The following miscellaneous notes were written by me in shorthand while a prisoner in Siberia and Russia, but I had no time to decipher them till the foregoing pages were already in the hands of the printer, and till I myself had left England again for the Russian frontier. I hope that, under these circumstances, and in consideration of the fact that nearly all of them were written amid the scenes which I describe, and even jotted down sometimes in the street and in the darkness, their crude form, their want of connection, and their appearance as an appendix will be excused by the reader.

KOLCHAK’S GOLD TRAIN

Gold to the value of £44,000,000 left Omsk in a special train of forty cars which came into collision at Tatarskaya, near Omsk, with another train and caught fire, with the result that boxes full of gold to the value of hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling were thrown out of the train like so many boxes of “bully” beef, were left lying on the track for days, and were finally “lost.” The rest of the gold was captured by the Reds at Nizhniudinsk, near Irkutsk.

BURNING OF A RED CROSS TRAIN

This disaster took place at Kochenovo, forty versts to the west of Novo-Nikolaevsk. I heard of it while still with the Whites, and the Reds afterwards gave me full particulars of it. They said that they rescued some of the patients, and that they found the charred remains of over two hundred typhus patients in the débris of the train. They added that in some of the abandoned trains they found prison vans with barred windows, but that in all cases the prisoners had been butchered by the Whites. Whether this was true or not I do not know, but at Novo-Nikolaevsk and Omsk I found the railway stations adorned with ghastly photographs of mutilated corpses as they had, in Kolchak’s time, been adorned with similar photographs of Red butcheries.

WRITINGS ON STATION WALLS

“Dear Masha,—I have gone on by the echelon of the Osvyetverkh, November 11. I will wait for you and the children in the Dom Petrov, Bolshoi Prospekt, No. 12.—Ivan.”

Ivan, it will be seen, neglects to give the name of the town where he proposes to wait.

“To Dominica Ivanovna Glyebova,—We cannot get any further, and are staying here in Bolotnaya in the Square opposite the Church, Dom Rykachev, No. 8. Vanna is sick of typhus.—Sergius and Natasha.”

Sometimes one found rude, pencilled notices from Colonels who had apparently lost their regiments.

“Colonel Butenko is living here in Sadovaya, No. 18.”

Still another specimen, unsigned:

“Will anyone who knows the whereabouts of Olga and Tatiana Petrova, please tell the commandant at this station?”

Reading long afterwards the copies I had made of those notices, I was touched by the confidence shown by all the writers that there must be a secure haven of refuge somewhere. At Novo-Nikolaevsk, Tomsk was the abiding city, the inviolable sanctuary which Trotsky could never violate; at Taiga it was Marinsk; at Marinsk it was Achinsk; at Achinsk it was Krasnoyarsk. At the time I first read those appeals I had, however, the same illusions myself; but now I see something symbolical in this futile hunt for security. “We have here no abiding city.”

THE PROPAGANDA HALL AT EKATERINBURG

This hall was always crowded with young soldiers and workmen, who listened most attentively to the violin recitals, piano playing, old ballads, and classical music, and seemed to be fascinated by the endless succession of artistes, some of whom were very good. It had, however, two great drawbacks: it contributed to the spread of poisonous doctrine, and it contributed to the spread of typhus. One of my travelling companions visited it once only, and shortly afterwards fell sick of this disease. The entertainments and lectures seemed to go on for ever, but the audience never grew tired. There were all sorts of common people in the crowd—Cossacks, Kirghiz, miners, young peasants with the bodies of giants and the faces of children. Workmen sometimes came in with bags of flour, which they deposited on the ground while they listened to what was going on. It reminded me of workmen and market women I had seen coming into an Italian cathedral in the noonday heat to pray: these Propaganda Halls are the Cathedrals of Bolshevism. Soldiers also came in, the permanently fixed bayonets on the muzzles of their rifles white with hoar-frost.

In one of the cartoons a man with a plough stood on a terrestrial globe, beneath which was the inscription “The World is Thine.” Innumerable other notices vaunted the superiority of Labour and the defeat of Capitalism and Imperialism. “The Rule of the Proletariat,” said one of these notices, “is the Death of the Bourgeois Horde.”

BOLSHEVIK JOURNALISM

Nearly everybody dabbled in journalism; and foreign correspondents always ran the risk of seeing their most casual conversation at Commissars’ tables reproduced in a distorted form next morning by some Communist newspaper. Cabinet ministers in the West are sometimes rather afraid of talking to newspapermen lest their remarks be published without their permission and in an incorrect form. Journalists from the West have, for precisely the same reason, a well-grounded fear of talking to Bolshevik Cabinet Ministers. The average Red leader writes as much as he talks, and he talks as much as the most talkative English M.P. The Russians are, indeed, a very talkative race; they talk with the inexhaustible rapidity of Greeks or women. Not that I despise them for this natural accomplishment: on the contrary I envy them; and I must say that their conversation is sometimes of extraordinary charm and brilliancy. But the conversation of such of them as have got the Bolshevik bee in their bonnets can only be described as devastating, though the Reactionaries who think that England has not helped enough run these Red bores very close. The “loquacity valve” which works so stiffly in some other races does not exist in the Russians at all. Talking is apparently an imperious necessity for them, and they droop and wither if deprived of all possibility of satisfying that necessity. I am told that many of the Russian prisoners of war in Germany went mad: I think it was because they had nobody to talk with.

Powerful articles are published occasionally in the Moscow papers, but the general tone of the Bolshevik Press is extremely low, for most of the regular Pressmen belong to the type which used to make a precarious living by bringing trifling items of intelligence to the old newspaper offices, though they themselves seldom succeeded in getting beyond the hall-porter. I know one editor who wrote a series of violent articles against a Soviet official, because the latter once occupied the permanent place assigned to this editor in the local theatre. Another paper published a frightful onslaught on a lady, the wife of an educational Commissar, because, on visiting the Opera House once, she complained (and with excellent reason) of the smell which emanated from the Proletariat audience. The attack on Mrs. North, wife of the British chaplain at Moscow, in the official organ of the Soviet Government, was the most vulgar, disgraceful, and unmanly thing that I ever read in print. The non-existence of a Libel Law encourages cowardly scribes to attack in the most brutal manner people whom it is safe to attack, especially women of good family married to technical functionaries of the Soviet, but none of these scribblers would dare to attack Mrs. Lenin or Mrs. Trotsky any more than they would have dared in the old days to attack the Tsarina.

The untruthful nature of the news which appears in the Pravda has become so notorious among the higher Commissars themselves that they have a saying to the effect that “You never find Pravda (Truth) in the Pravda.”

THE PEASANTS

If the outer world is nervous about Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks are even more nervous about the outer world and about the permanency of their own régime. They are so nervous that, excepting high officials and fanatical secret agents, none of Lenin’s subjects are ever allowed to leave Russia. Many of the Bolshevik Chinovniks have asked me confidentially if I thought their system of government would last, and were very anxious to know what change will, in my opinion, take place, and whether the change will be brought about by foreign interference, by internal trouble, or by a gradual modification in the Socialist system itself. I have seen with my own eyes that these people, who profess to be so very, very sure, are, in reality, very doubtful of their own success. They are overawed in the first place by the stupendous strength of the world-organization against which they have set out to do battle and are profoundly depressed by the obvious disinclination of the World’s workers to join Jack the Giant-killer in his forlorn campaign against the giant. They are also very much afraid of their own peasants who stand sullenly aside, refuse to bring produce to market, hoard all the money they can lay hands on, and leave the towns to starve. Despite his tone of supreme confidence, Lenin has many sleepless nights on account of the muzhik. That dark, enigmatical mass of a hundred millions presses down on him like a nightmare, and he has been forced to recognize the fact that the peasant is anything but an altruist, being extremely selfish and close-fisted, being, in fact, a small capitalist. “I have found,” said he, “that the muzhik has a dual personality. One personality will joyfully take all the Soviet Government gives it. The other refuses the least help to the Soviet Government.”

