On sneaking into the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs one day, in order to get the address of a foreign journalist then in Moscow, I ran into a Commissar who was specially charged with English journalistic affairs, who knew of my capture at Krasnoyarsk, and who had been anxiously awaiting my arrival in Moscow. I had a bad quarter of an hour explaining why I had not reported earlier, but I finally succeeded in shifting all the blame for the delay on to the shoulders of the Commissar in whose train I had travelled, and without whose permission I could not, I pleaded, call on Comrade Chicherin.

This Press Commissar insisted on my moving at once from my railway carriage to one of the guest-houses in which the Soviet Government accommodates its foreign visitors. This building had formerly been the residence of a German factory owner, and was situated in Mala Khartonovskaya Street, near the Red Gate. I moved into it next day, and some weeks later I was transferred to the Savoy Hotel, a similar establishment.

This change in my fortunes introduced me to a new world, the underworld of the Third International, an institution which aims frankly at the overthrow of every Government in Europe, Asia, and America. Among the guests was a Korean Committee which is working hard for the independence of Korea, though it only contemplates the establishment of a constitutional monarchy there, not of a Soviet. The head of the Korean Committee is an intelligent and very pleasant young Korean called Pak-oi, who was educated at Moscow University and speaks Russian well. Under him are several other Koreans, as well as a Japanese correspondent of the Osaka Asahi who had been captured, like myself, in Siberia, imprisoned in Moscow, and only released on promising to work against his own country. He is now translating with Oriental placidity all sorts of Propaganda matter for dissemination among the Japanese troops, and this Propaganda is credited with having caused the desertion to the Bolsheviks of about one hundred Japanese soldiers in Trans-Baïkalia last spring. A Communist newspaper is printed in Japanese by the Third International, and is periodically dispatched to the Far East. Another Japanese journalist, Mr. Husie, representing the Osaka Mainichi, came from Reval with a safe-conduct signed by Chicherin, but the Extraordinary Commission, which insisted that he was a spy and had been living in 1915 with the Japanese military attaché at Petrograd, made a great effort to arrest him, but had not succeeded in doing so up to the time I left Moscow, owing to Chicherin’s opposition. The correspondent in question was kept under domiciliary arrest, however, and, for all the news he got, might as well have remained in Esthonia.

There were some English and American correspondents, while, in other parts of the city, were several Italian newspapermen, a Rumanian journalist, and two or three French journalists. One of the latter, who had formerly been very bourgeois and militarist, had been purposely compromised by the publication of a pro-Bolshevik letter addressed to the French President which was found during a search made at his house, and which had only been written, I think, as “a blind.” Unable now to put himself right with his own people, and unable to return to France, he is employed by the Bolshevik Foreign Office in the composition of Communist literature intended for French consumption, but he is carefully watched, at the same time, by the secret agents of the Reds. Several English correspondents have been compromised in the same way by the unauthorized publication in Moscow of pro-Bolshevik articles which they wrote for America, but which were distributed by the Reds as Propaganda matter among the English and American troops at Archangel. If a correspondent cannot be bought, he is compromised in the eyes of his own countrymen, and thus thrown entirely into the hands of the enemy.

Captain Sadul, formerly of the French Military Mission, and now a Red Commissar, was down in the south with the Army during my stay in Moscow, but his brother, also a Bolshevik, had arrived from France. Professor Barrakatula had come from India, and was assisted by a number of Indians, who spoke Russian, in planning a revolt against British rule in Hindustan. He worked in combination with an Afghan deputation dressed in the military uniforms supplied to the Amir by the Indian Government, and with a number of other Mohammedans from Persia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Turkey. A Pan-Mohammedan Congress was held at the Foreign Office in April, 1920, with the object of driving the English from India and Persia, and of creating trouble in Turkey, and one of the fruits of its deliberations was the attack on Persia which took place some months later. The Bolsheviks are convinced that the British raj in India is undermined, and will soon go down with a crash; they are equally convinced that chaos will soon prevail in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Asiatic Turkey, not so much because the malcontents in those countries are strong, as because (in their opinion) the English troops are tired of war, and the English people will be unable and unwilling to make the financial sacrifices necessary for the retention or reconquest of those immense territories. Constantinople is an important centre of Bolshevik activity, and an unusually energetic agent of the Soviet—Dr. Mansur, I think, is his name—oscillates between that city and Buda-Pesth. In the centre of this fiendish activity at Moscow, with Bolshevik agents arriving daily by some subterranean route or with false passports, with hourly announcements of strikes and Labour troubles all over the world, with revolutionary leaders coming from the ends of the earth to do homage to the Red flag which floats over the Kremlin, and to take counsel with the successful Arch-conspirator who sits underneath it, I felt as if the end of all things had already come. Cut off, like a leper, from all the Governments of the world, Lenin is nevertheless in daily communication with the most desperate and dangerous section of every people, and the best passport to his presence-chamber is the brand of Cain. He receives ambassadors not accredited by Presidents or Kings, but nevertheless bearing terrible credentials from lawless associations which have sworn to carry out to the letter his decrees of violence and blood. While other rulers of States seek anxiously but in vain for indications which point to the slackening of the storm, Lenin listens triumphantly to the increasing fury of the tempest. Like a fiend in hell, instead of a man born of woman, he gloats daily over the world’s ghastly chronicle of red ruin and the breaking up of laws. To the ends of the earth he sends forth envoys with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other, and nothing delights him more than the reflection that these nuncios of revolution contribute less to the general chaos than do the mad policies and blind reprisals of his panic-stricken enemies.

