She wanted eagerly to know about the women soldiers, and said that she greatly admired their heroism. What was their life in camp like, and were they strong enough to stand the hardships? The Grand Duchess Serge is a good feminist and she agreed with me that in Russia’s crisis, as in the situation in all countries created by the war, it had been completely demonstrated that women would have henceforth to play a rôle equally important and equally prominent as that of men.
They would have to share equally with men in the successful operation of the war whether on the battlefield or behind the lines. She had always had a special devotion to Jeanne d’Arc and believed her to have been inspired by God. Other women also had been called of God to do great things.
“I am glad you like my convent,” she repeated as we parted. “Please come again. You know that it does not belong to me any more, but to the Provisional Government, but I hope they will let me keep it.”
I hope they will. The House of Mary and Martha, with the beautiful woman in it, is one of the things new Russia can least afford to lose.
CHAPTER XVI THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE
The Romanoffs gone, the soviets apparently yielding to Kerensky’s demand for a coalition government, and finally voting to give him almost supreme power, what then stood in the way of restoring order in the army and civil life? Readers of the despatches in the daily press last September and later must have puzzled over this question. The fact is that while there were indications that the last convention held in Petrograd by the Russian Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council, ended in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained every evidence that the Bolshevik element was still very strong. Kerensky succeeded in forming a coalition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates at the same time succeeded in electing a Bolshevik central executive committee with the notorious Leo Trotzky as chairman, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian Duma member, prominent in the Council, but against whose sincerity and honesty I never heard a word.
Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki couldn’t then get Lenine back. There were not enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council to force from the government a promise of immunity from arrest for Lenine, should he appear at a meeting, so he was kept in the background and Trotsky was made chairman of the Petrograd executive committee in his stead.
Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to-day, exactly as he was during the fateful days of July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle workmen out on the streets of the capital with machine guns to murder the populace. Trotzky, however, is an able and faithful lieutenant. He is a Jew and his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those Jews, unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs just now, who are doing everything in their power to prejudice the people of Russia against the race, and to check the movement for the full freedom of the Jews of the empire.