Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1918 — WANTED TO KEEP OLD RUSSIA [ARTICLE]

WANTED TO KEEP OLD RUSSIA

Desire of Caucasian Princes# Was far Independence Without Blemishes of Industrialism. • •• ■— I met a Caucasian princess here in Petrograd, Ernest Poole writes in the Saturday Evening Post. She sat next to me one day in the small press gallery of the hall in which the duma used to meet Now in its place was the council. The woman by my side, I learned, was here as a correspondent for a social revolutionist paper down in the Caucasus. I had been in the Caucasus years before, and we spoke of the old town where she had been born, high up in the heart of the mountains. The Russians call the women there “the diamonds of Russia,” and this woman was one of these. I was curious to learn what had drawn her to a scene like this, so many thousand miles from home. She explained that her husband had been killed in the first year of the war and that after that she had thrown herself into war activities. “We don’t want to desert the Russian cause. We are all in favor of pushing the war through to the end,” she told me. “And at the same time we are doing our part In the work of the revolution. The president of the council here, and half the other leaders, too, are Caucasians. We are doing our share. But at the same time we want to be free from too much rule by Petrograd.” “What do you mean by autonomy? How free do you want to be?” I asked. “Tell me about your United States. Ton have states, and a nation, too,” she said. I tried to explain the relations between our states and the federal government. . “We wish more than that,” she said; “we want more independence.” I replied that in America we were moving just the other way—toward more centralized government —Wd 1 tried to explain how the growth of rallroaas, factories, mills and huge Interstate corporations was forcing us to grant more and more control to the men in Washington. “But,” she rejoined, “we don’t want an ugly land of mills. We want o’ir Russia to stay as it is—l mean with Its beautiful fields and its forests, Its rivers and its mountains. You have seen the Caucasus and I know you will feel what I mean.”