Russia in 1919 | Page 8

districts which have experienced an occupation by the
counter-revolutionaries, are more determined and better understand the
need for discipline than the men from the country.
The most noticeable thing in Petrograd to anyone returning after six
months' absence is the complete disappearance of armed men. The
town seems to have returned to a perfectly peaceable condition in the
sense that the need for revolutionary patrols has gone. Soldiers walking
about no longer carry their rifles, and the picturesque figures of the
revolution who wore belts of machine-gun cartridges slung about their

persons have gone.
The second noticeable thing, especially in the Nevsky, which was once
crowded with people too fashionably dressed, is the general lack of
new clothes. I did not see anybody wearing clothes that looked less
than two years old, with the exception of some officers and soldiers
who are as well equipped nowadays as at the beginning of the war.
Petrograd ladies were particularly fond of boots, and of boots there is
an extreme shortage. I saw one young woman in a well-preserved,
obviously costly fur coat, and beneath it straw shoes with linen
wrappings.
We had started rather late, so we took a train half-way up the Nevsky.
The tram conductors are still women. The price of tickets has risen to a
rouble, usually, I noticed, paid in stamps. It used to be ten kopecks.
The armoured car which used to stand at the entrance of Smolni has
disappeared and been replaced by a horrible statue of Karl Marx, who
stands, thick and heavy, on a stout pedestal, holding behind him an
enormous top-hat like the muzzle of an eighteen-inch gun. The only
signs of preparations for defence that remain are the pair of light field
guns which, rather the worse for weather, still stand under the pillars of
the portico which they would probably shake to pieces if ever they
should be fired. Inside the routine was as it used to be, and when I
turned down the passage to get my permit to go upstairs, I could hardly
believe that I had been away for so long. The place is emptier than it
was. There is not the same eager crowd of country delegates pressing
up and down the corridors and collecting literature from the stalls that I
used to see in the old days when the serious little workman from the
Viborg side stood guard over Trotsky's door, and from the alcove with
its window looking down into the great hall, the endless noise of debate
rose from the Petrograd Soviet that met below.
Litvinov invited me to have dinner with the Petrograd Commissars,
which I was very glad to do, partly because I was hungry and partly
because I thought it would be better to meet Zinoviev thus than in any
other manner, remembering how sourly he had looked upon me earlier
in the revolution. Zinoviev is a Jew, with a lot of hair, a round smooth
face, and a very abrupt manner. He was against the November
Revolution, but when it had been accomplished returned to his old
allegiance to Lenin and, becoming President of the Northern Commune,

remained in Petrograd when the Government moved to Moscow. He is
neither an original thinker nor a good orator except in debate, in
answering opposition, which he does with extreme skill. His nerve was
badly shaken by the murders of his friends Volodarsky and Uritzky last
year, and he is said to have lost his head after the attack on Lenin, to
whom he is extremely devoted. I have heard many Communists
attribute to this fact the excesses which followed that event in
Petrograd. I have never noticed anything that would make me consider
him pro-German, though of course he is pro-Marx. He has, however, a
decided prejudice against the English. He was among the Communists
who put difficulties in my way as a "bourgeois journalist" in the earlier
days of the revolution, and I had heard that he had expressed suspicion
and disapproval of Radek's intimacy with me.
I was amused to see his face when he came in and saw me sitting at the
table. Litvinov introduced me to him, very tactfully telling him of
Lockhart's attack upon me, whereupon he became quite decently
friendly, and said that if I could stay a few days in Petrograd on my
way back from Moscow he would see that I had access to the historical
material I wanted, about the doings of the Petrograd Soviet during the
time I had been away. I told him I was surprised to find him here and
not at Kronstadt, and asked about the mutiny and the treachery of the
Semenovsky regiment. There was a shout of laughter, and Pozern
explained that there was no Semenovsky regiment in existence,