I was arrested by the Vecheka (the usual contraction for the Russian words signifying “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission”) at 12.30 on the night of Good Friday. I had passed the evening in the company of a very cheery electrical engineer called Falk who, though a Russian, had served in the French Army throughout the Great War, and was not a Bolshevik. He is at present helping to carry out the vast engineering scheme for the electrification of the villages which I have described elsewhere, and his frank and naïve appeal to me, to assist by my pen in putting Russia on her legs again, moved me more than all the elaborate arguments of the well-primed specialists who had previously been let loose on me. The corrective came half an hour after midnight in the shape of the Vecheka. I was asleep at the time of the visitation, but a loud knocking on the door soon woke me up. I was not alarmed on hearing it, for correspondents in possession of important news had been in the habit of thus waking me up unceremoniously at night. On opening the door I saw a group of soldiers outside—five or six young men. One of them said: “You are arrested, and we are going to make a search.” Switching on the electric light, I invited them to enter, but the invitation was unnecessary, for they were already in my room when it was made. Among them was the young soldier who was acting as hotel manager at the Savoy. All of them were excited and were breathing heavily. They evidently expected resistance, and one of them asked me if I had any arms. They themselves were all armed with revolvers.

I was proceeding to dress, when they plucked away my clothes from me, and began to search them, not only turning out the contents of my pockets, but also feeling all over each garment to see if there were any document hidden in the lining. If there had been any, it would have betrayed its presence by the crinkling of the paper. Only a few weeks earlier I had secreted in the lining of my coat a photograph of myself in military uniform, stamped on the back “Director of Military Intelligence, War Office,” with the word “correct,” and the signature of an officer in the M.I. Department at the War Office added in ink. Luckily I had destroyed this, along with a great deal of other documentary evidence establishing my connection with the Army. It would certainly have been discovered on this occasion, for the searchers knew their business thoroughly; and, if discovered, my stay in prison would be lengthy, or, which would be worse, not lengthy. The only compromising object in my possession was an army identity disc worn round the neck, but the soldiers apparently mistook it for a charm or religious emblem of some kind. Painted in large letters on the outside of my leathern hunting kit-bag was my name and military rank and the one fatal word “Intelligence,” but I had rubbed some ink over this inscription, to which the searchers paid no attention, though a wet rag would have removed all the ink in a few moments without obliterating the tell-tale letters underneath. The interior of the bag was very carefully examined, however, even the space between the canvas lining and the outer skin being opened up and minutely scrutinized.

Having searched my clothes, the soldiers of the Vecheka returned them to me and told me to dress. While I was doing so, they examined all my other belongings with the same expert care. These police of the Revolution are twice as competent at their work as the old police of the Tsar, for, during the imperialistic régime, they themselves (having been in jail most of the time) knew every trick for secreting documents, and now they put that expert knowledge to account in order to discover the documents that others may have secreted. One of them even hammered on the wall in order to ascertain if, during the week I had occupied the room, any cache for papers had been hollowed by me in the wall underneath the wall-paper. It was documents they were practically in search of. I happened to have a good many, and they collected every scrap of writing, as well as of printed matter, including even bits of newspaper which I had wrapped round pieces of bread, etc., and tied them all together in one large package which they treated with particular care, and which they would not even allow me to approach. They were evidently afraid of some sudden grab on my part, or some of trick of legerdemain which might result in the destruction or the disappearance of some compromising document. But, luckily, as I have already pointed out, I had no compromising document in my possession. My mind was perfectly easy, therefore, and I could even afford at times to be jocose. This had its effect on the police. Their laboured breathing soon became normal, and their manner natural.

I took advantage of this change in their demeanour to ask why I had been arrested, and what the charge was, but everybody burst out laughing at this unusual question, and the leader of the party replied darkly, “Oh! you’ll learn that soon enough.” I then asked him if he had got any warrant, whereupon he showed me a document from the Vecheka ordering the arrest of “the English journalist, Francis McCullagh, and a search of his rooms.” The warrant was signed by the head of the Vecheka, but no charge was stated.

