I was finally offered a room in an institution which constituted the heart of Bolshevism in Krasnoyarsk, and as, for obvious reasons, my comrades were all of them in favour of my accepting the offer, I did so at once.

I told them that I would see them frequently afterwards, and I kept my promise, but I did not give them my address as I feared that some of them might unconsciously give it away or that they might chance to be overheard while talking about it among themselves. I was particularly suspicious of some of our ex-interpreters who came to see us; but several of my young companions, with that generous frankness which is (in England) such a charming trait in the character of English public-school boys, refused to entertain any suspicions, and confided in them all their little plans for escape. The ex-interpreters listened attentively, made helpful suggestions, and the plans went wrong.

The room which I occupied was separated by a low wooden partition from an office where a good deal of Government business was done, and there was much shouting, day and night, into a telephone. One day a young married lady came to get permission to bury in a separate grave the body of her husband, a White officer, who had been murdered by the Reds under the following circumstances: A White volunteer detachment which had already surrendered and given up its arms happening to encounter a Red volunteer detachment belonging to the same town in the Urals, the Reds immediately murdered all the White officers. One of those White officers was the husband of the above-mentioned lady, whose modest petition was that the body should not be buried in a common grave with the other corpses but in a separate grave. I do not know whether her request was granted or not, but I do know that none of those Red murderers was punished for their massacre, and that the matter was hushed up.

To be quite fair, however, I must say that the Whites had, to my certain knowledge, committed innumerable atrocities during the one year that they had ruled Siberia and that the White officers had behaved with a peculiar brutality, against which the English and Scots officers strongly and manfully protested. (One officer, formerly of Carson’s Army, who did not protest, now—October, 1920—holds an important position in the Irish Secret Service.) On this occasion in Krasnoyarsk a Bolshevik leader tried hard to have those Red murderers punished, but he was overruled by superior authorities who believed that punishment for such acts is a delicate matter and that it is only human that they should act on their own initiative.

One of our visitors was a Commissar from Moscow, who had false passports and was on his way to Irkutsk and Vladivostock in order to overthrow the Social Revolutionary Governments in those places. He succeeded at Irkutsk, but what happened to him afterwards I do not know. These agents with false passports are a feature of every Russian front, being very numerous in Finland, Poland, and South Russia, and always exceedingly confident of success. They laugh at the idea of Social Revolutionary Republics holding out against them, and, had it not been for Japan, they would have extended Bolshevik rule to Vladivostock six months ago.

I had frequent difficulties in explaining my position as a journalist, but was helped by the general chaos that prevailed and by a scrapbook full of newspaper cuttings, many of them in Russian, in which I was described as a celebrated war correspondent.

Some of these Russian cuttings were so laudatory and spelt my name so badly that I am afraid the Bolsheviks attributed to me a literary importance which I do not possess. One triumphant radio of theirs which was quoted in the English Press described me as “the well-known writer Macaulay.”

During the revolutionary movement of 1905-1906 I had, like all the British correspondents in St. Petersburg, criticized the Tsar’s Government, and, for journalistic purposes, got into touch with opponents of that Government. I now met some of these people or acquaintances of theirs, and, later on, I met several American correspondents, one British correspondent, and one high official of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, who had known me as a journalist five years earlier and were unaware that I had spent all the interval in the British Army. The journalists, Russian and foreign, who did not know me personally were acquainted with a great many newspapermen whom I knew. My name appeared in “Who’s Who” as a journalist; and several prominent Bolsheviks who had been living in Italy at the time my dispatches from Tripoli raised a storm in the Italian Press, recollected me perfectly, while a very large number who had not been in Italy had heard of my connection with that storm.

I could not show my passport, as I was described in it as a military officer, but, luckily, I had with me a cutting from the New York World containing a portrait of myself, and this proved better than any passport.

I was sorry that I had to leave so many people under a false impression, but I had now gone so far that there was no turning back; and, besides, the money question was still very acute with my companions. They had not, at this time, begun to get any money at all for teaching, and what they earned in that way later would never have sufficed to keep them from starvation. My first duty, therefore, was to persuade Commissar Sverdlov, Vice-Minister of Ways and Communications, to let them have some money by casually pointing out to him, in a tone of emotionless unconcern, that the death by cold and starvation of my comrades, most of whom belonged really to the working classes, would not be good propaganda for Bolshevism among the workmen of England.

Having succeeded in this important matter, I quietly took various steps in other directions to render their position safe. I found them more protectors than they were aware of, for I always impressed on these friends the necessity of not showing their friendship openly by making themselves known to my companions.