This Sphinx is cunning, cautious, and evasive. One of the Commissars told me that the class of “poor” peasants—still catalogued as “poor,” though they are now rich—are much more difficult to deal with than the old kulak whom they have plundered and replaced. Meanwhile the attitude of the Bolshevik newspapers towards the peasantry is very interesting and suggestive, for those newspapers faithfully reflect the hopes and fears of the Omnipotent Five. Sometimes they attack the peasants with violence, but, as a rule, they write about him with a hopefulness which they do not feel. They publish many articles on “What to do in the Villages,” proving to their own satisfaction apparently that the peasants’ sons, when they return from the Red Army, will carry the armed doctrine of the revolution into the farmhouses (but omitting to state that they will also carry, in many cases, those diseases which seem to be almost inseparable from the noble profession of arms), and that they will make the villages supply the workmen with bread, since, without bread, the workmen will be unable to deliver the ploughs, clothing, boots, etc., which the villagers need so badly. An energetic agitator, who had (of course) served a sentence of penal servitude under the Tsar, once described to me with great satisfaction how he had corrupted the peasantry in his native village. At first he had to be very cautious, and could not speak against the Tsar, the priests, or the landowners, but little by little he made headway “until now”—and with a bland smile he waved his hand towards the street adorned throughout its entire length with Red flags. As a matter of fact, however, Lenin would be as much out of place in the average Russian village as the Dean of St. Paul’s would be in a Sinn Fein school at Ballinasloe. This was clearly shown during the attempts, which the Bolsheviks made, to establish Communist colonies in Samara Government and elsewhere throughout Russia. Those colonies were established in the confiscated estates of landowners, and were filled with long-haired enthusiasts from Moscow, but there was as great a gulf between them and the peasants as there would have been between the peasants and an American Brook Farm colony dumped down among them. The muzhiks simply said, “These are new landlords come here. Let’s kill them,” and in the riots which ensued several people were killed and wounded on both sides. Finally, the Red Army was sent to restore order. The peasants were flogged, but the long-haired enthusiasts had fled, and all these Communist experiments came to naught.

To all the frantic appeals of the Reds to co-operate with them in the creation of a great Socialistic Russia, the peasant opposes an inscrutable passivity. As a matter of fact, he dislikes to be worried by any form of government, and no more desires to build up a great Socialist Russia than he ever desired to build up a great Imperialist Russia. His objection to military service is as great as was the objection of the Bolsheviks when they came into power, but, as the Reds now conscribe the peasants as readily as the Tsarists, the peasants feel vaguely that they have been swindled. On one point only do the Marxists and the muzhiks feel alike. Neither of them care in the least whether chunks as large as France and Germany put together are bit off the Empire, for the Marxists have no fatherland, and the muzhik’s Empire is confined to the limits of his native village.

I once saw a list of instructions to Bolshevik agitators, which laid down the rule: “Keep things moving all the time. When one cry has become stale, get up another and cry it out at the top of your voice. The next cry will be ‘Electrification of the Villages.’ Always have something new. Don’t let the pace flag. Keep the people so busy that they won’t have time to think.”

And, sure enough, in a week or two afterwards the cry “Electrification of the Villages” resounded all over Russia. It is, in truth, rather a silly cry considering how many of the Russian peasants are nearer the Stone Age than the Age of Electricity, and the slight effect that it has had on the muzhiks shows that Lenin does not understand them at all; but, after all, politicians in every country act very often on the same great principle. What about “Three Acres and a Cow,” “Land for the Soldiers,” “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make Germany Pay,” and a number of similar slogans in our own country? The principle of keeping everybody busy is important, and leads to Lenin making all women, even married women, work all day in Government offices, so that they will have no time at night to worry themselves and their husbands about politics. The inertia which is such a marked characteristic of the Muscovite mind makes the Russian difficult to rouse, but it also makes him continue working at high pressure once he has been thoroughly warmed up, and the Bolsheviks are cleverly utilizing this psychological trait in the national character in order to keep things “humming,” and to prevent people from falling back into their old state of sluggishness.

In order to “keep things humming,” the Bolsheviks not only insist on the Proletariat working: they also insist on their playing. Life among the Reds is not only therefore a constant round of work, it is also a round of amusements, lectures, Red picnics, Red athletic exhibitions, Red swimming shows, and Red skating competitions. Certain days are devoted, by Government decree, to certain “stunts.” There is a “Children’s Day,” a “Woman’s Day,” a “Red Soldier’s Day,” a “Red Hospital Day,” a “House Cleaning Week,” and many other fixtures of the same kind, which replace the ancient religious holidays.

In order to give greater interest and a better organization to these movements, newspapers are published temporarily in connection with each of them. I have already spoken of how such newspapers are published by the G.H.Q. of the Labour Army.

MOSCOW

The first night I ventured out into the streets of Moscow was one of almost unbelievable gloom and depression. I was not met by brass bands and Soviet motor-cars, as most of the English investigators have been met; nevertheless, I venture to think that I saw as much of the real Russia as they did. The first thing that struck me early in the night was the great number of people, including feeble old men and delicate young women, who were engaged in dragging along the street little sleighs laden with firewood; and in some pitiful cases this work was rendered impossible of accomplishment owing to the physical weakness of those engaged in it, and to the fact that in many places the snow had all melted, with the result that the sleighs got hopelessly embedded in the mud or wedged immovably among the loose cobble-stones. Some of the young ladies were in a state of utter exhaustion; apparently they had been engaged all day in collecting fuel; their whole time was taken up in attending to the most primitive necessities of themselves and those dependent on them. Subsequent investigation showed me that this theory of mine was correct, and that the Communist system tends inevitably to crush all expression of genius, as it has never before been crushed even under the most barbarous of the Ottoman Sultans. If a Shakespeare or a Shelley arises in Red Russia, and refuses to make himself the mouthpiece for the coarse, semi-educated leaders of the Reds, he will have to spend all his time in getting himself bread, water, fuel, and clothing, and will have no leisure left for any higher work.

When the night advanced and the darkness increased, there was not a gleam of light in the streets, for there were no street lamps and no shop-windows. There were also no trams for passengers, but, once an hour or so, a solitary tramcar rushed madly uptown, flashing fire from the electric wires overhead as it tore onwards. I was nearly run over once or twice by these insane chariots, for the only possible place for a pedestrian was right in the middle of the tramway track, and on each side of the track there rose to the height of at least four feet a solid rampart of frozen and excessively slippery snow and mud, which was quite invisible in the darkness. I had some bad falls in consequence, and on one occasion smashed my only pair of spectacles, with the result that the chaos around me became more of a Dante’s inferno than ever. It only needed those furious tramcars to give the last touch of unreality and insanity to the whole incredible tableau. The desertion of the streets, the disorder, the gloom charged with menace, the terrifying and inexplicable sounds that smote the ear, combined to create the best impression of the lower regions that it is possible to imagine. I have often been at night, during the Great War, in deserted and shattered villages of No Man’s Land, with corpses lying in the streets and enemies hidden in the cellars, but none of them ever filled me with such fear as did this Bolshevik Garden of Eden.