When the search was finished, the leader of the party asked me to sign a document, stating that I had no complaints to make with regard to the manner in which the search had been conducted. I said that I protested against both the search and the arrest, but, as he explained that that was not the point, and that the only question at issue was whether I had been offered unnecessary personal violence or had any of my belongings stolen, I signed.

Having packed up all my belongings, they tried to telephone for an izvoshchik (cab), but, as the izvoshchik did not come, they asked me to help them to carry my things downstairs. I carried one bag; they carried all the rest between them; and so we left the house at about 2 a.m., the girl-clerks of the “hotel” forming a frightened group at the foot of the stairs, and regarding me with tragic eyes as I passed through them.

We had not far to go, for the Vecheka was only about 600 yards off. It struck me, as I staggered along under the weight of my luggage, that the reason for my transfer from the Mala Hartonovskaya to the Savoy was that the latter “hostel” was much nearer to the Vecheka than the former. I should be under closer observation in the Savoy; and, when the time for my arrest came, I should only have to be brought across the Lubyanka Square in order to be “run in.” When correspondents in the Mala Hartonovskaya are now invited to transfer themselves to the Savoy, they generally make their wills and prepare for the worst.

The exterior of the dreaded Vecheka is as little calculated to strike one with terror as the exterior of, say, Harrod’s or Selfridge’s. Far from resembling a gloomy prison like the forbidding fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, it is light and airy in its style of architecture, and there is not a single iron bar on any of its exterior windows. It is a huge block of business premises situated between the Bolshaya and the Malaya Lubyanka, and opposite the Vladimir gate of the Kremlin on the other side of Lubyanka Square. Built only a few years back by the great Insurance Society “Rossia,” its very modern appearance is rendered almost flippant by contrast with the aged Kremlin walls. It occupies an island site, as it is called, and juts up to a great height like a rocky island, but all trace of austerity is removed from its outline by the gay turrets and pinnacles, weathercocks, and plaster figures which give a light and frivolous air to its skyline, as well as by the enormous shop-windows and office-windows which break up its exterior surface, not only on the ground-floor, but on every storey. No greater contrast could be imagined than that between those generous windows and the narrow, barred slits in Petropavlovsk kryepost, unless perhaps it be the contrast between the fair modern façade of Lenin’s “Holy Office” and the mediæval horrors of the interior. Like the Bolshevik system, the Vecheka presents an ultra-modern front to the world, while, inside, it is a throw-back to the days of Ivan the Terrible.

The inscriptions on the windows all speak of peaceful occupations—“Dentist,” “Music Shop,” “Bank,” “William Miller and Sons, Petrograd and Moscow.” (This last inscription in English, Messrs. Miller and Sons being, I believe, an English company which used to brew beer and manufacture soap, candles, etc.). The biggest inscription of all advertises a Life Insurance Company, but some of the huge gilt letters have fallen off. The topmost figure on the roof is that of a benignant female deity of some kind; and at her feet on each side sit two half-naked allegorical figures, also of benignant aspect.

As seen from the street, the insides of the rooms with the plate-glass windows differ little from what they were in peace-time. They are still offices. Clerks still sit on high stools and work at desks. The cashier in the bank still hands out money through a grille, and apparently the bank-clerks are still busy writing in huge ledgers. But the bank is simply the financial department of the Vecheka. It pays the employees of that great organization, and some of the payments it makes against scrawls signed “Derzhinsky” are for services such as would surprise an English bank manager. The objects of value in the safes of this extraordinary bank consist not only of money, but also of jewelry, strings of pearls, and of precious stones, taken from suspects arrested by the Vecheka. The clerks writing in the other offices are dealing not only with the complicated business side of their extraordinary organization, but also with secret and incredible matters such as office-boys in England like to read about in penny dreadfuls, but which no English clerk ever writes about, at least during office hours.

I was brought into what had apparently been a large shop. It was now cut in two by a wooden partition in which there was a door. Behind this door was the police-office of the Vecheka—a police-office with a large plate-glass window as big as any in Bond Street. This window was unprotected by bars, but the glass was rendered opaque by means of whitewash. There was no fear of any prisoner attempting to escape by jumping through the window, for, before he had got near it, he would have been spitted by the policeman who was on duty with fixed bayonet, or shot by some of the other policemen, all of whom were armed with revolvers.