My access to Commissar circles also enabled me to telegraph from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow and Copenhagen and to bring to Moscow many letters from my companions to their relatives, and to send those letters to England. At Moscow I found the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in a curious state of ignorance about our officers in Siberia, owing apparently to a lack of connection, not only between the Commissariat of F.A. and the Commissariat of War, but also between the representatives of those Commissariats in Siberia and the central Commissariats in Moscow to which they were supposed to be respectively subordinate. I also found that Provincial Soviets and other organizations had at times an awkward habit of obstinately claiming a sort of local autonomy, and of impeding rather than helping the representatives of the Central Government.

Hence it came to pass that the F.O. in Moscow does not seem to have ever been informed officially of the capture of British troops in Siberia. So far as I know, all the telegrams on that subject that got through from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow in January, 1920, were sent by me. I sent two telegrams from Krasnoyarsk at that time to the Commissariat of F.A.; and, when I arrived myself in Moscow, I was able to supplement those telegrams by a good deal of additional information helpful to our prisoners. Many enquiries about them came from our Legation in Copenhagen, and Chicherin had always to apply to me for answers to these enquiries. Meanwhile, in Krasnoyarsk, at the Ministry of Communications in Moscow, and at the Bolshevik Foreign Office in Moscow, I lost no opportunity of making representations on behalf of my comrades. I always pointed out that, from the Bolshevik point of view, it would be good policy to release these men at once. They had been well treated, I said, and their release in itself would be a contradiction of the report that the Reds always killed their prisoners. If detained till they contracted typhus, or even till they had got excessively bored, as soldiers easily become when kept a long time in one place doing nothing, they would only become permanently embittered against Bolshevism. My arguments seemed to make a considerable impression; nevertheless, as my companions were detained in Eastern Siberia six months after I left, it is to be presumed that there were difficulties in the way of acting on my advice. The difficulties were, I think, these: (1) The higher Commissars are secretly afraid of the dregs who keep them in power; and (2) local authorities, such as those who had charge of our prisoners in Siberia, are, as I have already pointed out, sometimes difficult to manage. The first reason is the more important. It will also tell against any trade between England and Russia and against any modification of Bolshevism.

My fellow-captives, who cordially approved of all I did for them and of the secrecy with which I did it, were very glad when I told them that my next move would be to get to Moscow and then to England. In Moscow I might be able to do something for them, and I was able to do something; but in London I could furnish the British Government with the fullest information about them, and that also I have done. They offered to draw up a paper signed by all of them, and declaring that I was acting with their sanction; but I declined to take such a compromising document with me, and it was lucky for me that I did decline.

If I had asked permission from the Bolsheviks to go east to Vladivostock, their suspicions would have been at once aroused; and, moreover, there was a front in that direction: the railway was cut, and I could never have got through. I therefore asked permission to go to Ekaterinburg in order to see Trotsky carry out there his great scheme for converting a whole army into a labour force, and making a hundred thousand soldiers beat their swords into ploughshares. I did not particularly want to see Ekaterinburg again, for I had been there three or four times and might be recognized. But if once I got to Ekaterinburg, I might have a chance of going to Moscow, and Moscow is close to Petrograd, which is near the Finnish frontier, and from which, as I knew every inch of the ground, escape should be fairly easy.

This proposal appealed to them at once, and they said that, if I had asked them earlier, they would have sent me off by a train of technical experts which was leaving in a few hours. Fearing that any delay might be fatal to my plans, I offered to go at once. It would not take me half an hour, I said, to fetch the little kit I had from the town to the railway carriage in which this conversation was being carried on. “Then,” they said, “we will arrange the matter at once.” I saw that they were pleased at my rapidity of decision and at the indication that I was not overburdened with baggage, for, to do them justice, they are men of rapid decision themselves, and not possessed of much movable property. The matter was accordingly arranged in one minute by telephone, and in another minute I was dashing townwards for my kit.

The only difficulty I experienced was from the cold, which, as I have already remarked, was 49 degrees below zero—a frightfully low temperature, which made exposure in the open air for more than an hour positively dangerous. I had never in my life experienced such cold. Even inside the heated carriages it caused the windows to be coated with sheets of ice, half an inch thick at top and perhaps two inches thick at the bottom. All the brass-work near the windows and doors was covered with hoar-frost, and, whenever a door was opened, the cold air rushed in like a whiff of smoke. Outside, my glasses were always covered with frost, and the metal pincers of the pince-nez burned the bridge of my nose like red-hot irons, so that I had to remove my glasses altogether. I had also to cover my face from time to time, as, otherwise, all of it and especially my nose would have been frost-bitten. But finally I managed to return in time with my kit, and to stow it in an upper bunk which had been assigned to me in the special train. I had no time to bid my companions good-bye, but I had told them beforehand that I would probably leave that day, and leave, perhaps, without being able to see them again.

The sound of the train rumbling slowly out of Krasnoyarsk was one of the pleasantest sounds I had heard for a long time, though mingled with my pleasure was a certain uneasiness when I remembered that my destination was Bolshevik Russia and Red Moscow.