CHAPTER XXIV

ABOARD THE GOOD SHIP “DONGOLA”

The experiences of past history make us doubtful of any theory of

government ever coming in practice to produce the results which the

Constitution-framers had in mind, or of any governmental action ever

having the effect which statesmen expected it to have; for the values

with which rulers deal fluctuate continually, and missing factors have

an awkward habit of turning up unexpectedly and spoiling all the neat

equations of Cabinets and Kings. Past history (to vary the metaphor), is

largely a record of intense activity on the part of rulers in erecting

walls which tumble down on top of them, and digging pits into which

they fall themselves. James the First planted Ulster with sturdy Scots

who, instead of proving a support to his dynasty, as he had probably

expected, helped to drive James the Second from his throne. We supported

our settlers in the New World so as to counterbalance French influence in

Canada, with the result that our North American Colonies threw us over,

while the French Canadians remained faithful to us. And as past history

is strewn with falsified predictions, so future history may likewise be

paved with the miscalculations of statesmen, and the present activities

of European Governments may be found, in fifty years’ time, to have been

entirely futile, misdirected, and suicidal. To-day Mr. Lloyd George, for

example, is apparently concentrating his immense industry on the task

of converting the essentially conservative peasantry of Ireland into

Bolsheviks, and Comrade Lenin is equally busy laying the foundations of

a great capitalist state in Communistic Russia. I quoted in a previous

chapter a strange admission of Lenin to the effect that he did not quite

know towards what harbour he was drifting, and at the present moment he

is certainly tossing about in uncharted seas which, when he weighed

anchor, were the very last places in the political world where he ever

expected to find himself. He set out to kill militarism, with the result

that he is now almost the only militarist in Europe. He has one of the

largest and most enthusiastic armies in the world; schools for officers

have been established in every town, and boys from sixteen to twenty

years are taught military exercises. What is more important, the Russian

people have become, for the first time in their history, bellicose and

jingoistic. They write martial poetry which even Kipling could not

improve upon, and of which they never before had any specimens in their

popular literature. One poem to the “Red Star of Bolshevism” comes from

a section of the workmen to which Lermontov’s “Borodino” never made an

appeal; and their innumerable rude dramas in praise of militarism are

quite a novelty on the Russian stage, where patriotic operas like “A

Life for the Tsar” were never popular save on artistic grounds. Their

coarse, popular pictures depicting the triumph of Bolshevism in arms

arouse enthusiasm amongst a class which Vereshchagin’s heroic Napoleonic

canvasses left absolutely cold.

Lenin set out to kill individualism in Russia, as well as militarism, but

all he has killed has been the vague Socialistic spirit which tinged the

thoughts of most Russians, even those of the middle and upper classes. A

harsh, greedy individualism has now mastered most of the Russian people.

The old philanthropic landowner has gone, but has been replaced by a

hard-fisted _muzhik_ class resembling the most unlovely type of French

peasant, and the patriarchal old bureaucrat has been replaced by a

violent and ill-mannered Commissar, with all the worst qualities of his

predecessor and none of the good.

The Bolsheviks declared that they would extirpate all capitalists, but,

judging by innumerable indications to which I have already made allusion,

they will, if they last, find themselves largely in the hands of foreign

capitalists, of whom the Tsar’s Government was always very distrustful.

In March last, an able Lettish forestry expert in Ekaterinburg approached

the Soviet forestry department for a post, but was told that most of the

forests would be given over for exploitation to foreigners. “They know

these things better than we do,” quoth the Forestry Commissar. Moscow I

found full of secret or acknowledged representatives of great American,

British, and Continental firms, some of whom, I know, got very large

concessions. There is now in Copenhagen a great clearing-house scheme

for doing trade with Russia, and in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France,

and Italy, the “big business” men are equally active. Krassin could,

if he would, make some strange disclosures of the anxiety of British

firms to “do a deal” with him, and of the way Russified Englishmen and

“big business” generally have grovelled before him, as I once knew an

obsequious English concessionaire literally to crawl on his belly before

a former King of Siam, in accordance with the degrading Court etiquette

then prevalent; and the ultimate result will be that the anti-capitalist

movement in Russia will end by leaving Russia as much at the mercy of

foreign capitalists as China. Whatever may be said of the old Russian

bureaucracy, it must be admitted that they never allowed anybody to

plunder Russia but themselves. There will now be wholesale plunder by

Bolsheviks ready to sell the real gains of the first Revolution, and by

capitalists ready to sell their country, their civilization, and their

souls.

The Socialistic régime was expected to stop corruption in Russia, but it

is a well-known fact that corruption was never so rampant there as it

is now. The Food Control at Moscow is a scandal of the first magnitude,

50 per cent. of the food which is handed over to it being sold through

speculators and profiteers. An employee of the English Cold Storage

Company in Moscow told me that he himself transferred to the Food

Control enormous numbers of chickens and sausages, and large quantities

of butter, which were never issued to the public on cards, but which he

himself saw in the hands of speculators, who offered them for sale at

more than extravagant prices. The attempt to extirpate the profiteer has

only resulted, therefore, in the enhancement of the profiteer’s earnings

by 5,000 per cent., and even the shooting of dishonest Commissars does

not reduce the evil.