What surprised me about these police officials, as it had surprised me about the policemen who had arrested me, was their youth. Their average age was about twenty-four, and some of them were mere boys. Apparently the best police agents of the Vecheka are of the “larrikin” type, dissipated, conceited, cruel, as all boys tend to be when allowed to run wild, and, when the occasion demands it, desperate. Some of these lads were probably sailors, but the majority were factory-hands. Few of them could be described as educated, but they were all of them fanatical believers in Bolshevism.

This was the first visit I had ever paid in my life to a police station, but I had always imagined such an institution to be a silent place presided over by a grave inspector of mature years and containing, besides a loudly ticking clock, a police-clerk, the prisoner, and the large constable who has brought the prisoner. Most of the officials in this police station looked, however, like brutalized schoolboys engaged in some savage “rag.” Here I was again searched and my belongings examined, the youthful police-inspector indulging all the time in cruel jibes at my expense. When I asked to be allowed to keep my safety razor, he said: “No, you won’t want to shave for another year.” He marvelled at my having six tooth-brushes, and declared that I must be a merchant. “We in the Red Army,” he said, “have only one tooth-brush for every two men, and you have six,” at the same time glaring at me as if this disproportion were a crime to my charge. When he came to my field-glasses he said: “In the Red Army we have very few binoculars, while you, a civilian, have got a good pair of field-glasses. What do you want with them?”

This habit of making out a man to be a criminal because he has got something which the Reds have not got, is universal among the Bolsheviks, being based, of course, on the first principles of Communism. The Communists have a theory that no man should have more than one blanket, two suits of clothes, two sets of underlinen, two pairs of socks, two day-shirts, two night-dresses, two pairs of shoes, one cap, one piece of soap, one overcoat, and a very few other strictly necessary articles. He is also allowed to have a bag of some kind for carrying his spare linen, etc. My own modest kit was soon cut down to this scale, and I was also allowed to take with me two tooth-brushes, not good ones, but worn-out ones. The bag into which I was allowed to put my spare things was the one which bore in bold lettering (concealed by a thin coating of ink), my name, military rank, and unit. It remained in my cell with me during my incarceration, and was never examined. All the things taken from me were packed together and sealed with the seal of the Vecheka. My money and valuables were sent upstairs to the bank which I have already described; and, after my release, I got them back again.

Here, again, I was asked to sign a statement to the effect that this search, as a search, had not been improperly conducted. I had also to fill up a long form, intended apparently for Russians only, asking not only for the usual particulars—name, age, birthplace, nationality, etc.—but also if I had relatives in the White Army, had served myself in the Red Army, and that sort of thing.

Having done this I was brought up three flights of stairs to the office of the Governor of the jail. That functionary, a man of about thirty-five years of age with the hard face of a professional jailer, searched me personally, even putting his hands into my pockets and feeling all over my clothes. Then he showed me a paper which stated in very general terms the property that had been taken from me downstairs—R.10,000 in Soviet money, R.10,000 in Omsk money, and one bag full of clothes, books, etc. I signed this, but explained at the same time that it was obviously no check as a detailed list of my belongings was not given. And, as a matter of fact, I afterwards discovered that a number of things were stolen, and all my efforts to have them returned proved unavailing. I also discovered, by comparing my treatment with that of other victims of the Vecheka who were not journalists or authors, that I had been dealt with very gently indeed. As a rule, a prisoner’s money is all kept, and returned at the rate of 1,000 roubles a month. Mr. Bleezdale, an English engineer who had been thus robbed of all the earnings he had made in Russia since the beginning of the war, calculated that, in order to get back his money repaid to him at this rate, he would have to remain seven years in Russia; and, though he was offered a well-paid technical job in addition by the Soviet, he refused to wait, and left the country at the same time as myself. I could cite thousands of similar cases, but this is not the place to give them.