The night was bitterly cold, yet all the glass in the single crazy tramcar had been broken, and the driver, who was the sole occupant, was muffled up as if for an Arctic expedition. These cars carried, I believe, the mails, or had some other sane reason for their insane speed; but the enigma remained why, if they could run, other cars could not run with passengers. Making all allowances, they seemed to be symbolical of Bolshevism.

Three kinds of noise broke the midnight stillness of Moscow: first, the rushing sound of these rickety tramcars lurching unsteadily over the worn and uneven rails, with wildly clanging bells, and amid a continuous shower of electric sparks which illuminated with a sickly and unnatural light the dilapidated houses and the emaciated faces of the few passers-by; secondly, a curious hooting of railway or other engines which went on all night, and which, to me at least, remained mysterious and inexplicable; thirdly, and most ominous of all, occasional stray shots in the distance. I have compared the scene to a scene at the Front, but I could almost imagine myself at times to be lost in the dark recesses of an equatorial forest, listening to the nocturnal cries of wild animals.

BOLSHEVIK MODERNISM

The Communists claim to be ultra-modern, to be the last word in scientific progress; and, in proof of this, they point to their extraordinarily wide use of Wireless for newspaper purposes; and to their vast schemes for the electrification of agriculture—schemes which will introduce electric ploughing in one part of an Empire, where the peasants in other parts are still ploughing with boughs of trees dragged by bullocks. They point also to the extensive use they are making, for Governmental and propaganda purposes, of that remarkable system of advertisement by suggestion which is one of the most striking developments of the twentieth century. They are utilizing the cinema for educational work, and they speak with enthusiasm of the widespread use they will make of other modern inventions, when the opening up of trade relations with foreign countries enables them to import the necessary apparatus. They will teach geography and history by the cinema, as well as by the older methods. They will teach foreign languages and the correct pronunciation of their own language by the aid of the gramophone and the dictaphone. They will restore the theatre to its ancient position as an educational instrument. In their schools they have already replaced the Bible by Karl Marx, and substituted Esperanto for Latin and Greek, and their next step will probably be to make Trotsky take the place of Demosthenes. Not only have they adopted the Julian Calendar which, owing to religious scruples, Old Russia boggled at for two hundred years, and which even Peter the Great was not brave enough to carry through, but they have also adopted the Daylight Saving Bill—though that measure is of doubtful utility in Russia owing to the length of the days in summertime and to their shortness in winter, as well as to the fact that the country is mainly agricultural—and have even improved on it by putting on the clock not once but three times a year.

The Omnipotent Five—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, and Kristinsky—propose, in short, to cut themselves adrift altogether from the past, and to turn their faces entirely towards the future. They will harness modern science to the Socialist chariot, as Wilhelm harnessed it to the Militarist; and, indeed, Russian Communism bears in some respects a close resemblance to Prussian Militarism. The idea of doing what Lenin is doing is not, of course, new. Russian professors toyed with that idea before the Great War; Professor Struve, Wrangel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, was the first to translate Karl Marx into Russian (an achievement for which he is now very sorry); and the Russian Intelligentsia themselves are largely to blame for the general weakening of faith in Christianity, and the general strengthening of belief in the infallibility of science that has taken place in Russia during the last twenty years. But, though apparently so up to date, this Bolshevik system of education is thoroughly wrong, as the whole Bolshevik theory is wrong. That theory, as it is now seen working in practice, has all the hardness of the early Egyptian priestcraft; and, if it lasts for any length of time, it will inevitably become a fossilized and intensely materialistic religion of empty symbols, of barren rites and ceremonies. Though young, it has already acquired all the jargon, mummery, hair-splitting, futile and involved controversy and rotatory argument of an old and debased superstition. The pundits of the Reds are more addicted to red tape than the most retrograde Chinovniks of the Empire ever were. They quote decrees, rescripts, and precedents with all the verbose obscurity of Old Régime lawyers quoting ukazes and legal enactments; and, owing to the many barbarous contractions they have invented, it is sometimes difficult even for one knowing Russian to follow them. These Bolshevik decrees are innumerable, and most of them are silly, but respect for them is imposed by terror. Mr. Thomas, the acting British consul in Ekaterinburg, told me once of a clown in a circus who, for joking somewhat coarsely about the amazing legislative fecundity of the Soviet Government, was immediately taken from the stage and shot.

Hypocrisy and insincerity permeate Bolshevism through and through. Even now, while professing to be merely servants of the people, most of the Bolshevik leaders live in comparative luxury. They wear on public occasions the humble dress and high boots of the Russian working-man. Trotsky, the most autocratic War Minister in the world, dresses as a private soldier, shovels snow, and runs about the Kremlin with his own messages. The big-wigs at the F.O. act as their own office-boys, and carry on diplomatic conversations while repairing the handle of a door or nailing up pictures on the wall. A time may come when the successor of Tsar Lenin will appear on ceremonial occasions leaning on a symbolical spade, and wearing on his bowler hat the republican crest of a crossed hammer and scythe, as Wilhelm used to lean on a sword which he never used, and to wear on his Imperial crown a Cross which taught him nothing. But it will all be idle show. Lenin the Thirteenth, or whatever his name and number is, will be none the less an autocrat because of his wearing emblems, whose significance will have become lost in the mists of antiquity.

Bolshevism, as I saw it, made the same impression on me as was made by a carnivorous plant which I once saw trapping flies in the Kew Gardens. Attracted by the bright red colour of the fatal plant, the giddy fly alights unsuspectingly on the pitcher, crawls in, is stupefied by the juice and the faint perfume, and, in the end, is slowly dissolved and absorbed. I have seen the Red flag of Bolshevism have the same effect on many young and ardent natures. I have seen living men swallowed by an organism which is itself dead. Their initiative, their creative energy, their immortal souls, are sucked out of them, and nothing is left but mere husks of themselves, “hard, indigestible remains,” like that part of the fly which is rejected by the insectivorous Nepenthes and Sarracenias after the process of digestion has been completed.

TYPHUS

The mortality from typhus in Siberia ranged from 5 per cent. to 8 per cent. in 1918, but in 1920 it reached 10 per cent. to 11 per cent. In Taiga on February 1 nearly all the large railway stations had been converted into typhus hospitals, and most of the cases lay on the bare floor without blankets. I am told that many buildings in the town were equally full, and that there were over 20,000 cases in Taiga alone. There were two huge piles of unidentified dead bodies, one near the station, the other some distance off; and in one hospital surgeons were busily engaged in amputating gangrened limbs that had been frost-bitten. There was only one doctor for every one hundred typhus cases. In the district between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk practically all the medical men had been attacked by typhus, and 50 per cent. of them had succumbed, among them being the best doctors in Siberia. One doctor told me that he found the mortality to be lowest among young illiterate peasants, and highest among middle-aged people engaged in intellectual work. Not the least horrible feature of the typhus horror in Russia is this fact, that it reduces still lower the percentage of literates, always low in Russia, and brought down to an infinitesimal figure by the murders and the proscriptions of the Reds. The doctor I refer to had served with Kolchak, and left Omsk in a staff train containing eight hundred staff officers who had some chance of changing their linen; nevertheless, at Krasnoyarsk, he had twenty-six corpses on the train. Sanitary conditions on the other trains were frightful, and the percentage of deaths was consequently greater. In the echelon of the Izhevsky Division about 50 per cent. of the passengers died.