Every Commissar’s train which visits the provinces returns to Moscow

with loads of food on which much money is made. There is a soldier at

every railway station to prevent this, but the Commissar invariably

gives a paper to his subordinates entitling them to bring home as much

foodstuff as they like. When Bolshevik Missions return from abroad, they

will have similar cargoes; hence there is a keen desire on the part of

Red officials to go abroad in some official capacity. This also leads to

instances of favouritism and corruption, such as no other Government in

the world could parallel. Theoretically the most competent man is chosen,

but in practice it is a matter of intrigue, family influence, and money

to a much greater extent than in the worst days of Imperialism. The

selection of bureaucrats for important posts is accompanied by an amount

of “wire-pulling” which would shock even the city of Washington. The

relatives of Commissars get appointments which they would never obtain

under the laxest Parliamentary system of government, and the children of

Trotsky and of the other Commissars will be sure of high positions in the

Bolshevik Oligarchy.

I am sometimes tempted to think that the outcome of it all will be the

establishment of a powerful Russian bureaucracy allied to a powerful

German bureaucracy, and the conversion of anti-capitalist Russia into a

sort of Petropavlovsk Fortress-prison, with capitalists and bureaucrats

in the fortress, and an enslaved Labour class in the prison. Why, indeed,

should not the handful of desperate adventurers, who have conquered

Russia by their ideas, evolve, with the support of international capital,

into a ruling caste, even as the disreputable freebooters who conquered

England in 1066 by their swords evolved into perfectly respectable

people? But the conclusion at which I have invariably arrived, when

engaged in such surmises, is that the ideas of the Bolsheviks will not

keep their edge so long as did the swords of the Normans, and that

the feudal system, with its roots stretching down to the humblest of

the people, contained far greater promise of stability than does the

Bolshevik theory which has no hold on the peasants and no hold on most

of the workmen. There are, as I have already pointed out, 125,000,000

people in Russia, and, according to Trotsky, the Bolsheviks number

only 604,000, of whom not more than 70,000 are workmen. All the rest

are bureaucrats, and, from personal investigations which I conducted

in Moscow, I discovered that at least half of these 70,000 workmen are

engaged on what they call “political work,” though they are paid by the

factories, are inscribed on the books of the factories, and are supposed

to be working in the factories. The Bolsheviks are losing touch with the

manual workers at a very rapid rate indeed, and, in a short time, every

member of the party will be a bureaucrat. Obsessed by their impracticable

theories, they will be carried further and further from the realities of

life and of human nature, until finally they are tripped up by something

very simple and very small, as the Tsar, who had survived the Japanese

War and the revolution of 1905, was ignobly tripped up at length by

a drunken pilgrim and a shortage of bread. Wars have been caused by

diphthongs, and the heirs of the Byzantines may be overthrown by their

own misinterpretation of the one word “worker.” To that word their

leaders, who certainly know better, have consistently and dishonestly

given the meaning “manual worker,” so that when, in 1905, Count Witte

claimed, and with very good reason, to be also a worker, the deputation

of Workmen’s Deputies, which by the way included Trotsky, laughed him

to scorn. Yet now there are in Moscow alone 230,000 Bolshevik officials

who do not work with their hands, against 100,000 manual workers, of

whom considerably less than half are members of the Communist party. A

Menshevik recently asked in the _Pravda_ why so few skilled workmen are

Bolshevik, and the editor replied that he needed time before he could

answer that difficult question. “If any will not work, neither let

him eat”: out of their own mouths shall the Bolsheviks be confounded.

They misapplied that text in order to ruin others, and now it will be

misapplied by others in order to ruin them.

History has frequently furnished the spectacle of rough barbarians

descending from the hills to conquer a great pacific people, and to found

a ruling caste which in course of time becomes corrupted by luxury and

is swept away. The empire-smashing barbarians of the future will come

from the mines and workshops of nations which brutalize the lower classes

and lose at the same time their own ancient virtue; but in these rapid

days the degeneration of the conquerors will be swift, and in Russia it

shows every sign of being already complete.

A probable outcome of the present Russian experiment will be a military

reaction involving the extermination of half a million Reds, and

perhaps another half-million of more or less inoffensive Jews, and the

persecution by the Whites, for twenty years, of those Socialists and

Liberals whom Lenin hated, and who will probably have done most towards

bringing about Lenin’s fall. Then the pendulum will swing from right to

left and from left to right, until finally it settles at a federated

_bourgeois_ republic.

Of my own personal adventures there is little more to be said save that,

curiously enough, they ended on a cheerful and even comic note.

After my release by the Bolshevik Inquisition I applied for permission

to leave Russia with the British refugees who were due to leave under

the Litvinov-O’Grady agreement for the exchange of prisoners, and this

permission was granted. I could have remained as a correspondent on

very favourable terms if I had consented to write for the Bolsheviks;

I could have visited Petrograd, the South, and the Polish Front, and

accumulated a mass of material about Red Russia, but there was danger

in carrying out that programme. The fact that I was an officer might

leak out at Krasnoyarsk or at Moscow, might be disclosed by treacherous

interpreters who had been attached to us, by military documents which

had been captured, or simply by reference to the British Army List. Even

if it did not leak out, the Bolsheviks, who were anxious that I should

stay, and willing to make it worth my while to stay, would certainly try

to cut off my retreat and place me entirely at their mercy by publishing

something which I had not said, or garbling something which I had said,

with the result that, owing to my inability to contradict this, and to

the British Government’s intense suspicion of everything Bolshevik, I

might be refused admittance into England. Those who are inclined to doubt

all this do not know the Bolsheviks, and do not know the morbid tension

which Bolshevism has produced outside Russia, and of which I had a most

unpleasant personal experience as soon as I crossed the Finnish frontier.

