Page:John Rickman - An Eye-witness from Russia.djvu/9

 on wages and salaries. No one was exempt. The banks were controlled by the Soviet, and the limit that any private person was allowed to withdraw in any month without previous permission was fixed at 100 roubles.

The medical needs of the community were met by department medical committees and village committees centring round the hospitals. The public sent their delegates to these committees, representing the patients; the doctors in their capacity as workmen also sent delegates. Accounts were audited by a neutral body, usually the Soviet of the district.

The Russian public had not been accustomed to reliable law courts or a just police administration. Under the Bolsheviks, as under the Provisional and Kerensky Governments, the villages appointed their own police when necessary, choosing the oldest men as those most likely to have wisdom and discretion in human affairs. The Red Guard, and later the Red Army, supplemented and sometimes over-rode the simple requirements of the peasants. For six months under Bolshevik rule order of a kind superior to that ever experienced under the old régime was maintained.

As an instance of this may be mentioned the way in which the old régime and the Bolsheviks dealt with illegal vodka distilling. In the days of the Imperial police anyone caught in the act was arrested by the police, but, as everyone knew, each offence had its price, except that of political propaganda, and a sum of money, amounting maybe to several hundred or several thousand roubles, would settle the matter, and until the time of blackmail came round again the business could continue unmolested, however much the public might be against it. Under the Bolsheviks a man found distilling vodka would not be punished, but his still would be taken from him, the public would be informed of his guilt, and the amount of grain which the food committee would allow him to buy would be limited to that needed for his own domestic use.

The characteristic feature of the Czecho-Slovak movement in Russia and Siberia is the intense national feeling among the