Page:John Rickman - An Eye-witness from Russia.djvu/4

 of special training, but a foreigner, and as I was in uniform I appeared to be a person of rank or position. I saw the gulf that lay between the upper classes and the peasants. Detached from the land, having interests in the problems of empire, the upper classes seemed hardly of the same people as the moujiks, whose chief concerns were in the social relationships and government of their village communities. I was treated as a "traveller," and told the Russian society people about the life of their own peasants.

The journey through Siberia was eased by the fact that I carried official papers for the Samara branch of the American Consulate General in Moscow and because of the kindness which the Czechs extended to the English and Americans. I received letters of recommendation which gave me the privilege of having reserved coupés when the trains were so crowded that each car had an average of ten people on the roof. At the stations the thousand passengers turned out of the carriages and cattle trucks (there was one of the former to forty of the latter) to stretch themselves or get boiling water for tea. In the rush to get hot water or buy food the sense of equality which the Revolution brought asserted itself, and foreign officer and peasant, Englishman, Russian, Kirghis, stood in line and waited. their turn. Things were different in the old régime.

By means of the letters of recommendation I was able to reach Irkutsk from Samara in the amazingly short period of ten days, changing from passenger trains to hospital trains, to military trains, to peasants' carts as occasion demanded, the line not being continuous owing to bridges being destroyed. There I was delayed two months owing to the Bolsheviks still being in force (and fighting) round Baikal and Chita. In Irkutsk I lived with General Illyashavitch, ex-Chief of Staff of the Third Siberian Army Corps (old régime), with whom I used to talk far into the night on the political situation. From him and from the members of the Consular Corps, from the representatives of the Social Revolutionary Right, and from peasants and workmen with whom I talked I was able to get a variety of new political impressions which led me to suspend judgments which I may have formed with respect to Bolshevism, just as under the influence of the peasants I had learned to suspend judgment on the administration of the old régime.

Travelling through Manchuria and in Vladivostok I came for