It would be difficult for me to exaggerate the horror produced on my mind by what I saw of the great typhus epidemic in Siberia and Russia. My whole journey from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, and from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow, was overshadowed by this scourge, as well as by the venereal and the other diseases which are fast eating away the vitality of the Russian race, and my fears on the score of typhus were increased by what I saw of the filthy personal habits of the Russians; some of them could not shake the folds of their dress without sprinkling lice on everybody in their immediate vicinity. My worst experience was in Moscow, where a man fell ill of typhus in the compartment which I occupied in a railway carriage. I fled from him in horror, and spent most of my time in the corridor, but I could not keep my eyes off that fatal door inside which my belongings were piled close to his. This patient had accumulated a large supply of rusks, Siberian butter, and rum, but even his starving companions were afraid to touch them. The terror of those awful, voiceless, creeping things, whose bite is sickness, unconsciousness, physical collapse, and sometimes death, protected those stores more effectively than anything else could have done. For weeks afterwards I could not sit on the bunk where the sick man had piled his clothes without being filled with a morbid dread; and never, as long as I live, shall I be able to look a body parasite in the face without a shiver, or to dread its infinitesimal bite any less than I would dread the bite of a mad dog. Going through Russia at the present moment is, owing to typhus alone, as dangerous as going “over the top” was in France. The Soviet Republic is protected, for this winter at least, against outside aggression by a triple shield of hunger, typhus, and cold, but the strongest of these three is the typhus. Instead of making one charitable towards the sick, this epidemic develops in the healthy a deadly hatred of typhus patients, as if they were murderers who meditated an attempt on one’s life, and for this hatred the sick people themselves are sometimes to blame on account of their criminal carelessness, their intense selfishness, and their utter disregard for others. In the present atmosphere of Red Russia all human charity withers away like flowers in Polar snow. Not even on the battlefields of the Great War was death such an overpowering factor in the situation as it is now in Russia. Behind Lenin’s head grins a skeleton, and one can hardly ever converse with any Muscovite about his friends and relations without hearing, sooner or later, the dreadful word “dead.” Sometimes when I spoke to a man about his wife or children, he took out of his pocket a photograph of a beautiful young woman and a group of healthy children, and again I heard the phrase “died of typhus” pronounced in as unconcerned a tone as that in which an Englishman might say, “Gone to Brighton for the week-end.”

If the above remarks seem overstrained and morbid, the explanation lies in the fact that they were all written, not in a clean British home, but in that pestiferous railway carriage at Moscow, and that I transcribe them here without the change of a syllable. Had I not had the writing of these notes to occupy my mind with, I do not know what I should have done during the interminable waits in railway carriages at desolate, typhus-stricken stations on the Trans-Siberian, and especially during the nightmare weeks that I passed side-tracked with a dying man in a dismal swamp of mud and melting snow, outside a deserted halt on the outskirts of Lenin’s Red Capital.

It is doubtful whether the wild educational efforts of the Bolsheviks will ever compensate for the ravages of typhus among the Russian literati, and for the other factors which have militated against the spread of public instruction. For several years past most of the schools in Russia have been used as hospitals and barracks. The old teachers have mostly run away, and those who have taken their places have enthusiasm, but not competence; and, as a result of these two circumstances joined to the decimation of the literati, the new generation in Russia will have hardly anything in common with the old. The stage has been swept clear for an entirely new set of actors filled with most poisonous ideas, devoid of any trace of Christianity, and bound to constitute for centuries a centre of infection for the world. If any of the best parts of the old civilization are retained, it will be due to the action of many Russian mothers in teaching their children the great truths which Lenin has set himself to crush. For the moment, however, it would seem as if Lenin will simply drive Russia back into savagery, instead of teaching her anything new. Most people are occupied so much in seeking for food, clothing, and warmth, that they have no time to think of higher things, and are rapidly drifting into barbarism. No books save poisonous ones are published. There is a great scarcity of school-books and of Russian classical writers. Nearly all the young men are either in the field fighting, or else they are hiding in the woods to avoid conscription, so that for some years they have read nothing, and the gentlest of them have become very much roughened. Growing children have become accustomed to the most awful sights of war, so that the new generation is already ruined. The peasant is in a state of panic. Harried, robbed, and flogged, first by one side and then by another, he sees his horses, carts, sleighs, sons, and foodstuffs requisitioned. Many of the workmen are trying to study, but, while their stomachs are empty, their heads are full of wrong ideas, misty notions, and impossible expectations. The interference of the Government with everything cannot be a success, and the whole outlook for Russia is excessively gloomy. But nothing in the present situation makes a more painful impression on one than the dreadful wastage of human life which is going on unchecked.

CONDITIONS IN EKATERINBURG

I might add to the description of conditions in Ekaterinburg, which I have given in Chapter XII., the following remarks, which I wrote in shorthand in a notebook, while wandering about the streets of Ekaterinburg:

“One shop advertised ‘Boots. Quick Repairs. All Kinds of Footwear. Children’s Shoes a Speciality.’ I entered and found not a single boot in the place, and not even a scrap of leather. I went to a dentist’s, dentist fled; to a tailor’s, tailor present and correct, but no cloth, thread, needles, or buttons; to a watchmaker’s, no watches; to a café, no coffee; to a grocer’s, no groceries; to a milkman’s, no milk; to a beer-hall, no beer; to a tea-house, no tea; to a carpenter’s, carpenter sick of typhus; to a butcher’s, no meat save possibly the very small quantity which may have covered the bones of a moribund, half-frozen old man, sitting helplessly in an icy shop before an empty pair of scales. What made these disappointments all the more heartrending was the fact that, for the benefit of the illiterate, there were pictorial representations on each shop of the articles supposed to be sold within—fat cows, foaming pails of milk, tankards of beer, firkins of butter, loaves of bread, and so on.”

THE RUSSIAN WHITES

My opinion of the Russian Whites I shall set down frankly, as it is of importance, for our own future guidance, that my own countrymen, who have not had an opportunity to go abroad, should know something of the class they have been asked once, and may be asked again, to reimpose on Russia. They are a class which has forgotten nothing and learnt nothing, and is in every way unfit to rule. As soon as the White officers in Siberia began to recover from the effects of the Red Terror to which they had been subjected, they reverted at once to the courses which had brought about their downfall. They intrigued in the most shameless manner for posts in the rear, so that Kolchak had more officers in his G.H.Q. than Foch had in his at the time of the Armistice. Thousands of those who should have been at the Front spent practically all their time revelling in Omsk. Regimental commanders neglected their soldiers for months, and then treated them with brutal severity. Every British officer who served with Denikin or Kolchak can give dozens of examples of this. I shall confine myself to one. A regiment was sent from Tomsk to the Front in the middle of 1919, but at Omsk the men sent a deputation to their C.O. to say that they had no boots or clothing, and could not go further; and, as a matter of fact, they had been swindled of their pay, rations, and clothing by their own officers. The C.O. had several members of this deputation shot and the remainder brutally flogged, with the result that the whole regiment passed over to the Reds a few months afterwards. This sort of thing made such a bad impression on our British troops, that they became more or less demoralized, and, if a large British Army had been sent into Russia, it would have become utterly corrupted. The Russian Generals whom we supported became almost invariably reactionaries of the worst type; their punitive expeditions into the villages turned all Siberia against them; and, if they had ever reached Moscow, they would have undoubtedly established there a régime in comparison with which the Government of the Tsar would have seemed absurdly democratic.