It was 4 a.m. before the Governor of the jail had done with me; and then I was conveyed by the soldier with rifle and fixed bayonet, who had been in attendance on me all the time, into that part of the building which had been converted into a prison. The soldier knocked at a closed door: a sentry opened it carefully; and I was inside the Communist Inquisition, the most dreaded prison in Moscow. This part of the house had evidently been used as living quarters by the staff of Messrs. William Miller and Sons; and, with its lighted corridors, linoleum floor, and gay wall-paper, it still resembled the living-quarters of well-paid clerks. At the end of the first corridor was a door which gave me rather a shock, for it differed from all the other doors I had passed by having a sentry posted outside it. Was it a condemned cell? I had never seen a condemned cell, but had read that it was differentiated from the others by having a warder stationed day and night at the door.

Into this sinister cell I was ushered: the key grated in the lock; and I was alone. After the manner of gentlemen in story-books, who find themselves immured in a dungeon, I next proceeded to examine my surroundings. My first thoughts were practical. A dismantled plank bed lay in the corner; and I lost no time in fixing it up, spreading my one blanket on it, and rolling up my overcoat and coat so as to constitute a sort of pillow. I then turned my attention to the room. I did not try the lock, as heroes in fiction do, for I presumed that it was all right; and, even if it had not been secure, there was no object in my opening the door, for an armed sentry stood outside it, and, besides, there were quite a number of other doors and other sentries between me and liberty. As for the window, which is the next thing that the hero turns his attention to, I cannot say that I “examined” it, for I placed no hopes in it at all as it was a long way above the ground, but I looked hard at it and found it to be secured by thick iron bars. Despite Soviet Russia’s lack of iron and of skilled ironworkers, both iron and skilled labour were here employed to produce a very neat piece of work indeed—from the jailer’s point of view; and an enormous amount of similar work must have been done all over Russia since the Bolsheviks came into power. All the old Tsarist prisons having been filled to overflowing, private houses, business establishments, and monasteries have been converted into jails and fitted up accordingly. A small army of men must be needed for this work, and also for the detective and police work of the Vecheka.

My room was five yards square, twelve feet high, and contained no furniture beyond the plank bed. It was lighted by electricity controlled from the outside. The walls were covered with light wall-paper of gay design, but the pencilled inscriptions with which it was covered were anything but gay. I made out some words of them, and found to my surprise that some of the scrawls were in English. There were half a dozen opened jam tins strewn about the floor, and full, not of jam, but of urine; and there was quite a pool of the same filth in a corner of the room. This disgusting state of things was due to the fact that, in all Russian places of detention, the prisoners are only allowed to visit the latrines once a day, and that it is difficult to get this rule altered. Great inconvenience is caused by this arrangement, as the rough kind of food, to which nearly everybody in Russia is now reduced, acts in such a way on the bowels and kidneys, that in all cases several visits per day are necessary. I suffered from this rule myself until the last day of my detention, when it was modified in my favour. All my requests to see a doctor were ignored, probably because the visit of a doctor might divert my mind, even for a few moments, from the gloomy reflections which naturally filled it, and undo to some extent the effects of the solitary confinement to which I was condemned.

My reflections this first night were gloomy enough, when suddenly there was a sharp click from the door, and I saw that, through a peep-hole in it, an eye was watching me. Hastily undressing, I lay on the plank bed—there was no mattress—and covered myself with my blanket. I could not sleep, more especially as the electric light was left burning for about an hour after I retired. Even after it was switched off outside, I remained awake listening to the occasional movements of the watcher on the threshold; and it was near daybreak before I fell into a troubled doze.

