relict and its vast collection of machinery idle. The
streets were deserted, and it was estimated that half of its inhabitants
had been destroyed. It was, and now it is not. The few remaining
inhabitants were valiantly pulling themselves together, and if order and
some sort of law could be established, they were confident that they
could rebuild their life again. We talked to them and encouraged them to
continue their struggle against the blight that had defiled their homes
and their country. Their hopes seemed to revive from our assurance of
English working-class sympathy. I am pleased they did not know that we
had some people mad enough to wish to inflict similar wounds upon our
own country.

A pound of sugar cost thirty-five roubles, a pair of 3s. 11d. goloshes
two hundred and fifty roubles, one pound of bread seven roubles. These
were the things we wished to buy, and so made the discovery of their
price; we bought bread only, as the thing we could not do without.
Typhus was raging in almost every house. General Knox was inoculated,
but I decided to run the risk. Doctors had largely disappeared, owing to
the hatred of everybody with a bourgeois education.

I wonder what sort of jokes or fun G.B.S. could make out of it. There
_is_ fun in it somewhere. The contrast between the original idea of the
revolution and the outcome of those ideas are so grotesque in their
realisation that it looks as though some hidden power were indulging in
a Mephistophelian laugh at the expense of mankind.

We next arrived at Taighill, where the same effects had been produced,
though on a smaller scale. It was Palm Sunday, and the great bell of the
cathedral was booming through the surrounding pine forest calling the
faithful to prayer. In the square of the town near by a statue of
Alexander II lay in the mud, having been thrown down by the
revolutionaries. Quite near a white figure of a woman, intended to
represent the Enthronement of Liberty, had been hurled from its recently
constructed base, and formed the roadside seat of five or six of the
raggedest starvelings to be found in the world. An inscription on
Alexander's statue states that it was raised to commemorate his
emancipation of the peasants from serfdom. The Bolsheviks had not time
to write _their_ inscription; but it did not matter--the empty houses
and deserted streets were quite enough. By means of much elbow labour
they had smoothed out the inscription on the statue of the