In 1918 I travelled to Ekaterinburg in a Czech train, into which a Russian General introduced himself without permission. Having done so, he promptly got drunk at the expense of his involuntary hosts, whom he began abusing as “mere prisoners of war, nothing more.” Under the Czech flag he smuggled past his own Customs a large quantity of cigarettes, on which, at Omsk, he made a profit of 20,000 roubles. Some of the Russian officers who joined the British Mission frankly explained that they did so because (1) they were not obliged to go to the Front, and (2) they were paid both by the British and by the Russians.

The Intelligentsia spent half their time criticizing the British troops for not going into the firing-line, and the other half in “wangling” safe jobs for their own officer-sons in the rear. Kolchak’s newspapers in Siberia were not allowed to make the faintest criticism on the utterly inefficient Government of Omsk, but they were not prevented from filling their columns with abuse of the English for not helping them enough. I think they were even encouraged to make these attacks, as it was considered that this display of independence tended to remove the impression that Kolchak was a puppet of Whitehall—which he was.

The Russian bourgeoisie are a kindly, soft, and gentle people, but, brought up as they were under the protecting tyranny of the Tsardom, they reminded me of domesticated animals let loose in a savage jungle. To put it differently, the Russian Intelligentsia seems to be suffering from shell-shock (or what I might call revolution-shock), with the result that they turn all their venom on the Good Samaritans who minister to them, and address no reproaches to the Levites who pass by on the other side of the street and take no notice. In such cases the physician should be firm as well as kind, but unfortunately we have in England many people suffering as badly as the Russians from revolution-shock, who persist in saying that we did not do half enough for Kolchak and Denikin.

To give one out of innumerable personal experiences, during the retreat from Omsk a number of middle-class Russians, including young ladies and aged people, were placed under the protection of the British party I was with, and but for them none of us would have been captured. Among them, wearing uniform and carrying a sword, was a young Russian who, even in fleeing from the battlefield under a foreign flag, could not restrain himself from criticisms of England for not having given Kolchak sufficient assistance; and when, owing to their own utter helplessness, the whole party was ultimately captured, they overwhelmed us with abuse. Previous to that they had shown themselves to be impossible travelling companions. We had very little water in our carriage, but they used all of it for washing clothes, and then used the water we had obtained with great difficulty for cooking purposes. One of our officers had a batman, Private Smith, who had kindly consented to cook for all the officers, but the Russians wanted us to force him to cook for them too, and could not be made to understand that a British soldier cannot be forced to be a batman at all, much less to cook for a crowd of foreign civilians. Their attitude on this small question was the attitude of Kolchak and Denikin on larger questions. Kolchak and Denikin wanted us to employ the British Army in a way which would certainly have led to wholesale mutiny, and probably have caused revolution at home and the bankruptcy of our Empire. And, because we did not take their advice, they hated us like poison. I speak thus frankly about them, because there is a danger that these things will be overlooked by some British officials and officers anxious for employment in Russia, and not sufficiently alive to the expense and danger to their own country which further intervention in Russia would entail.

WHITE TROOPS WHO JOINED THE REDS

During the first week I spent as a prisoner of war at Krasnoyarsk the number of White officers who registered at the Red Commandant’s office (where, by the way, we found Makarov, one of the British Mission interpreters, acting as a Bolshevik employee, and professing to be a red-hot Bolshevik himself) was: 20 Generals, 175 Staff officers, and 4,380 higher officers. The White soldiers who were drafted like cattle into the Red Army, without having to go through any formality, numbered 24,000. For some weeks the peasants in villages near Krasnoyarsk busied themselves in digging out of the snow guns, Generals, “Brass Hats,” and rifles, which they surrendered, cold but more or less intact, to the conquerors. One village presented to the Reds, as a peace-offering or Christmas-box, one White General (slightly frost-bitten) and a battery of 6-inch howitzers which had been supplied to Kolchak by the British Government. The Staff officers, the Colonels, and even the great Brass Generals were promptly reduced to the ranks, formed into awkward squads, and drilled by a Red corporal in the barrack square. Some of them seemed to have forgotten the very elements of drill, but the corporal was merciful to them, and even prefaced on one occasion the welcome command “Dismiss!” with the respectful Russian phrase for “Messieurs les officiers,” though I am afraid that he spoke in sarcasm. About two hundred White officers refused to serve in the Red Army, and were consequently sent to work as convicts in the Ural mines. For these brave men I was sincerely sorry, but I cannot honestly say that I was moved to tears by the spectacle of the lazy and corrupt old Generals, who had joined the ranks of the Red Army, being made to do an honest stroke of work, probably for the first time in their lives. Many of the White officers not only joined the Reds, but worked enthusiastically for them, and were given positions of trust. A trusted Adjutant of General Sakharov was in the Red force which captured us.

General Dutov’s adjutant, Bogdanov, who was captured by the Reds in September of that year, is now a Red Propagandist who has had great success among the Cossack stanitzi, and many of the Russian officers, who were attached to the British Missions in Siberia and elsewhere in Russia, are now working far harder for the Reds than ever they worked against them. Lieutenant Hahn, an ex-Guards officer who was attached to the British Military Mission in Omsk, is now at the head of the Red Extraordinary Commission in Irkutsk, and unfortunately this is only one name out of many. This weakness on the part of the Russian Imperialists themselves had far more to do with the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik effort in 1919 than any weakness on the part of the Entente, yet the Entente is bitterly blamed for that defeat by the Russian reactionaries, who never by any chance think of asking themselves if there was any fault on their side. I have remarked in Chapter XIX. how aptly the words of Burke on the French Terrorists may be applied to the Bolshevik leaders. His indictment of the “Marais” of 1798 is no less applicable to the Russian anti-Bolsheviks, whose flabbiness has disgusted most of the British officers who have had to do with them during the last two years. “They are nothing more nor better than men engaged in desperate designs with feeble minds. They are not honest; they are only ineffectual and unsystematic in their iniquity.” “They can serve no cause,” he says in another place, “because they have no cause at heart.... They have not been guilty of great crimes, but it is only because they have not energy of mind to rise to any height of wickedness.” “They are of a tame, timid, languid, inert temper wherever the welfare of others is concerned.”

As for the railway material lost by the Whites in Siberia, the Reds told me that they captured 20,000 railway waggons between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, and over 3,000 locomotives, 600 of which were taken at Novo-Nikolaevsk alone. Nearly all these engines were derelicts that had cumbered the line for years, or machines that had “gone cold” or been damaged during the retreat, so that the Siberian line is in an extremely bad condition as regards engines. The captured trucks are useless, for the Reds have already more waggons than they can make use of. The enlightened policy of Sverdlov, the Bolshevik Minister of Railways, in employing ex-railway officials of the Omsk Government, is giving rise to much opposition on the part of the workmen, who threatened at Omsk to take from the train in which I travelled seven of these “Kolchakovsky officers,” as they called them. These officials, being at the mercy of every workman, find it hard to get any work done. One of them told me that he would much prefer to be a workman. The Executive Committee of the Communists in Moscow has come to the assistance of the “bourgeois specialists,” however, both by direct decrees and by explanatory articles in the Bolshevik Press, to the effect that, being at present indispensable to the State, they must be retained and even paid high salaries, until the workmen produce thoroughly Bolshevik engineers of equal competence to take their places. Lenin cannot see that the professional self-respect of these new experts must necessarily make them as much a class apart from the ignorant workmen, as did the professional pride of the old experts.

