Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/130

 train or steamship communication. Managerial responsibility is the only way.

Through Sverdloff’s able organisation the whole of the railways and bridges destroyed by the Koltchak bands have been restored. Communication with Siberia has been re-established. Fleets of oil-ships are bringing from Baku millions of poods of oil, so necessary for railway engines and workshop machinery. And when the economic life of Russia is fully restored, no small part of the credit must be given to this extraordinarily able and commanding personality.

There are others of the Communists who might with interest be described, men like Serada, the Commissar for Agriculture, of blameless life and lofty idealism; Tchicherine, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, gentle by nature, artistic by temperament, uncomfortable in the whirlpool of politics as it seemed to me, and shrinking, sad-eyed, into nothing with the burden of the office unto which he was not born, turned tyrant through suffering, the instrument of less admirable men than himself. Of the able Communist women Madame Colontai was reported in Kharkoff. Madame Lenin was too seriously ill to be seen. Madame Trotsky never came to see us, though she was said to be in the Opera House when her husband made his sudden and dramatic appearance. Madame Kameneff, who has charge