I always told the Reds that it was absolutely necessary for me to go

home, since (as I put it) everything I wrote from Russia would be

regarded in England as having been written under duress. At the same

time, I always made it clear to them that I was no Socialist, that I did

not believe their experiment would succeed, and that when I returned to

England I would put down everything without fear or favour, what told

against them as well as what told for them.

Their answer to this was characteristic. They said in effect: “Russia is

the only country in the world where you can write with perfect freedom.

Here you can denounce King George, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and

all the Generals, Cabinet Ministers, clergymen, and capitalists that you

can think of. There is no limit to the violence of the language you can

use against them, and no matter what mismanagement, fraud, and debauchery

you accuse them of, you need fear no action for libel here. What greater

freedom do you want? You could never do that in England. You could never

publish in England anything that tells in favour of Bolshevism, no matter

how true it be, and no matter what denunciations of Bolshevism you

publish along with it.”

My answer to that is the foregoing narrative, in which absolutely

everything is published, and in the composition of which no suggestion

has been made to me to omit or alter a single word. That is what _I_ call

freedom.

The last days spent in Moscow by the British party were enlivened by the

efforts of certain young Russian ladies to get married to the fugitives,

so that they themselves could leave as British subjects, for it is as

difficult for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for a

Russian “citizen” to leave Russia. Most of the British officer-prisoners,

married and unmarried, could have brought out with them charming Russian

brides of good family, and in some cases with ample fortunes awaiting

them outside in Paris or London banks; and I do not think that, since

the Rape of the Sabines, soldiers have ever had such an embarrassing

abundance of youth and beauty to choose from. The officers resisted

heroically, though perhaps some of them, demobilized and out of work,

now regret that _gran rifiuto_; but, alas! some of the civilians fell.

It was not a serious matter, however, for the unions were contracted in

accordance with the Soviet marriage-law (which is anything but serious,

and has no legal validity outside Russia), and were only nominal unless

the parties wished to supplement them by a regular marriage on the other

side of the frontier. Some amusing situations arose in consequence of

these marriages. One aristocratic lady who had “married” an English youth

of half her age dropped him and the name he had given her as soon as

she got aboard the boat for England; another English bridegroom had, on

the contrary, considerable difficulty in getting disentangled from his

Muscovite “bride.” But no English wife need be in the least uneasy. The

whole masquerade was as innocent and delightful as a dance, and, in the

gay jingling of marriage bells mixed with the silvery laughter of Russian

girls, I read a prophecy of a day when the masculine energy of the Briton

will combine on equal terms with the delicate feminine genius of the Slav

to reorganize a shattered world and to save our Christian civilization.

Up to this time an ice-bound sea, void of life, had stretched away like a

Siberian steppe to the horizon, but now the mighty waters had burst their

chains, and the humble craft of the fisherman went freely to and fro on

the rippling surface. I thanked God for the passing away of that dreadful

winter which I had often thought would be my last, and I prayed that the

great Russian people might soon be freed in like manner from the frozen,

life-destroying immobility of Communism.

For five long months the only news I had had from home were the tidings

of discontent, disorder, mutiny, and revolution published in the

Bolshevik newspapers, but all these shapes of horror faded away when

I went aboard the British naval transport which lay awaiting us in

Helsingfors Bay with a British destroyer alongside. An armed bluejacket

saluted briskly at the gangway, and the interior of the great ship

presented the same impressive picture of ordered freedom as the _Kent_

had presented at Vladivostock seven thousand miles away. The bugles were

as merry and confident as ever; the “Aye, aye, sir!” of the sailors as

ready and cheerful as of yore. Amid these reassuring sights and sounds I

close this narrative of captivity.

[Illustration: TWO SNOW SCENES ON THE FINNISH FRONTIER. _To face p. 310._]

APPENDIX

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.”

THE EDUCATION OF THE PROLETARIAT

In the chapter entitled “Trotsky in Ekaterinburg,” I speak of “butchers’

boys who had qualified for professorships.”

A typical paragraph of this kind, which was headed “A Peasant’s Son,”

tells how Ivan Polukarov, the son of a Siberian peasant, entered the Red

Academy of the General Staff two years ago when he was twenty-three, and

became, at the end of that time, an able Staff officer. The papers are

full of news about the opening of new schools for workmen by the Soviet

Government and the Professional Unions. There are long descriptions of a

school for artists opened recently at Nizhni-Novgorod—free courses in

studio work, drawing, painting, and sculpture; school for agricultural

experts opened at Tambov—220 students; handicraft schools in Spassky

(Ryzansky Government) for bookbinders, coopers, and basket-makers. It is

announced that all the Russian factories are working overtime, and that

the workmen are giving the money thus earned to the Red Army, which also

receives from the Government the articles thus manufactured. I know,

however, that the number of Russian factories which are doing any work at

all is very negligible. There is certainly a great intellectual ferment,

but not much solid work is done owing, as the Reds themselves confessed

to me, to the following reasons: (1) There are too many Government

departments, and they only get in one another’s way; (2) the departmental

machinery is excessively complicated; (3) the departmental chiefs waste

their time in letting crowds of people see them, and have consequently

no time to do any real work; (4) heads of departments draw up ambitious

programmes which are “scrapped” on account of those heads being very

frequently changed; (5) a great waste of energy in all directions and a

great overlapping of work. Almost everything of technical or scientific

value which the Bolsheviks have done is based on plans, specifications,

and preparatory work which were carried out under the Old Régime. All the

technical reports which I saw the Bolshevik chiefs working on had been

compiled in the time of the Tsar.