In April last he received frequent reports from Tashkent, which is the seat of a powerful organization, which is even now marshalling the forces of disorder in Central Asia for a grand attack on India; and as this organization complained that Bokhara was an obstacle in its path, he decreed that Bokhara should be swept aside by a Red revolution, and this has since been done. During the same month he sent envoys to the Amir of Afghanistan with the object of concluding with that potentate a treaty having for its aim, not peace and amity but the stirring up of insurrections on the frontiers of Hindustan. He authorized Trotsky to invade Khorasan, and to pour Red troops into Asia Minor so as to create in that infernal Deep of unspeakable memories a Deep lower still.

One day he signed an agreement with the American I.W.W., as King George might sign a treaty with France. Another day he received a deputation of “the Russian Friends of American Freedom”—an Association of expelled American Anarchists who aim at smashing the Government and the whole social system of the United States—as President Wilson might receive the heads of an Inter-Church movement. He dined in the ancient palace of the Tsars with a group of powerful and dangerous Mohammedans, whose object is to create chaos from Alexandria to Khartoum, and to deluge half Asia with blood. And yet he looks a most harmless, bourgeois person. At the Ninth Communist Convention, which was the only public function he attended during my stay in Moscow, he spoke freely, monotonously, without the faintest trace of hesitation or nervousness, like the chairman of a London Tea-House Company reading out an unsensational annual report which most of his hearers know already. Dressed in rusty black, with trousers which were somewhat baggy at the knees and a general appearance of reasonableness and respectability, he looked at first sight a safe, unpretentious, middle-class person in fairly comfortable circumstances. His head was bald, but with a dull, mottled, and not a shiny, billiard-ball hairlessness. His beard was scanty and reddish; his eyes far apart, and with a cast in one of them; his cheek-bones high; his face broad, and with a dim, disturbing suggestion of Asia, which half prepared one for the monstrous theories he proceeded to set forth in his matter-of-fact voice. For some reason or other very little of his speech on this occasion appeared in the newspapers; perhaps because Russia was at that moment seeking recognition by “capitalist” Governments. In one brilliant passage, which was omitted, he declared himself unable to describe precisely the form which the Soviet Government would assume “until the volcanic explosions cease, and the smoke clears away, and we can see the new shape into which the landscape has hardened.” According to Trotsky, the Red Tsar often lights up a debate with unpremeditated remarks like this, remarks in which the Commissars discover profound and prophetic significance. But he discounts even his most terrible sayings by the business-like evenness of his delivery, and by his habit of handling pens and other objects on the table in front of him and occasionally inserting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, a gesture which displays a comfortable and slightly protuberant abdomen. Looking at him on such occasions without knowing who he was or what he was talking about, one would feel inclined to say “Now, this is a safe, reliable man giving utterance to reasonable things.”

Save that his sedentary life of the past two years has made him somewhat stouter, Lenin has altered little in appearance since the day when he presented himself at the Russian frontier near Torneo, shabby, tired, and travel-stained, accompanied by a crowd of women and of disreputable-looking men, at one moment on the point of being refused admittance, and the next moment frantically organizing an anti-war meeting among the Russian soldiers, and winning their applause by his fierce denunciations of militarism. He takes so little care of himself in the Kremlin that a deputation of peasants which once came to see him insisted on sending him bread, butter, and eggs from their village; and this is only a continuation of the life which he led in exile. An intimate friend of his told me that when Lenin left his humble lodgings in Paris for still humbler lodgings in Switzerland, his furniture fetched only forty-five francs at an auction. A little-known side of Lenin’s life is the domestic side. The Red Dictator is sincerely attached to his wife, whose health is, however, very bad; and he is passionately fond of children.