I could not tell at what hour I got up next morning, for my watch had been taken from me, and my cell was almost dark, even in the daytime, owing to the whitewash on the windows, and to the fact that a high wall at a distance of ten feet from my window cut off all direct light. I could see this wall through scratches in the whitewash. The light was so bad that I could only read a few lines of the typewritten notice on the wall, though my ignorance of some of the many warnings of which this notice was composed might have been fatal. The only two prohibitions I could make out were (1) not to make a noise, and (2) not to stay in that part of the cell where I would be invisible to the sentry through the eye-hole in the door. To make a noise was sometimes necessary, as there was no other way of attracting the attention of the sentry outside, and, owing to the complaint from which I suffered, I was frequently obliged to attract his attention. I was given no facilities for washing, and was beginning to think that I should get no breakfast, when the key rattled in the lock and the door opened wide enough to admit a hand and arm which deposited a large jug of hot water on the floor, and then withdrew again immediately, shutting the door as they did so. Luckily I had been allowed to bring with me an enamelled mug which had seen much war service and also some tea. Hastily seizing the jug, I filled my mug and was making myself some tea when the door opened again, the hand reappeared, and the jug was rapidly withdrawn, the door being immediately afterwards closed and locked.

This mysterious performance showed me what the game was. The inquisitors meant, before questioning me, to submit me to such a dose of strictly solitary confinement as would shake my nerves and render me an easy subject for them when they came to examine me. I was amused at first at the wall of impenetrable silence, broken only by terrifying sounds, with which they surrounded me; and also at the disquieting sights they sometimes permitted me to see, for there was a good deal of the boy’s penny dreadful about the whole proceedings. But I could not help reflecting on the cruelty of treating delicate women in this way. And delicate women were so treated. Mrs. Harrison of the American Associated Press had been arrested in the Savoy the same day as myself, and, as I afterwards learned, was at that very moment being subjected to the same terrible régime in another part of the building. Other women were enduring the same punishment, and thousands of women and girls have suffered similar treatment at the hands of the Vecheka.

Even in my own case the isolation and anxiety soon became almost unbearable. Absolutely solitary confinement is a terrible punishment if prolonged for any considerable length of time; and the jailers of the Vecheka are past-masters in the art of getting the full benefit out of it. If I had had books, for example, or pencil and paper, I could have occupied my mind; but they took particular pains to deprive me of all printed matter, even of the smallest scraps of newspaper, and of all facilities for writing. What this means will be readily understood by anyone who has never, since he learned to read, been alone without a book or notebook or newspaper. Deprived of outer stimulus or of any possibility of exercising itself, the mind tends to prey on itself, and to become lost in morbid speculations and gloomy thoughts. I tried to struggle against this tendency, but found it impossible to prevent my mind from traversing a futile and tiresome round of surmises. “Who had given me away?” This was the question that I asked myself a thousand times a day; and the answers I gave myself were always the same.

1. Nobody. The Vecheka had no evidence against me, and had merely arrested me on suspicion, expecting that, if reduced to a sufficiently nervous and hysterical condition, I would incriminate myself. This conviction remained uppermost to the end and finally saved me.

2. Some of the young officers of our party had been imprudent in their conversation. Instances of supreme imprudence on the part of young British officers rushed at once to my mind. There are no people in the world so frank and open as young British subalterns, so ready to pooh-pooh secrecy and mystery. Their physical detestation of closed and darkened rooms and foul air is only equalled by the irresistible impulse they all have to throw open the windows of their minds, and let the air and light of heaven in. It is a glorious impulse, but not suited to all countries. I knew a Colonel at Omsk who insisted on keeping his windows open in mid-winter, and who laughed in scorn when told that it was a dangerous practice. To leave the physical aspect of the question, I would not like to estimate the number of British lives that have been lost in this war through the national virtue of transparent frankness. We are not a loquacious people, but we hate to keep secrets or return indirect answers; and we credit people who have been properly introduced to us, and who apparently sympathize with our point of view, with the same honesty as we have ourselves. Unfortunately my experiences in Russia proved to me beyond all manner of doubt that the people whom we should most expect to be on our side are, some of them, in the clutch of the enemy. They hate Bolshevism as much as we do, but the Extraordinary Commission has got a hold on them, either through offences they have owned up to in writing when on the verge of mental collapse through solitary confinement, or through a similar hold which that terrible Inquisition has got on persons who are near and dear to them, and to whom they confide everything. This is not surmise on my part. I know of such cases. Hence it is that the Vecheka possesses allies in the most unexpected quarters. Delicate, aristocratic ladies, officers of the Guards, foreigners, even trusted secret-service agents of the European Powers: there are members of all these classes acting consciously or unconsciously as spies of the Soviet. This is not surmise, I repeat. I know of such cases.

