At this point the chronological arrangement of my book,
already weak, breaks down altogether. So far I have set
down, almost day by day, things seen and heard which
seemed to me characteristic and clear illustration of the
mentality of the Communists, of the work that has been
done or that they are trying to do, and of the general state of
affairs. I spent the whole of my time in ceaseless
investigation, talking now with this man, now with that,
until at the end of a month I was so tired (besides being
permanently hungry) that I began to fear rather than to seek
new experiences and impressions. The last two weeks of
my stay were spent, not in visiting Commissariats, but in
collecting masses of printed material, in talking with my
friends of the opposition parties, and, while it was in
progress, visiting daily the Conference in the Kremlin
which, in the end, definitely announced itself as the
Third International. I have considered it best to treat of that
Conference more or less as a whole, and am therefore
compelled to disregard chronology altogether in putting
down on paper, the results of some of my talks with the
opposition. Some of these took place on the same days as
my visits to the Kremlin conference, and during those days
I was also partly engaged in getting to see the British
prisoners in the Butyrka prison, in which I eventually
succeeded. This is my excuse for the inadequacy of my
account of the conference, an inadequacy which I regret the
more as I was the only non-Communist who was able to
be there at all.