Despite his determination, when he entered Russia, of turning everything upside down, doing all the things that a “capitalist” Government does not do, and not doing anything which a “capitalist” Government does, he has found that the laws of human nature are too much for him, and that he is leading, outwardly, much the same kind of life as any conscientious, hard-working, and respectable Tsar, and a very much more regular life than was led by Peter the Great. His whole day is spent receiving deputations, signing papers, presiding over cabinet meetings, and getting through all the heavy routine business discharged by any King or President. Fanaticism in his case has cast out fear, but his entourage have as great and well-grounded an anxiety for his personal safety as had ever the bodyguard of a Tsar for the safety of their master. The display of military force on the occasion of the Convention I speak of was as great as when Nicholas the Second opened the first Duma in the Winter Palace. Lenin’s future, too, is more uncertain than was ever the future of a Russian Emperor. With a wilderness of blood and horror behind him, with a highly volcanic soil trembling beneath his feet, and with clouds of inky blackness veiling his future, few human beings have ever been enveloped in more tragic menace and mystery than this prosaic, common-looking man. Outlawed by every Government, anathematized by every Church, cursed by his millions of victims, he can never leave Russia alive; he cannot stay in Russia and live.

Among the guests of the Soviet were a number of Germans, sent secretly by the Ebert Government to consider the question of lending skilled Prussian mechanics to the Russian factories. Though themselves Socialists, these envoys of Berlin were very much disgusted by what they saw in Russia. The condition of the factories shocked them, but, curiously enough, they were even more shocked by the facility of divorce and the lack of reverence for the dead. They told of how one day they had met a Bolshevik lady twice. At lunch she was the wife of one Commissar, at dinner she was the wife of another, at whose table her first husband was a guest. As for funerals, they discovered that all corpses had to be handed over to the State, which interred them without religious ceremonies and without allowing the relatives to be present. The Germans also disliked the systematic and diabolical attempt which the Reds were making to destroy family life, by tempting mothers to surrender their children to the State. Children who spent all day in school got one free meal; children who lived day and night in the school got three good meals and were well clothed and cared for. Mothers were almost forced to spend most of their time at work in Government offices. If they insisted on remaining at home, they got no rations.

A large number of German mechanics did eventually go to Russia, but were bitterly disappointed by the treatment they met with there, and have all returned to Germany, where one of them has since published an extremely pessimistic account of the Russian industrial situation.

The gang of international concession hunters who were also guests of the Soviet and who had risked their lives in getting into Russia formed a curious contrast to the still larger gang of foreign capitalists who were ready to risk their lives for the sake of getting out of Russia. The former were the more interesting by reason of their bravery, hardness, competence, will-power, diplomatic skill, and absolute unscrupulousness. They were “out” for “big money,” for concessions which would make them multi-millionaires, and they would let no considerations of sentiment, religion, nationality, or civilization stand in their way. They represented the most inhuman and aggressive aspect of that capitalism which the Reds have sworn to destroy, yet they made friends with the Reds and hob-nobbed with Lenin. The Soviet Government, which wants recognition by Europe and America, thinks that it can get that recognition by pandering to the greed of these capitalists, and it has accordingly dangled in front of them prizes of practically inestimable value—forests, fisheries, gold mines, islands, dozens of square miles of priceless ore.

The capitalists of California and South Africa will be paupers in point of wealth and cowards in point of courage compared to the hard-bitten plutocrats who may arise out of this Russian chaos. The dangers from Boers, Blacks, wild animals, and American “bad men,” which figure in the exploits of pioneers in other parts of the world, are nothing in comparison with the dangers which these fanatical missionaries of Mammon run in Moscow, and I do not doubt but that histories and novels and perhaps even Kiplingesque poetry will be written about those who succeed. But I cannot say that I admire them. It may be a good thing to reopen trade with Russia, but some of the adventurers who will reopen it and get concessions and float companies in England and America will be inspired by greed, and also no doubt by that itch for colossal gambles and desperate adventures which one often finds in very great plutocrats who have once been poor. What I cannot forgive them in connection with this question of Russia’s recognition is their cynical and contemptuous attitude towards the moral aspect of it. They would renounce their nationality, betray civilization, abjure their religion, and sell their souls, if by doing so they could attain their own selfish ends.