3. Some of the British civilians in Moscow in whom I had to confide may have given me away, also through imprudence in their conversation.

4. Some of the very few Russians in Siberia who knew all about me may have been themselves arrested, and evidence against me may have been found on them.

This exhausted the possibilities, and all my thinking during the next three days tended to run in these narrow grooves. But of course I combated this tendency, as I would, when swimming in a rough sea, have combated waves that threatened to engulf me. I tried my best to crest all these dark billows, to swim on the surface, and to keep the sky and the land in sight. I divided the long day into several parts. For hours I would sing songs in various languages; and this exercise had a wonderfully exhilarating effect on me. One song of Thomas Moore’s I was fond of repeating, and I sometimes sang it in an audible voice. It was “The Minstrel Boy”; and I thought it was apropos, for the Bolsheviks might make my writing for them a condition of my release; and of course I was determined to refuse this condition. I sang it out loud, as I suspected that there was somebody who understood English listening to me. Perhaps the sentry at the door did not understand, but I noticed that high up on the wall, near the roof, there was, underneath the wall-paper, a large square of boards instead of brick. Some of the wall-paper had peeled off, disclosing the nature of this contrivance, which I suspected to be a sort of box accessible from the adjoining room, and containing at times a listener who understood English.

But I should be cowardly and ungrateful indeed if I omitted to say, though I have an extreme reluctance to speak of such things, that my greatest consolations in those dark moments were given me by Him who so often invited the afflicted to come to Him, and that I more than once felt my sinking soul held up by the strong arms of comrades who had passed from my side at Gallipoli into that unknown land at whose dread frontier I now stood. I had begged the intercession of those soldiers with all the more confidence inasmuch as I had never for a single day forgotten them in my prayers.

I also prepared a number of speeches on Russian subjects, and declaimed them to myself in a low voice. I walked a great deal up and down my cell while engaged in these mental exercises, so that, despite the bad food, my health continued good, and, when I was brought before the Inquisitors, I felt quite calm and self-possessed. My food was very bad, scanty, and unpalatable. In the morning I had hot water and three-quarters of a pound of black bread. In the middle of the day, and again in the evening, I got some fish-soup with nothing but fish-bones and water in it, followed by some concoction of salty cabbage. I could never take more than one or two spoonfuls of these dishes, which were quite repulsive. On the first day of my imprisonment I got ten cigarettes and a box of Soviet Government matches, which all refused to light.

I was visited once every day by the Governor of the prison, a silent and most forbidding-looking man, who never asked me more than one question: “What is your name?” When he had asked me this on the third day and refused to be drawn into any discussion about anything, I concluded that he meant to go on making the same enquiry until I had forgotten my name. Then he would probably report that my nerves were sufficiently wrecked, and that I might be brought before the Extraordinary Commission.

It was on the third night, after seventy hours’ solitary confinement, that I was summoned to appear before that terrible tribunal. The summons was brought in the same dramatic manner as had marked all the proceedings of the Vecheka. After I had gone to sleep, I was awakened by the sound of the key grating in the lock, but at first I paid no attention to this, as my jailers had been in the habit of rattling the key in this way once every ten minutes or so for hours at a time during the night, with the object presumably of breaking my night’s rest, wrecking my nerves, and thus reducing me to a helpless, neurasthenic condition in which I would be more likely to blurt out every secret to my examiners. I therefore pressed my fingers to my ears, and tried to sleep again, but suddenly I felt somebody touching me, and, on looking up, I saw a soldier with a rifle and fixed bayonet bending over me. “Get up and follow me,” he said. “You are going to be examined.”