TRADE WITH CAPITALIST COUNTRIES

As for trade with capitalist countries, there are two schools of thought among the Bolsheviks. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and several other leaders think that, even if it be a danger, it is absolutely necessary at present, as otherwise they will never be able to overcome their transport difficulties, or to get their factories going. But they contend that it will be an even greater danger to outer Powers than to themselves, owing to the facilities it will give their propaganda in foreign countries. They admit that trade between a Government on one side and private firms on the other will be very difficult, but are convinced that all difficulties will be eventually overcome by the whole outside world becoming Bolshevik. They confess that the Soviet Government does not stand much chance of surviving unless all the other Governments in Europe become Bolshevik too. Hence their nervousness and the extreme importance they attach to foreign propaganda.

The second school of thought is represented by Bukharin, Radek, and the Cheka, which is fearful of the effect of foreign trade on the Bolshevik movement in Russia. Radek has expressed that misgiving in the Izvestia, where he declared that the Entente, having failed to conquer them by force of arms, now intends to conquer them by a much more dangerous weapon—namely, the opening up of trade relations—which will involve the flooding of Russia with agents of capitalism. This second school thinks that the Soviet system must be given time to harden, as the Shogunate system in Japan required a century to harden before it had cemented the Japanese race, and rendered totally impossible the conquest of Daï-Nippon either by Christian ideas or by Christian arms.

One Bolshevik said to me quite confidently: “The re-establishment of commercial relations between Russia and the outside world will ultimately lead to the overthrow first of the financial system, and secondly of the political system of the European States. The gold value has ceased to exist in Russia: we mean to abolish all money; and a new value, based perhaps on the price of bread, will have to be created. The change is bound to affect, sooner or later, the financial and political system of the rest of Europe. Trade cannot be carried on between a Socialist Government which has no currency, and a number of private firms in capitalistic Governments which have a currency, without new and far-reaching changes resulting in the capitalistic countries.”

THE IMPERIAL FAMILY

The birth of each of the Tsar’s daughters had, in turn, been a bitter disappointment to the parents, so that the girls grew up neglected Cinderellas, who, perhaps, for this very reason, became all the more beautiful in mind and body. The Imperial couple were morbidly anxious to have a boy. Every Saint in the Russian calendar was appealed to, while the intercession of living “Saints,” like Father John of Kronstadt, was continually implored, and God only knows how many pilgrimages were undertaken, and how many prayers and Masses were offered up in monasteries and convents, for the same end. The Empress became morbidly obsessed by the idea of bringing a man-child into the world, and there is no knowing how many night-long petitions she offered up to God in her oratory for that purpose, or how much money she bestowed on pious quacks of the Rasputin type. She even pressed science into her service, as well as religion, and the Austrian doctor Schenk was brought at great expense to Tsarskoe Selo, in order to put into practice there his theory for pre-determining the sex of infants. He failed, and the Tsarina turned again to Heaven with a fervour that seems to have permanently affected her mind. When, finally, God granted her a son, her joy was soon alloyed by the discovery that he was tainted with the hereditary disease of her family, and she addressed herself once more to religious quacks with results which finally cost her both her throne and her life. It has been pointed out to me since this book was placed in the hands of the publisher that, owing to his illness, the lad’s education was certainly neglected; and it is at all events certain that this young Prince never lived to attain his sixteenth year. On the other hand, the comparative neglect in which the girls were allowed to grow up counterbalanced the pride natural to their high position, with the result that they had, at the time of their murder, developed into unaffected, charming, and highly accomplished young women. Had the Tsaritsa not been born, or had his father, on seeing the sickly condition of his son, proclaimed the eldest daughter his successor, the nation might have rallied around this young woman, with the result perhaps that there would have been no revolution, and that Olga would have proved herself as great as Catherine without Catherine’s vices.

The Grand Duchesses were, at the time of their death, in the full glory of young womanhood, but the face of their mother bore those tragic signs of middle age which she could no longer conceal by elaborate coiffures, perfect dress, and a dazzling display of pearls calculated to withdraw the spectator’s eye from the faded face. The Empress had a passion for jewelry, which was carried so far in 1906, when I lived in Petrograd, that it was thought to indicate monomania. This helps to explain why she brought so much jewelry with her into exile.

Yurovsky’s drowning of the Tsar’s last words reminds us of how Santerre cried out with uplifted hand “Tambours!” at the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, in order to drown the voice of the condemned King.

LENIN

Lenin’s strong convictions, combined with his extreme narrowness of mind, make him a terrible antagonist. His convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost on him, and he has none of that foresight which leads to doubt. He has more than once shown that he is ready to sacrifice himself for his ideas, and that the very instinct of self-preservation is obliterated in him. This intensity of faith gives great power of suggestion to his words, and leads to his imposing himself in an astonishing manner on the Communist party. He has succeeded in arousing in their souls that formidable force known as Faith, the most tremendous of all forces at the disposal of humanity. Like all crowds, the Communist party bows to strength of will, energy, and conviction. In comparison with Lenin, Lloyd George is only a subtle rhetorician without moral earnestness or strong convictions.

Lenin is hypnotized by the philosophical ideas of Marx, and is employing his gigantic propaganda organization to spread them, exactly as Robespierre was hypnotized by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, and employed the propaganda organization of the French Republic to make them known. He believes that he has the secret of earthly happiness, and people who believe very strongly that they are in possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness inevitably display intolerance and fanaticism, accompanied by a blind submission to a political or religious formula, an inability to discuss that formula, a tendency to regard as enemies all those who refuse to accept it, and an intense itch for propaganda.

Despite his warlike panoply and his constant desire to overawe, the ex-Kaiser represented a lesser danger to the world than does Lenin with his unassuming manner, his unfashionable exterior, and the real modesty with which he regards himself as merely the foam on top of a great seismic wave, with whose formation he had nothing to do. As a matter of fact, he is perhaps the most startling figure which has appeared in the world during this century, and there is more of peril to civilization in his hard laugh than there was in all the theatrical mouthings of the Kaiser, or in all the barbaric militarism of Peter and Catherine. Even now the cloaked and belted figure of Wilhelm is gradually becoming transformed before our eyes into that of a respectable country gentleman, whose end will probably be peaceful and even edifying. But the awful fascination exercised over men’s minds by the Red Tsar, by this terrible homme qui rit of these apocalyptic times, increases daily, as he comes more and more within the dark shadow of the unknown, unavoidable cataclysm in which he will finally go down, dragging perhaps our civilization with him. Meanwhile, however, the world, having spent all its strength in overthrowing Prussianism, finds itself naked and unarmed in front of a far greater menace.

The following is a specimen of Lenin’s hard style of eloquence:

“I read in the English newspapers that all the victories of the Bolsheviks are due to their propaganda. This is very flattering, but, as a matter of fact, the people of Siberia and of South Russia have had a lengthy experience of both Red and White Propaganda, and they have apparently made up their minds that the Red Propaganda is true and the White Propaganda untrue. The Red Propaganda was not more skilful than the White Propaganda, backed up as the latter was by the unlimited paper and the inexhaustible technical resources of England, France, and America. The only advantage it had was that it was true. In the judgment of the people the actions of Kolchak and Denikin spoke louder than their propaganda, and gave that propaganda the lie. As Denikin advanced, the great landowners by whom he was surrounded took possession of their estates again, and chased away the peasants, despite all Denikin’s proclamations to the effect that he would let the peasants keep the land which they had taken.”