I have quite as much contempt, however, for the Big Money-Bags (mostly French) who loftily refuse to trade with Russia—till that country has acknowledged all the debts of the Tsar’s Government. These people also would compound any felony so long as they are paid enough for doing so. My sympathies are with those old-fashioned people, if any such there be, whose reluctance to trade with Soviet Russia is due solely to their high moral standard of international morality. The Reds fear and respect these idealists, for they are at bottom idealists themselves.

But even among the agents of materialist capitalism congregated in Moscow there were exceptions to the general rule, though their exceptionality was perhaps due to sordid motives. One American engineer called Keeley, representing the greatest captains of industry in America, told Lenin frankly that all the Russian factories and railways would collapse if run any longer on Bolshevik principles, with the result that he had great difficulty in getting permission to leave the country. A Dutch capitalist called Schmidt was also imprudent enough to express pessimism, with the result that he was refused permission to leave and may be in Moscow still.

The other group of capitalists, the old hands who had lost their nerve and were making for the nearest frontier, were, on the whole, an equally unlovely collection. Some of them were young men who had escaped military service at home, and who stayed in Russia on the chance of amassing great riches. When Bolshevism came they clamoured violently for British soldiers to be sent to their assistance. One man with a mine was excessively angry with the British Government for not having sent at least a hundred thousand men to Siberia. Though younger than I am myself, he had not stood by Tommy’s side in France; nevertheless, he insisted very dictatorially on Tommy being sent, after he had done his “bit,” to save his property in Siberia. Another man, with a factory, said, “I refuse to run this factory unless a British Battalion is sent to guard it.”

British Capitalists in every part of the world have cut a sorry figure during these last six years. A British Minister in one place described to me how they establish offices abroad in order to escape taxation at home, and how, when any thief approaches their safe, they wave the English flag wildly, talk of our Imperial Mission and of the White Man’s Burden, and summon fleets and armies to their help. But worst of all is the Russian capitalist who now detests us more than he detests the Bolsheviks, because we did not spend a thousand million on him instead of a mere hundred million, because we did not send five hundred thousand men to his assistance instead of a few Divisions. White Russia is suffering from a nervous disease which I should call Revolution-shock, for it is akin to shell-shock. It makes no complaint about those of the Allies who have offered it practically no assistance, but on us who have stood by its side, ministering patiently to it, for the last two years, and giving it millions of pounds to which the poor of our own country had the first claim, on us it pours the bitterest venom. Some of the Russian Generals, whom we did most for, have now gone to Berlin and are our worst enemies.

The diplomatic and business guests of the Soviet did not, I must admit, look at their best. Stripped of all adventitious aids to impressiveness, of their country houses and their motor-cars, their yachts and their troops of servants, the Company Promoters looked and talked like pickpockets (which most of them were on a large scale); while, without a noble Embassy in the background, the suave, polyglot diplomatists engendered in my mind by their conversation a horrid suspicion that they had no sense. Had the Bolsheviks some deep, diabolical design in thus exposing the great ones of the earth in all their nakedness to the derision of the common herd? Was it part of some fiendish scheme for undermining our belief in Christianity? Carefully underfed on cold porridge and imitation coffee, slightly exacerbated in temper, and suffering from sore feet caused by a lack of even the most primitive transport contrivances, the august representatives of “big business” were anything but imposing; but I doubt whether, in similar circumstances, even the grave and reverend seigneurs of the Supreme Council itself would have impressed the groundlings.

Among them was a considerable sprinkling of Russians who seemed to be more at home, but who had so many aliases, that some of them have probably forgotten their real names. One such Russian, but a very honest and amiable one, Mr. Serezhnikov, a Co-operative expert who left Moscow with the Krassin Mission, had long worked for the Russian Co-operatives on the American Pacific Coast, where he was known as Shavchenko. He had been in the American Y.M.C.A. in Vladivostock, and belonged to the Social Revolutionary party, but disgust with Kolchak induced him to desert to the Bolsheviks. Another gentleman, called in America Mulkner and in Russia Kamerinsk, was working hard to send agents to the United States with forged passports and false money and left himself for the States in February or March last, though I don’t think that he ever got there, for the anti-Bolshevik Secret Service of America is the best in the world.