My hour, then, had come; and, jumping up, I quickly dressed, and followed him along several corridors and up two flights of stairs, until he threw a door open and ushered me into the Inquisition Chamber. It was certainly not a place of the rack and thumbscrew order, being, on the contrary, a large and commodious office fitted with electric light, desks, typewriters, telephones, and all the most up-to-date office furniture. Even the two men who sat at a large desk at one side of the room were not out of keeping with their surroundings, save that they wore the semi-military khaki uniform which most employees of the Soviet Government wear. Xenofontov, who was standing, was a man of about thirty, with mild dark eyes and a countenance to which a sympathetic, Biblical touch was lent by a short silky beard which had never apparently been touched by a razor. The other, Comrade Mogilevsky, who was sitting at the desk, was thin, nervous in manner, and clean-shaven save for a slight moustache. He looked harder than his companion, but I do not think that he was harder.

I was asked to sit down and then offered a cigarette, which Mogilevsky lighted for me, at the same time apologizing for the inconvenience he had put me to. Pointing to a pile of papers on the desk—my papers as I saw at a glance—he said: “We find nothing suspicious in these, but there are a few things we would like you to clear up for us.”

They then went through all my papers and asked me to explain sundry passages in them. One passage was in very badly written shorthand which even Mr. Pitman himself, if he were alive, would probably have found impossible to decipher. Unfortunately this passage gave me away completely, and I cursed my imprudence which had left this one damning piece of evidence unobliterated, while marvelling at the sure instinct which had led them to select it from among a mass of innocuous notes also in shorthand. While they both watched my face narrowly, I translated it for them freely, so very, very freely that they were quite satisfied.

I was surprised afterwards that they let me off so easily, for the Bolsheviks have a department in the Kremlin where ordinary English shorthand is easily deciphered, and where notes written in any system of phonography can soon be made out, if the writer of the notes is induced to give them the principles of his system. I know of at least one English correspondent who was so “induced”; and if they had confronted me with this expert of theirs who, if not an Englishman, must know English extremely well, I should have been ruined. I might also add that they have an excellent cryptographic department, where some of the most secret ciphers of foreign nations are decoded. Several of my own papers were, I think, treated chemically, so as to disclose the presence of invisible writing; and, in short, the Bolshevik Secret Service employs very efficient cryptographic experts and the most modern cryptographic methods. The other things about which the Inquisitors wanted an explanation were all easily explainable, being names and addresses of various Bolsheviks in Moscow, as well as odds and ends of general information which I had picked up. Some of this information dealt with the economic condition of the country, and I was surprised to discover that they regarded any enquiry into their economic or industrial conditions as espionage.

“You say you are only a journalist,” said Mogilevsky in a menacing tone, “but why do you collect all this data about our factories and our agriculture? A newspaper man does not write on such subjects.”

I might have told him that these are the very subjects which a good journalist does write about, especially if he is in the habit of contributing to serious periodicals, but I thought it better to remind him that I was an author as well as a journalist, and that I was collecting material for a book. This answer appeared not only to satisfy him, but to raise me considerably in his esteem.

Telling his companion that he would ask Derzhinsky to sanction my release that night, he went into another room, and then Xenofontov, the mild-looking man who is, as a matter of fact, Derzhinsky’s ablest adjutant, looked at me in his mildest manner, and repeated some things which I had only told Mr. North. It was not a very important matter, but the fact that it had got out rather unnerved me, and I had the greatest difficulty in explaining it away. The mild-looking man then remarked casually that, being a newspaper correspondent, I had probably been in the habit of visiting Kolchak’s Intelligence Department at Omsk. Did I happen by any chance to recollect the names of the men employed there? I said that I had met a Colonel Goldstein in the Military Operations Department, but that I had never met anyone belonging to the M.I. He pressed me to give him the names of any agents whom Kolchak had sent into Russia, but I said that I did not know any. His object, of course, was to terrorize these men, who had nearly all been captured by the Reds, into giving him the names of other agents inside Soviet Russia. These would be made to betray others still, and the vision of endless cruelty and bloodshed which this prospect opened up so appalled me, that I was heartily glad when Mogilevsky returned and told me that I could go. He also gave me a document certifying that I had been released from the prison of the Vecheka.

The soldier who had brought me had been waiting all this time at the door, and he now led the way back to my cell, where I packed my belongings with a vigour that I had seldom shown in that work during the whole course of my life. Within the space of an hour I was back in the Savoy Hotel, and I could hardly have been more pleased had it been the Savoy in the Strand to which I was restored.