Another specimen:

“Formerly it was said, ‘Each for himself and God for us all,’ and how much suffering did not the application of this principle cause in the world! Our motto is: ‘Each for all, and without God we will nevertheless go forward.’ ... We used to send 700 million poods of bread out of this country every year, and this export trade enriched a small group of Russian and foreign millionaires, but left the Russian workmen and peasants starving. That system is bad on the face of it, and it will now be changed. In future the Russian workmen and peasants will first be fed, and if there is anything left over it will be exported abroad.”

As a final example of Lenin’s style I shall quote from the Social-Democrat of November 11, 1914, his statement of the position he took up during the Great War:

“The duty of the Socialist during the armed Imperialistic conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations is to preach the Class War, and to do all that in him lies to convert this struggle of the nations into universal Civil Strife. Down with the sentimental, foolish, and stupid cry of ‘Peace at any price!’ Let us raise aloft the banners of civil war!”

It almost seems at times as if, in Lenin, Antichrist had at last appeared on earth. Christ’s greatest commandment was love; Lenin’s is hate. He teaches workmen to hate their employers, peasants to hate their landlords, Jews to hate Christians, soldiers and sailors to hate officers, laymen to hate priests, citizens to hate their magistrates, apprentices to hate their masters, shoppers to hate shopkeepers, the poor to hate those who are less poor, the ignorant to hate those who are less ignorant. And there is no denying the fact that, in the present period of universal bitterness and universal disillusion, of intense hatred among subject peoples for their masters, among beaten nations for their conquerors, and, even among conquerors for each other, he has hit upon a principle of action which may lead to the undermining and collapse of our whole civilization. The distrust and suspicion with which he is inoculating Europe, at a time when Christian charity and mutual confidence are absolutely necessary, may very well be the end of Europe; and, unfortunately, he is assisted very much by the fact that it is easier to make men hate than love, criticize than approve, distrust than confide; by the discovery of obvious defects in our economic system, and, worst of all, by a continual succession of mistakes and miscalculations on the part of the statesmen who are opposed to him.

THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT

Russia is ruled by a Committee rather than by a party, and a Committee has always been the most impersonal, and, in consequence, the most oppressive form of tyranny, owing to the fact that the leaders who direct it are freed from all responsibility, and are in a position to do just as they please, because they are supposed to speak and act in the name of a collectivity. The Committees of the French Revolution carried out proscriptions such as the most savage tyrant never ventured upon, and, owing to the ignorance of the lower classes in Russia and the apathy of the upper classes, the Bolshevik Committee has been able to perpetrate atrocities such as even Robespierre would have boggled at. The Bolshevik Government is irresponsible, impersonal, and perpetual; and no more oppressive despotism could be imagined.

To look at it from a somewhat different angle, its principal weakness is that it contains too many orators and writers, and too few technical and administrative experts, and that it has to deal with a disorganization worse even than the disorganization of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The majority of the technical experts are not in sympathy with Bolshevism. Many of them are strongly opposed to it. Some are dull, old, routine, red-tape bureaucrats handed down from Tsarist days, and constituting a drag rather than an assistance, but it is impossible for the Reds to dispense with them at the present moment owing to their special knowledge and their extensive experience. Even if specialists arise from the midst of the Proletariat, as Lenin says they will, they also will be anti-Bolshevik. It is impossible for them to be otherwise. Lenin’s power really rests on the great mass of skilled and unskilled labour. The shock-battalions which overcame Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak were composed almost entirely of skilled workmen, but they are rapidly ceasing to be workmen and are becoming professional soldiers or office-holders.

It is surprising how many of the Russian revolutionaries employed by the Soviet are not Bolsheviks: in fact, it is difficult to find a thorough Bolshevik among them. They defend themselves, however, by saying that they had to support Lenin because he was the only man capable of overthrowing Kerensky, who was such a weak doctrinaire that, if he had not been upset by a Revolution from the Left, he would certainly have been unseated by a Counter-Revolution from the Right. They also maintain that the Russian Revolution could not possibly have been a direct movement from an abnormal state of things, such as existed under the Tsardom, to a normal condition with liberty for all. The previous abnormality rendered unavoidable the creation of a temporary abnormality in the opposite direction. The popular ignorance was so great, and the disorganization of life so profound, that people would simply not have worked at all had a dictatorship of the Proletariat not been established. The Social-Revolutionaries with their pathetic belief in the peasant as opposed to the workman, their weak philanthropy, and their endless talking and theorizing, joined to a total incapacity for action and a fixed delusion in favour of giving complete liberty to everybody, would have lost for Russia the fruits of the first Revolution. The Social-Revolutionaries were dreamers, who thought they could build an enduring structure on the ancient Socialism of the Russian peasant, on that Socialism which was shown in the mir. But the mir no longer exists, nor the Socialism of the peasant either. They would have built on sand. Only the Bolsheviks, that is, the workmen themselves, could ever have made a tired, hungry, and disorganized Proletariat toil for ten hours a day.

My own strongest objection to Bolshevism is that its existence in Russia strengthens reaction in every other country, and continues the abnormal situation brought about in the domestic politics of those countries by the war.

MY BOLSHEVIK TRAVELLING COMPANIONS

On the occasion of my journey to Ekaterinburg with Soviet engineers, I found that, after the train started, my companions solemnly formed themselves into what they called a Soviet, but which I would call an ordinary mess, and formally invited me to join, which, of course, I did. Communistic ideas run in this way through all the life of the good Bolshevik, but the result is rather amusing than otherwise. I have often heard a Red say, out of habit, to a comrade, “This is mine”; and the reply, given in the voice of a fanatic stating a religious dogma, was always the same: “It is not yours. It is ours. There is no longer private property.” As a matter of fact, there was private property; each Bolshevik had at least his own clothes, while many of them had much more property which was absolutely his own.

I found some of my companions on this journey wearing honest Bradford cloth, and eating with trusty Sheffield steel which, being smiths themselves and having had lamentable experience of Japanese knives, they thoroughly appreciated. Among the Russian workmen the manufactured products of Great Britain have done more, in my opinion, to sustain a belief in England’s greatness than all the victories of Nelson and all the glory of our Old Nobility. The Bolsheviks say that the workmen who make such excellent wares will one day rule England and be their brothers.

As I have just alluded to dress, I might here remark that, if Bolshevism continues much longer, there is a serious likelihood of the Russians reverting to the ancient Scythian costume of skins. I have seen very many peasants wearing trousers made out of ordinary sacking with the name of some guano firm on the seat.

We had, by the way, as a servant in our train a most respectable-looking individual with mutton-chop whiskers, whom at first, despite my constant practice to think evil of nobody, I was inclined to put down as having been an habitual lawyer. On being jokingly addressed once as “old bourgeois,” this respectable-looking personage fairly exploded with wrath. “Even in jest,” he spluttered, “you should not apply that term to any human being.”

But, on the other hand, as I afterwards discovered in Moscow, the term “Tavarisch” (Comrade) has become a term of contempt among the technical and political experts employed by the Reds. To them it means an unkempt, unshaven person enveloped in a dirty sheepskin coat and without the slightest knowledge or experience to fit him for the post into which he has been pitchforked.

THE RED LABOUR ARMY

All the news in the Tocsin, the organ of the Red Labour Army, was set out just as war news used to be set out in the English newspapers during the Great War. Under the general heading of “News from the Front,” there was a collection of dispatches from the different Labour “Fronts,” and one of the early issues of the Tocsin bore, as a “screaming” headline, the words, “Our First Victory.” Beneath it was a triumphant account of the repair by the Red Labour Army of a bridge over the Kama at Perm, which the retreating Whites had blown up. The Red journalists go on the principle that “peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war,” and accordingly celebrate the battles of peace with headlines as large as those which announced in English newspapers the Battle of the Marne.