Arrests sometimes took place even among these guests of Lenin. A Frenchman who was apparently a very advanced Socialist, but really an agent of the War Office in Paris, disappeared one day because certain agents of the German Spartacists who had turned up in Moscow informed the Extraordinary Commission of his true status. Having previously lived in Berlin this Frenchman had made himself known to the Spartacists in order to obtain from them information about plots that were being hatched by the German Militarists whom the Spartacists hated worse than they hated the French; and though this arrangement worked well in Berlin, it was disastrous in Moscow.

The German prisoners of war in Moscow, who occupy the former German Consulate and the adjoining German hospital, live comfortably and in perfect freedom, owing to the fact that they were taken prisoners while fighting against the Tsar. They have two motor-cars, a fine hospital, and a Soviet of their own. Not all of them have joined this Soviet, which will only serve to convey the poison of Bolshevism into German and Austrian homes. One of these Germans brought one day to a friend of mine an English magazine article by an English military officer on a method he had discovered for decoding figure cyphers without a key, and asked him to translate it into German, offering him at the same time a large sum of money for the work. “What cypher messages,” we asked one another in astonishment, “has the man got hold of? Has he a private wireless apparatus by means of which he is communicating with Germany?”

Other mysterious things were done by those Germans, but to me they are still mysteries—mysteries, however, that have no importance since Germany has ceased to be a great military power. It would be easy enough to work oneself into a state of mind wherein these trifles are charged with sinister meaning, but I do not think that there is any good reason for doing so. The secret Mission from the Ebert Government, of which I have already spoken, ended, for instance, in nothing; for though, as a result of it, German skilled workmen were sent to Russia, those workmen soon came back again very disgusted. A Swedish Consular official, who had formerly been stationed in Petrograd, was also in Moscow last March, and had many conferences with the Bolshevik F.O., but these were probably connected with a deal in Russian copper which did not come off owing to the Bolshevik sailors of Kronstadt having resolutely refused to let the copper be shipped to a capitalist country.

The collection of hopes, panics, greeds, secrecies, cunnings, treacheries, and idealisms which jostled one another in those amazing guest-houses of the Soviets transcended in interest anything that I had ever before seen, read, or imagined. Secret agents of foreign Powers who posed as Bolsheviks jostled open agents of foreign Powers who really leaned towards Communism. Quakers who did not believe in war at all defended militarism against Italian naval officers who, after fighting for three years, had become Pacificists. Korean Buddhists who thought it a sin to kill a rattlesnake advocated the assassination of the Mikado. Mohammedans whose religion is the sword tried to prove that the Prophet was really a man of peace. Financiers wanted the abolition of finance. Respectable married men suddenly remembered that they had got married again that afternoon according to Soviet law, having duly divorced that morning before a Bolshevik Commissar their lawful wives beyond the sea. Diplomatists, who knew nothing, fished delicately for information from low-class Labour journalists who, having just dined with Trotsky, knew everything.

The ignorance of the diplomatists surprised me more than anything, until I remembered that, in all this vast Empire, the whole diplomatic, consular, and commercial machinery, by means of which Governments keep themselves informed of the ever-changing conditions in a foreign country, had been utterly swept away. Russia is now as much of a hermit empire as Japan was sixty years ago. The carefully shepherded journalists and Labour men, who are allowed to circulate a little outside Moscow, learn little more of actual conditions in the districts which they traverse than did the Dutch deputation from Deshima in their annual pilgrimage to Yedo. When I was arrested later on by Lenin’s Inquisition, nothing in my notebooks excited such suspicion as some industrial statistics which I had jotted down. A dubious foreigner arrested in England during the war with a map of Scapa Flow in his possession would hardly have been regarded with more distrust at Scotland Yard.

Owing to the great preponderance of Russian Bolsheviks, the tone of conversation at these gatherings was always very “advanced.” Whatever some of us may have thought, none of us openly defended kingship or Parliamentary Government any more than a delegate at an Anglican Church Congress would have defended the burning of heretics. The world consists of different “atmospheres”—the “atmosphere” of the battleship ward-room, the “atmosphere” of the National Liberal Club, the “atmosphere” of the Stock Exchange, the “atmosphere” of a Jesuit novitiate, and many other “atmospheres.” The Bolsheviks have succeeded in creating a special “atmosphere” of their own, such as never openly existed in the world before. It is not, in my opinion, a good “atmosphere.”