Russia in 1919 | Page 7

my mind to something else.
The Astoria is now a bare barrack of a place, but comparatively clean.
During the war and the first part of the revolution it was tenanted

chiefly by officers, and owing to the idiocy of a few of these at the time
of the first revolution in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of
soldiers and sailors, who came there at first with no other object than to
invite the officers to join them, the place was badly smashed up in the
resulting scrimmage. I remember with Major Scale fixing up a paper
announcing the fall of Bagdad either the night this happened or perhaps
the night before. People rushed up to it, thinking it some news about
the revolution, and turned impatiently away. All the damage has been
repaired, but the red carpets have gone, perhaps to make banners, and
many of the electric lights were not burning, probably because of the
shortage in electricity. I got my luggage upstairs to a very pleasant
room on the fourth floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories for
me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that
he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame
Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon
when he was talking about how to write short stories and having
influenza. There was the room where Miss Beatty used to give tea to
tired revolutionaries and to still more tired enquirers into the nature of
revolution while she wrote the only book that has so far appeared
which gives anything like a true impresionist picture of those
unforgettable days.* [(*)"The Red Heart of Russia."] Close by was the
room where poor Denis Garstin used to talk of the hunting he would
have when the war should come to an end.
I enquired for a meal, and found that no food was to be had in the hotel,
but they could supply hot water. Then, to get an appetite for sleep, I
went out for a short walk, though I did not much like doing so with
nothing but an English passport, and with no papers to show that I had
any right to be there. I had, like the other foreigners, been promised
such papers but had not yet received them. I went round to the Regina,
which used to be one of the best hotels in the town, but those of us who
had rooms there were complaining so bitterly that I did not stay with
them, but went off along the Moika to the Nevsky and so back to my
own hotel. The streets, like the hotel, were only half lit, and hardly any
of the houses had a lighted window. In the old sheepskin coat I had
worn on the front and in my high fur hat, I felt like some ghost of the
old regime visiting a town long dead. The silence and emptiness of the
streets contributed to this effect. Still, the few people I met or passed

were talking cheerfully together and the rare sledges and motors had
comparatively good roads, the streets being certainly better swept and
cleaned than they have been since the last winter of the Russian
Empire.

SMOLNI

Early in the morning I got tea, and a bread card on which I was given a
very small allowance of brown bread, noticeably better in quality than
the compound of clay and straw which made me ill in Moscow last
summer. Then I went to find Litvinov, and set out with him to walk to
the Smolni institute, once a school for the daughters of the aristocracy,
then the headquarters of the Soviet, then the headquarters of the Soviet
Government, and finally, after the Government's evacuation to Moscow,
bequeathed to the Northern Commune and the Petrograd Soviet. The
town, in daylight, seemed less deserted, though it was obvious that the
"unloading" of the Petrograd population, which was unsuccessfully
attempted during the Kerensky regime, had been accomplished to a
large extent. This has been partly the result of famine and of the
stoppage of factories, which in its turn is due to the impossibility of
bringing fuel and raw material to Petrograd. A very large proportion of
Russian factory hands have not, as in other countries, lost their
connection with their native villages. There was always a considerable
annual migration backwards and forwards between the villages and the
town, and great numbers of workmen have gone home, carrying with
them the ideas of the revolution. It should also be remembered that the
bulk of the earlier formed units of the Red Army is composed of
workmen from the towns who, except in the case of peasants mobilized
in