My eye was once caught by the following headline in a Bolshevik

newspaper: “Illiteracy Must No Longer Exist.” The article of which it was

the caption told of how the Soviet of Krasnokokshaisky Uyezd, Kazunsky

Government, had decided “to abolish illiteracy in the case of all persons

of both sexes between the ages of seventeen and fifty.” As there were not

enough teachers to carry out this laudable decree, literate peasants were

made to teach the illiterates. This “revolt against illiteracy,” as the

Bolsheviks call it, is common all over Russia, and it is considered such

a disgrace for a soldier in the Red Army to be unable to read and write

that comrades able to do so teach him.

A Commissar once described to me the career of Budyonin, the Red cavalry

leader who was once an officer’s batman and is now one of the Soviet’s

most successful Generals. “There is always,” he added, “at least as much

talent in the masses as in an equal number of the classes; and, owing to

their great numerical superiority, the whole bulk of the masses have far

more talent latent in them than all the _bourgeoisie_ and aristocracy

put together. We are basing our whole system of government on that

principle, and the facts of life are on our side. Take England. A son

of the governing classes there gets an expensive education at Oxford,

and may, when he leaves Oxford, enter public life and rise easily, if

he has even moderate talent, to the top of the tree. A poor man, though

he may have far greater talent, has nothing like the same chance.

Ill-educated and handicapped, he struggles till he is forty at making

himself financially independent; and at forty his spirit is broken and

he cannot do much. There are exceptions, of course, but only a fool will

say that in England the son of a poor man has, as a rule, an equal chance

with a scion of your ‘great governing families.’ Every revolution proves

that what you call ‘the lower classes’ is an inexhaustible reservoir of

talent, and that the oligarchs are generally dull, pompous, and selfish

old men whose master passion in life is to keep the monopoly of power as

much as possible in their own families. The present decay of governmental

authority in capitalist countries is partly due to the fact that, under

the extreme stress of the war, the various imperialistic Governments were

compelled to let outsiders have access to their political and military

secrets, and to see the various Grand Lamas hidden away in the recesses

of their Courts, Cabinets, and War Offices, with the result that a large

number of honest men are disgusted by the fools they met with in high

places and by the idiocy of the policies which those fools pursued. The

High Priests of the Temple of Capitalism are now trying to replace the

veil that hid the faces of those oracles from the profane gaze of the

vulgar, but it is too late. The spell is broken; the sordid secrets are

revealed; and the end of it all will most certainly be—Bolshevism.

“Compare the disgusting flabbiness of the Romanovs and of the ‘gentry,’

officer, and _bourgeois_ classes in this country with the alertness and

resolution of the Russian workmen.

“You English think that a cavalry leader like Haig can only arise in

an aristocratic family. The Russian Imperialists thought so too, and

therefore they selected Mamontov to lead Denikin’s cavalry. We opposed to

him Budyonin, an officer’s batman, who soon swept Mamontov off the face

of the earth. You say that Budyonin is no longer one of the people, that

he must necessarily develop like Murat, Hector MacDonald, Sir William

Robertson, and other talented plebeians, and join a higher class. But

he will do nothing of the kind, for he is a strong Bolshevik, and will

always be one of the Proletariat. This is the difference between our

revolution and all the revolutions that have gone before. Our statesmen

and soldiers will always remain with the people, not only because of

their own strong Communist principles, but also because, once they ceased

to belong to the people, they would be destroyed either by the people or

by the old gang, which having, like all _emigrés_, learnt nothing and

forgotten nothing, would come back wanting their old places.”

The utterer of the above tirade was M. Dovgolevsky, a Socialist who has

passed most of his life in Western Europe, and who is now trying to

reorganize the Russian railways. The weak point in his argument is this:

The ruling class in the West may be as weak and foolish as he makes them

out to be, but the same number of workmen would prove to be infinitely

more corrupt. They have already proved so in Russia. A ruling class must

be raised above temptation of corruption by some kind of pride—pride of

caste, pride of birth, or pride of intellect; but rule by a Proletariat

or by those “Money-bags of Mammon,” whom Carlyle so roundly denounced,

and to which, unfortunately, we are all tending, is bound to be a corrupt

and despicable kind of rule. Both the English and the German bureaucrat

were comparatively honest, because they had one or other of the above

kinds of pride, though in many cases they were worse off financially than

if they had been in business. For the same reason the British officer

at the head of a patrol generally showed more self-sacrifice than a

non-commissioned officer would have done. Our British Army probably

contains some of the stupidest officers and the smartest N.C.O.’s in the

world, yet if the former were all displaced suddenly by the latter, as in

Russia, who that knows the army can doubt that the private would suffer

by the change?

INDEX

Achinsk, 4

Advertising, science of, 97

Afghanistan, Amir of, envoys from Lenin, 223

Agafonov, Gregory, 137

Alapaievsk, 83

Alexandra, Tsarina of Russia:

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166;

mode of concealing her jewels, 158, 167;

life at Tobolsk, 183;

attends Mass, 184;

birth of a son, 328;

appearance, 329;

passion for jewelry, 329

Alexis, Tsarevich of Russia:

at Ekaterinburg, 127;

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166;

lameness, 173;

education, 178, 180

Alexis, Tsarevich of Russia, prophecy of, 136

Alferov, Michael, 155

Anarchists, doctrine, 202

Anastasia, Grand Duchess:

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166

Anthony, Bishop, 264

Balabanova, 205

Barrakatula, Professor, at Moscow, 222

_Bednota_, the, 293

Birkmanns, John, 203, 205

Bleezdale, Mr., 275

Blücher, General von, in command at Novo-Nikolaevsk, 84, 335

Bogdanov, 326

Bogotol, 21

Boivoud, Victor, 140

Bokhara, revolution, 223

Bolotnaya, 12

Bolsheviks, the, policy, xi, 42-46, 77, 106, 113, 292;

atrocities, 37;

characteristics, 47, 49, 54, 62, 244;

use of the colour red, 64;

elections, 119;

wish to evangelize English workmen, 203;

International propaganda, 204, 206;

revolutionary views, 210-219, 286;

literature, 212-215;

theatres, 217;

“atmosphere,” 232;

news agency, 252-261;

creed, 289;

seductive appeal of their theory, 294;

emblems, 294;

position, 298;

number, 306;

journalism, 313;

list of instructions, 316;

modernism, 318-320;

system of education, 319

Bolshevism, vii, ix, 24, 339;

system of government, 53, 332;

Socialist journalists, 90;

resemblance to Puritanism, 108;

the Red Star of, 112;

war-cry, 114;

result of, 320, 333

“Boris Gudenov,” 194

Botkin, Dr., 127, 132, 181;

murdered, 136;

cremated, 154-166

British, the, characteristic of frankness, 280

British Army, 324, 340

British Military Mission:

at Omsk, 1;

flight from, 1-22;

captured at Krasnoyarsk, 22

British Railway Mission at Omsk, 1

British Red Cross supplies, 68

Buchan, John, 199

Budyonin, career, 338, 339

Bugatch, 21

Burke, Edmund, on the French Terrorists, 248, 326

“Butter General,” 6

Butter, price of, 123

“Byloe,” 30

Carlyle, Thomas, 286, 340

Carroll, Lewis, “Jabberwock,” 104

Cheliabinsk, 201, 336

Chesterton, G. K., 90, 91, 199

Chicherin, 63;

assistants, 199;

inspects telegrams by radio, 247;

mode of living, 247;

characteristics, 248;

office, 249;

nationality, 268

Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 98

Clarke, Colonel, 95

Clynes, J. R., 151

Communism:

principles, 24, 53, 88, 274;

patriarchal, 62;

result of the system, 120-123, 317;

modernism, 318-320

Communist Youth, League of, 117, 152

Communists, craving for propaganda, 204;

number, 299

Constantinople, 222

Corpses, treatment of, 15, 33, 35

Cromwell, Oliver, 108

Czechs, the:

conquest of Siberia, xi;

advance on Ekaterinburg, 168;

messenger service, 201

_Daily Herald_, the, 78, 91, 296

D——, Mr. Justice, 44

Demedova, 127, 132;

murdered, 137;

cremated, 154-166

Denikin, General, defeat, x, 88

Derevenko:

murdered, 158, 177;

charges against, 181

Derzhinsky, M., head of the extraordinary commission, 48, 268

Dickinson, Mr., 90

Dolgoruki, Prince, 183;

murdered, 171

_Dongola_, the, 310

Dostoievsky, extract from, 290

Dovgolevsky:

electrical engineer, 76;

study of social questions, 77;

on the Russian workmen, 339

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 199

Dryagina, Vassa, 168

Dutov, General, 326

Ekaterinburg, 74, 88, 92, 108;

measures against typhus, 95-97;

Propaganda Hall, 109-113, 312;

names of streets, 115;

number of Government offices, 115;

of professional unions, 116;

museum, 118;

meeting of the Provincial Soviet, 119;

libraries, 120;

eating-houses, 120;

working of the Communist theory, 120-123;

Government Provisioning Department, 122;

Ippatievsky Dom, 124-129;

number of newspapers, 257;

conditions in, 323

Eliot, Sir Charles, 85

Engineers, insufficient pay and position, 81

_En Route_, the, 93, 100

Ermakov, Peter, 165

Esthonia, peace with, 292

Extraordinary Commission, institution, 300

Falk, electrical engineer, 269

Feinberg, Commissar, 296

Feinberger, Press censor, 242, 246

Finland, 298;

International propaganda, 293

Florinsky, Mr., 216

Francis, Mr., American Ambassador, 241

Freemasonry, in Russia, 268

French Canadians, 302

French Press:

corruption, 259;

Revolution, result of the, 295

Gendrikova, Countess, murdered, 171

George, Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd, 102;

saying of, 300;

policy in Ireland, 302

German envoys, in Russia, 226, 231;

prisoners of war, in Moscow, 230

Gialliard, Peter, 157, 180

Gibbs, Mr., tutor to the Tsarevich, 176

Goldmann, Emma, 203, 205

Goldstein, Colonel, 285

Gold train, 6, 311

Goloshokin:

Commissar at Ekaterinburg, 129, 131, 144;

announces the murder of the Tsar, 130;

at the burial of the Imperial Family, 140, 154, 159-166;

death, 148

Gorbunov, 139, 164

Graves, General, 85

Great Britain, result of a Soviet Government, 197

Gulyaev, the Commissar, 169

Hahn, Lieutenant, 326

Hand-shaking, fine on, 62, 92

Horrocks, Captain, 46, 49, 57, 69

Horses:

number of ownerless, 65-67;

death, 66

Husie, Mr., 221

India, British rule in, 222

Internationalism or anti-nationalism, 288, 291, 292

Ippatiev, Mr., 124

Ippatievsky Dom, 124-129, 161;

plan of, 129

Ireland, condition of, 112

Irkutsk, 71

Irtysh River, 1

Isetsky factory, 159;

plan of, 161;

mine, 154, 155, 160

Ivan, the train conductor, 24

Ivanov, Feodor, 169

Ivanov:

at Ekaterinburg, 117;

revolutionary views, 118;

presides at a meeting of the Provincial Soviet, 119

Ivantsev, Colonel, 19

Izhevsky Division, number of deaths from typhus, 32, 321

_Izvestia_, the, 328

_Izvoshchik_, or driver, 14, 48, 195

James I., King, 302

James, Private, 13

Janin, General, 85

Japan, 298

Jews, number of, in the Soviet Government, 267

Johnston, Colonel, 84

Journalists, foreign, in Russia, 233-240, 243

Kalmykov, 36

Kapp, abortive revolution in Berlin, 251

Karlin, Dr., 205

Keeley, Mr., 228, 335

Kendrikova, 180

Kensit, John, 112

_Kent_, the, 310

Kerzhentsev, Comrade:

“The Irish Revolution,” 111;

director of the _Rosta_, 256, 258

Kew Gardens, carnivorous plant, 320

Klementovich, Colonel, 76

Knox, General Sir Alfred, 85;

leaves Omsk, 1;

military attaché at Tannenberg, 8

Kobylinsky, Colonel, 181

Kochenovo, Red Cross train, burnt, 311

Kolchak, Admiral:

defeat of his army, viii, 8, 88, 124;

gold reserve train, 6, 311;

retreat, 15, 17, 67;

War Office at Omsk, 85;

cartoon, 110

Kopchiki Forest, 153, 160;

village, 161

Korea, independence of, 220

Korff, 22

Kostusov, Alexander:

at the cremation of the Imperial Family, 140, 154, 159-166;

discovery of relics, 163

Krasnoyarsk, 8, 22, 41;

system of registration, 52, 56, 60;

Concentration Camp, 58;

cases of typhus, 58, 320;

Red fête, 64;

number of ownerless horses, 65-67;

of English uniforms, 67

Krassin Mission, 80

Kremlin, 252

Krivtsov, Alexander, 165

Kropotkin, Prince, ix

Kukhtenkov, Prokofy, 164, 165

Labashev, Leonidas, 138, 164

Labour Army:

scheme, 74, 83, 88, 92, 105, 334, 336;

failure, 106

Landau-Aldanov, “Lenin und der Bolshewismus,” 290

Lenin, M., 48, 90, 108;

pictures of, 113, 114;

interview with Yurovsky, 143;

appearance, 143, 224;

Bolshevik envoys, 222;

speech at the Ninth Communist Convention, 224;

day’s work, 225;

character of his censorship, 245;

belief in his dogma of internationalism, 288, 291;

characteristics, 289, 290, 329, 330;

failure of his policy, 303;

fanaticism, 330;

style of eloquence, 330;

gospel of hate, 331

Lenov, Peter Alexeivich, 139, 164

Lermontov: “Borodino,” 303;

“Demon,” 178

Leroy-Beaulieu, P., on the Jewish mind, 102

Letemin, Kouzma Ivanovich, 167, 171

Letemin, Michael Ivanovich, 167

Litvinov, interest in foreign journalists, 240

Litvinov-O’Grady, agreement, 307

Lockhart, Mr., Consul-General in Moscow, 103

London, increase of the postal rate, 198

Lovatnykh, Basil, 165;

at the cremation of the Imperial Family, 140, 154, 159-166;

discovery of relics, 163

Lukhanov, 138, 164

Lunacharsky, Commissar of Fine Arts, 90, 218, 293

Lvov, Mr., 200

Lvov, Prince, 200

Macdonald, Ramsay, 151

Macready, General Sir Nevill, 71

Makarov:

effect of Bolshevik oratory, 25;

at Krasnoyarsk, 325

Mamantov, S., 337, 339

Mamontov-Sibiriak, 115

Mamyshkin, Sergius Pavlov, 165

_Manchester Guardian_, the, 91

Mansur, Dr., agent of the Soviet, 222

Maria, Grand Duchess:

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166

Martel, Captain, 52, 54, 64

Marx, Karl:

warning, 91;

appeal to workers, 109;

busts of, 112, 115

McCullagh, Captain Francis:

member of the British Military Mission, at Omsk, 1;

flight from, 2-22, 325;

travelling in a sleigh, 12-15, 18-20;

at Taiga, 20;

captured at Krasnoyarsk, 22, 41, 287, 325;

leaves the train, 47;

quarters at Krasnoyarsk, 50;

impecuniosity, 51, 56;

ordered to register, 52;

on the danger of Bolshevism, 53;

registered, 58, 60;

negotiations with a Commissar, 59;

gives lessons, 61;

poses as a civilian, 69;

access to Commissar circles, 70-74;

war correspondent, 71;

telegrams to Moscow, 73;

journey to Ekaterinburg, 74-88, 108, 324, 333;

destruction of identity clues, 82, 270;

at Novo-Nikolaevsk, 84;

Omsk, 84-87;

at a meeting of the Provincial Soviet, 119;

interview with Yurovsky, 146-152;

journey to Moscow, 186-191, 317;

life in Moscow, 206;

attack of “trench foot,” 206;

guest of the Soviet Government, 220;

enters the Kremlin, 252;

interview with Tikhon the Patriarch, 262;

arrested by the Vecheka, 269-272;

searched, 270, 275;

cell, 276;

life in prison, 276-285;

food, 282;

examined, 283;

released, 285;

leaves Russia, 307;

on board the _Dongola_, 310

Mercier, Cardinal, 262

Merezhkovsky, saying of, 36

Metvietev, Paul, 125, 131;

murders the Tsar, 134;

flight, 166;

destroys traces of the crime at Ippatievsky House, 167;

journey to Moscow, 186, 191

Michael, Grand Duke, murdered, 171

Mikhailov, war correspondent of the _Pravda_, 15, 203

_Miropomazanie_, the, 184

Mogilevsky, 268, 283

_Morning Post_, the, 78

Moscow, 187, 191;

condition, 192-196, 198, 317;

food, 193, 207;

result of Soviet Government, 196, 207;

iron tyranny, 198;

anarchists, 202;

the Polish churches, 208;

disappearance of newspapers, 215;

destruction of official documents, 216;

plays, 217;

