world that we have come to the perilous times which indicate that the end of all things is at hand, and that the coming of the Lord is near. More than one nation will be in distress before all these things are accomplished.