Our further conversation was fruitless. The diplomat explained to me with a suave smile that since statesmen are mortal, the living ones do not like to hear the dead spoken of disparagingly. After the meeting, everything went on as before. The censor continued to blue-pencil. Instead of a newspaper, often all that appeared was a sheet of white paper. We were never guilty of disregarding M. Chasles’ will; he, in turn, was even less inclined to disregard the will of his masters.
Nevertheless, in September, 1916, the prefecture handed me the order for my expulsion from French territory. But they told me nothing
Business Broadband Service . Gradually, however, it became apparent that the cause was a malicious frame-up organized by the Russian secret police in France.
When deputy Jean Longuet came to Briand to protest, or, to be more precise, to grieve (Longuet’s protests always sounded like the gentlest of tunes) about my expulsion, the French prime minister answered him: “Do you know that the Nashe Slovo was found on the persons of the Russian soldiers who murdered their colonel at Marseilles?” Longuet had not been expecting this. He knew of the “Zimmerwald” policy of the paper; he could reconcile himself more or less to that, but the murder of a colonel could not but find him at a loss. He turned to inquire of my French friends there, and they in turn asked me, but I knew no more about the murder at Marseilles than they did
soho serviced apartment . Correspondents of the Russian liberal press who were patriotic enemies of the Nashe Slovo accidentally came into the affair and cleared up the whole Marseilles incident.
It happened that when the Czar’s government brought troops to the soil of the republic troops called “symbolical” because of their slim numbers they also mobilized in haste the requisite number of spies and agents-provocateurs. Among these was a certain Vining (I believe that was his name) who arrived from London with a letter of introduction to the Russian consul. To start things going, Vining tried to induce the most moderate of the Russian correspondents to take part in the “revolutionary” propaganda among the Russian soldiers. They refused. He did not dare address himself to the editors of the Nashe Slovo, and consequently we did not even know of him. After his failure in Paris, Vining went to Toulon, where it seems he had some success among the Russian sailors, who were unable to see through him. “The soil is very favorable for our work here. Send me revolutionary books and papers,” he wrote to certain Russian journalists, whom he chose at random ; but he received no answer. Serious mutinies broke out on the Russian cruiser Askold, stationed at Toulon, and were cruelly suppressed. Vining’s part in the business was only too obvious, and he decided that it was an opportune time to transfer his activities to Marseilles. The soil proved “favorable” there, too. Not without his co-operation, mutinies broke out among the Russian soldiers and culminated in the stoning to death of the Russian colonel, Krause, in the courtyard of the barracks. When the soldiers concerned in the affair were arrested, copies of the same issue of the Nashe Slovo were found on them. The Russian correspondents, coming to Marseilles to investigate, were told by the officers that during the disturbances a certain Vining had distributed the Nashe Slovo to all soldiers, whether they wanted it or not. And that was the only reason why the paper was found on the arrested soldiers, who had not even had a chance to read it.