I might here add that in those newspapers they have even got a “Roll of Honour,” containing the names of workmen who died in mines, factories, and hospitals. For example, an account of a Red soldier who died while carrying out anti-typhus measures was headed: “The First Victim in the Great War. Soldier Dies while Fighting the Worst Enemy of the Republic.”

The Bolsheviks are trying to arouse as much enthusiasm among boys over industrial triumphs as the militarists used to arouse among boys over military triumphs. Pictures of charging cavalry are replaced in boys’ magazines by pictures of miners saving entombed comrades. Instead of soldiers charging trenches, happy workmen charge into their own factories, eager to resume work. Blazing camp-fires on the battlefield are replaced by the red glow of colossal blast-furnaces. A youth hammering at an agricultural instrument on an anvil replaces the youth in military dress who hammers in an opponent’s head with the butt-end of his rifle. There is a glorification in boys’ papers, not of piracy, but of farming; not of mechanism for destroying life, but of mechanism for preserving it and adding to its comfort.

WORKMEN IN FACTORIES

Trotsky has admitted that 30 per cent. of the skilled workmen in industrial areas have fled to the villages, where most of them opened little one-man repairing shops. Mr. Keeley, an American engineer, who was allowed to make very careful investigations, discovered the exact percentage to be 60. In one Moscow factory which he visited, Mr. Keeley found the names of 1,600 workmen inscribed in the books, but over 400 of these were permanently engaged on “political work” and never turned up at the factory, though they were paid by it. The work of the remainder was 60 per cent. below the pre-war work of the same number of men, but I am told that the same decrease of output is noticeable in Western factories.

THE MILITARY POSITION IN SIBERIA

The only foreign mercenaries I saw in the Red Army were (1) an International Battalion in process of formation at Ekaterinburg. It was composed of ex-prisoners of war—Magyars, Letts, and Germans—and the British soldiers were invited to join it, but did not do so; (2) a battalion of Chinese soldiers quartered in an extemporized barrack near the Municipal Theatre in Ekaterinburg. They were all coolies who had been brought into Russia by the Imperial Government to constitute a Labour Battalion during the Great War, and who, after the war, were prevented by the Allies from returning to China. They are armed, equipped, and drilled in the Russian fashion, and have fought on various fronts, but when I saw them they were not doing military work, being only employed in shovelling snow from the railway track. It would be unjust to say that they are especially ferocious, or that they are the mainstay of the Soviet Government.

At Novo-Nikolaevsk, on my return journey with the Reds, I found the German ex-Rittmeister, von Blücher, acting as commander of the 30th Division, which was stationed at Novo-Nikolaevsk, and as military commandant of the town. It was lucky for us that he was not in command of the force which captured us, for he is anti-English, and, being a Prussian, holds strict views about the treatment of war prisoners. He is a capable officer, however, and his relegation to the rear is probably due to Communist distrust of military talent even among themselves.

The 3rd Army is at Ekaterinburg, and is now the 1st Labour Army. All the houses on Lenin Street, the principal street, from the Café “Orange” to the house opposite the town theatre, are occupied by the barracks and offices of a semi-military, semi-police force, which is now to be met with in all the large towns of Russia, and which is known as “the Force for the Internal Defence of the Republic.” The soldiers of this battalion fall in every morning, punctually at 9 a.m., in the street outside their quarters. They are inspected, and, after inspection, they divide into half a dozen different groups, and march off in good order to different parts of the town. They are well armed with Russian rifles, have plenty of ammunition, and are well dressed. This battalion remains under arms, and is not to be incorporated in the Labour Army. All the other troops in town are comfortably housed in barracks, well fed, well equipped, and well armed. The same remark applies to the troops in Omsk and Novo-Nikolaevsk. There were no troops in Taiga when I went through, all of them having moved east. The G.H.Q. 5th Army was at Tomsk, but preparations were being made for its reception in Krasnoyarsk on January 28, the day I left that town. Those entrusted with making these preparations said that the whole 5th Army was coming to Krasnoyarsk, and that they would remain four days there and then move east. An artillery brigade, several squadrons of cavalry, and a detachment of military engineers were also expected in Krasnoyarsk. At Omsk and Novo-Nikolaevsk I saw four or five military trains conveying Red troops eastwards. The Reds are certainly sending large forces into Eastern Siberia, and they are just as certainly sending on in advance Commissars provided with false passports, who say that they will easily undermine and overthrow the S.R. republics in Eastern Siberia. I met one of those envoys at the house of a Bolshevik functionary in Krasnoyarsk. He was leaving for Vladivostock the same day.

Besides the “Force for the Internal Defence of the Republic,” each town has a large police force, but it is called a “National Militia.” These forces, taken together, should be strong enough to maintain internal order.

The map, which was shown me to illustrate Trotsky’s grandiose scheme for converting an army of soldiers into an army of labourers, gave the location of all the Red troops in the Urals. They stretch, roughly speaking, from Ekaterinburg to Chelyabinsk, and include a detachment of about 5,000 Red cavalry whose horses were being used, on February 1, to carry wood to the railway line and to cart away snow. The horsemen themselves were employed in similar work. Several military engineering units were stationed at Zlatoust and another industrial town in the Urals, and were helping to repair the railway and the factories, but Trotsky refused to let them be broken up, though only in that way could their technical experience be fully utilized. A Bolshevik official pointed out to me some soldiers belonging to a unit which had come from Orenburg, and drew my attention to the fact that they were being kept together so as to be prepared in case of any aggression from the direction of India or Persia.

In the Krasnoyarsk, Minusinsk, Irkutsk, and Trans-Baikal regions, the Reds are encouraging the formation of partisan bands, strictly subordinate to them. S. Mamantov, the leader of the Minusinsk partisans, says that he is at the head of 10,000 men, armed entirely with rifles taken from trains which he held up. Those rifles were, he thinks, being sent by the English, French, and Japanese, to Kolchak at Omsk. There is now a plentiful supply of arms and ammunition in Siberia, not only for the regular Red Army, but also for all the partisan bands which the Soviet Government may raise. On the other hand, these arms may be ultimately turned against the Reds, for Bolshevism has swallowed in Siberia more White troops than it can ever digest, and in some towns I could hardly tell whether I was amongst Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik soldiers. Besides, the Red Army organization leaks very much. All the way from Omsk to Ekaterinburg Red stragglers tried to board trains, and were repulsed from them with far more brusqueness than was ever shown to the White stragglers boarding Kolchak’s trains. Their condition in the bitterly cold weather was pitiable. They had no food, were not allowed to sleep in the stations or in the towns, and proposed to travel on foot to destinations as distant as the Volga and beyond. On expressing my surprise once to a Commissar at the roughness with which he treated soldiers and workmen, I was told that only the representative of a Workers’ Government could act in that manner towards lazy members of the Proletariat. “In England,” quoth this Commissar, “your capitalist Government is afraid of the workmen, and consequently it is always flattering them, throwing them sops, and making them promises which it can never fulfil. By this means it is trying to postpone the evil day when the workers will seize everything, but here the workers have seized everything, and we, as their representatives, have a perfect right to speak in a tone of authority to railwaymen, factory-hands, and soldiers, who are not doing their duty to the State.”