I inquired about the “Red Terror” in Petrograd. “Yes,” I was informed, “there were two or three days of Red Terror in August, 1918, when Lenin was shot, in Moscow.” The rank and file were devoted to this man, and when they heard of the attempt on his life they turned loose, and it took three days of hard work on the part of the government officials and the government party members to stop the rush of the mob. Probably two thousand were killed, and during the six weeks that Lenin lay between life and death great crowds of working people watched the bulletins from his physicians that were posted on walls in all parts of the city from day to day. I was told that quite aside from his value to the government itself, it was a godsend to Russia that he survived, because his death would have meant an uprising that would have spared no human being believed to be in opposition to Lenin and the Soviet Government. Even Zinovieff is reported to have lost his head for a little time, when he heard of the precarious condition of his old friend and comrade.

A Russian friend of mine in America had asked me to look for his father who lived two or three blocks from St. Isaac’s Square when last heard from four years before.

I found the old man in his place of business—a picture frame store. He lived with his wife in two or three rooms in the rear. He had been in business for years, and was one of the bourgeoisie of the olden days. When I asked him if he had been disturbed by the Bolsheviki he said that during the two years since the revolution his store had been visited once by the authorities—an officer came to inquire for the address of some person living in the immediate neighborhood.

I asked him how he liked the new regime. “I don’t like it because food is scarce and prices high.” He showed me a small picture frame. “Before the war I could sell this for 70 kopecks, now I must charge 40 rubles,—but then maybe it was the war and not the revolution that caused the high prices,—I don’t know.”

He took me down the street three blocks to visit his daughter, so that when I returned to America I could assure my friend that his sister, too, was safe. She and her husband were both working for the Soviet Government and had but one complaint to make, “scarcity of food.” She was a teacher in one of the Soviet schools. They had two beautiful boys; the elder was studying sculpture in a Soviet art school, the younger was still in the grades. I asked this most intelligent and refined woman whether the Bolshevists had broken up the homes in Petrograd. She smiled and said, “Do they believe that in America?” When I had to answer that “some do,” she replied, “Please tell them it does not show intelligence to believe such things.”

I talked to three or four of the business men along the Nevsky Prospekt who were still clinging to their little shops, with their pitiful stocks of goods. These people have remained undisturbed for reasons I have already explained. In substance they all said the same thing: “It is terrible,—terrible. Before long we must quit business. The Bolshevists are setting up what they call ‘Soviet’ stores. The people don’t come to us now,—only a few of our old customers. The Soviet stores control the products and undersell us. Russia is doomed. We want to go away. How is it in America?”

The last cry of the private shopkeeper in Russia! Some day when the war is over and Russia is doing business with the rest of the world, these same shopkeepers will probably find the Soviet stores more attractive even than their own. They may remember, with no regret, their constant struggle to survive competition. Doubtless they will get behind the counters of the Soviet stores, as many of their kind have already done, and there find security of employment and compensation, and in the knowledge that they are rendering a real service to the New Russia they will find an adequate substitute for the stimulation of “private enterprise.”

With the removal of the capital to Moscow, the sending of thousands of workers to the army, the voluntary emigration to the villages of thousands of others, and the exodus of the bourgeoisie to Scandinavia, France, England and even America, Petrograd has probably one half the population it had under the Czar. Moscow had gained, however, during the same period in greater proportion than Petrograd lost.

CHICHERIN
Commissar of Foreign Affairs