Third International, 220, 297;

capitalists, 226-229;

diplomatists, 229;

German prisoners, 230;

the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, 241, 249, 296;

the Kremlin, 252;

Food Control at, 304

Moscow-Kursk railway strike, 288

Mrachkovsky, Commissar, present at the murder of the Tsar, 131

Mulkner or Kamerinsk, 230

Murray, Sergeant, 19

_Muzhik_, the, 122, 195, 303, 314

_Nation_, the, 90

Nekrasov, the democratic poet, 176;

“Moroz Krasny Nos,” 178;

“Russian Women,” 178

_New Statesman_, the, 90

_New York World_, the, 72

Newspapers, disappearance of, 215

Nicholas II., Tsar of Russia:

account of his murder, 124-138, 172;

fondness for children, 127;

appearance, 132, 173;

removal of his body, 138-140;

cremated, 154-166;

rumours of his being sent to Perm, 169;

treatment by the Reds, 173;

attends Mass, 174;

courtly manners, 175;

life at Tobolsk, 183;

publication of his public speeches, 217

Nikolsk, seized by the Japanese, 251

Ninth Communist Convention, 224, 253

Nizhniudinsk, 311

North, Rev. Frank, xii, 206

North, Mrs., attacked by the Russian Press, 314

Northcliffe, Lord, 90, 91, 256

Novo-Nikolaevsk, 4, 84, 335;

captured by the Reds, 12;

number of deaths from typhus, 31, 32

Okhotsk, Sea of, 179

Olga, Grand Duchess:

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166

Omsk, British Military Mission at, 1;

captured by the Reds, 2;

money, worthless, 11, 48, 51;

bridge blown up, 83;

cases of typhus, 84, 320;

retreat from, 325

Orenburg, 336

_Osaka Asahi_, the, 220

_Osaka Mainichi_, the, 221

Oyash, 12

Pak-oi, head of the Korean Committee at Moscow, 220

Pankratov, V. S.:

jailer of the Tsar, 175;

characteristics, 176;

statement on the Imperial Family, 176-184

Pan-Mohammedan Congress, 222, 297

Parasites, the, 286, 297

Partin, Nicholas:

at the burial of the Imperial Family, 140, 154, 159-166;

discovery of relics, 163

Pascal, Captain, 290

Peasants, the, 314-316

People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, 241, 249, 296

Pepelaiev, General, 12

Perm, 67;

bridge replaced, 83, 90;

number of newspapers, 257

Petrograd, “The Union of Five Oppressed,” 202

Petrov, 180

Plekhanov, Mr., arrested, 198

Pobydonostsev, Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, 289

Polar Sea, 5, 29, 179

Poles, the, 7, 21

Polish churches:

in Moscow, 208;

clergy, 266

Polukarov, John, 337

Pometkovsky, Captain, 154;

discovery of the murder of the Tsar, 155-157

_Pravda_, the, 15, 145, 203, 314

Press, development of the, 91;

censorship, 242

Preston, Mr., 129

Proletariat, the, 49, 50, 286, 297, 337

Propaganda Hall, 109-113;

charts and cartoons, 110

Propaganda, system of, vii, 97

Puritanism, 24;

resemblance to Bolshevism, 108

Radek, 90;

“The Bolshevik Party,” 291;

on the effect of foreign trade on Bolshevism, 328

Railways, destruction, 83, 188, 327

Rasputin, pictures of, 134

Razin, Stenka, 115

Red Army, 288, 335;

cartoons on, 111;

supply of arms, 337

_Red Flag, The_, 64

Red Labour Army, 334;

_see_ Labour

_Red Road, The_, 64

“Red Star of Bolshevism,” 303

_Red Tocsin, The_, 64, 89, 334

_Red Workman, The_, 64

Reds, the, ix;

at Irtysh River, 1;

capture Omsk, 2;

Novo-Nikolaevsk, 12;

revolutionary enthusiasm, 23;

atrocities, 27;

English uniforms, 67;

massacre of White officers, 70;

treatment of the Imperial Family, 173;

propaganda, 210-219;

on the freedom of Russia, 308;

joined by the Whites, 325

Reformation, result of the, 295

Revel, 233

_Review of Reviews_, the, 92

Rodzianko, Count, 177

Roman Catholic Church, in Russia, 265-267

Rooney, Sergeant, 61

Ropp, Bishop, imprisoned, 265

Rosenberg, Press censor, 242, 246

_Rosta_, the, 252-257, 260

Russia:

history, 29-31;

debauchery, 36;

peasant refugees, 37;

dislocation of families, 38, 200;

notices on station walls, 38, 312;

fate of girls, 39;

change in customs, 61;

patriarchal Communism, 62;

prejudice against manual labour, 63, 94;

_subbotnik_ movement, 151;

result of the Soviet Government, 190, 196, 207;

German envoys, 226, 231;

capitalists, 229, 304;

foreign journalists, 233-240, 243;

Foreign Office, 235, 237;

system of Press censorship, 242-245;

use of wireless, 258, 260;

separation of Church and State, 263;

position of the clergy, 264;

Roman Catholic Church, 265-267;

system of education, 267, 338;

characteristics of the people, 287, 303, 313;

number of Communists, 299;

Extraordinary Commission, 300;

corruption, 304;

population, 306;

military reaction, 307;

peasants, 314-316;

epidemic of typhus, 320-323;

trade with capitalist countries, 327

Russia, Grand Duchesses of:

imprisoned in Ippatievsky Dom, 127;

murdered, 131-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166

“Russian Friends of American Freedom” Association, 203, 223

“Russian Socialist Telegraph Agency,” or the _Rosta_, 252-257, 260

Sadul, Captain, 103, 222

Sakharov, General, 4, 23, 326

Samoilov, Alexander, 170

Schmidt, Herr, 228

Schneider, Countess, 180

Semashko, Dr., Commissar of Public Health, 31

Semenov, concubine, 36

Serbia, raid on German trenches, viii

Serezhnikov, Mr., 230

Sergiev, war correspondent of the _Pravda_, 145, 203

Shaw, George Bernard, 90, 91

Sheremetievsky, Andrew, 154, 155

Shitinkin, 21

Siberia, 29;

conquered by the Czechs, xi;

treatment of the peasants, 17;

refugees, 28;

epidemic of typhus, 31, 320-323;

military revival meetings, 257;

military position in, 335

Sirovi, General, 85

Sleighs, travelling by, 12-15, 18-20

Smith, Private, 325

_Social-Democrat_, extract from, 331

Soviet Government, ix, 299, 332;

system of advertisement, 97;

result in Russia, 190, 196, 207;

number of Jews, 267;

marriage-law, 309

_Sovietsky Sibir_, the, 85

Spain, 296

Spassky, 338

Staroduma, 168

Stead, W. T., 90

Streokin, on the murder of the Tsar, 134, 172

Struve, Professor, 319

_Subbotnik_ movement, 151

Supranovitch, 76

Sverdlov, Commissar, Vice-Minister of Ways and Communications, 72,

76, 327;

death, 107

Taiga, 20, 84;

number of cases of typhus, 34, 320

Tambov, 338

Tashkent, 223

Tatarskaya, 311

Tatiana, Grand Duchess:

murdered, 132-138, 172;

cremated, 154-166;

compositions, 180

Tatishchev, Count, 183;

murdered, 171

Tattelberg, Madame, 182

Third International Organization, 297

Thomas, Mr., at British Consulate in Ekaterinburg, 128, 319

Tikhon, the Patriarch:

interview with Captain F. McCullagh, 262;

characteristics, 262;

encyclical, 263;

position, 264

Timereva, Madame, 36

Tomsk, 23;

Red G.H.Q. in, 85

“Train-jumping,” 9

Trans-Baïkalia, 221

Trotsky:

fine on hand-shaking, 62, 92;

at Ekaterinburg, 63, 92;

scheme of a Labour Army, 74, 83, 88, 92, 105, 336;

style of journalism, 90;

appearance, 92;

capacity for work, 93;

transport reorganization, 93;

exercise, 94;

measures against typhus, 95-97;

speech on “The Fight Against Economic Ruin,” 98;

treatment of the working classes, 99;

train, 99;

police protection, 100, 194;

adaptability, 101;

characteristics, 102, 106;

style of oratory, 103-105;

position, 107;

pictures of, 113, 115, 117;

in the Kremlin, 252;

nervous strain, 300;

autocracy, 320

Trotsky, Mrs., 94

Turks, fanaticism, 55

Tsarskoe Selo, 134

Typhus:

epidemic of, 6, 16, 320-323;

train burnt, 6, 311;

number of deaths from, 31-35, 84;

treatment of patients, 33;

measures against, 95-97

“Typhus General,” 6

Ufa, 32

Ulster, 302

Uniat Church, 266, 267

Ural factories, 98

Varakovshev, Alexander, 170

Vecheka, the, 272;

police officials, 274;

Governor, 275, 282

Voitsekhovsky, General, 31

Vologda, Province, 264

Vyrobova, Madame, 165 _note_

Walters, Sergeant-Major, 18, 26

Webb, Sydney, 90

Wells, H. G., 90, 91

Whites, the, 323-327;

advance on Krasnoyarsk, 26;

atrocities, 71;

massacre of, 149;

join the Reds, 325

William II., ex-Kaiser, 330

Wireless service in Russia, 258, 260

Witte, Count, 306

Workmen in Factories, 335

Xenofontov, 283, 284

Yakimov, Anatoly, 134, 137;

on the murder of the Tsar, 172

Yaroslav, 187

Yates, Mr., 48

Yenisei, the, 59

Yudenich, advance on Petrograd, 104

Yurovskaya, Miss, 99, 152

Yurovsky:

murders the Tsar, 108, 125, 130-138, 329;

wounded, 137, 139, 151;

at the burial of the Imperial Family, 140, 154, 159-166;

fear of vengeance, 141;

appointed Inspector of Life Insurance, 142, 150;

interview with Lenin, 143;

flight to Petrograd, 143;

return to Ekaterinburg, 144;

house, 145;

interview with Captain F. McCullagh, 146-152;

appearance, 147;

death of his mother, 148;

President of the Extraordinary Commission, 149;

Bolshevik theories, 151;

son and daughter, 152;

picks up relics, 162

Zinoviev, 90, 327

Zlatoust, 336

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