Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most of the time, and where the food supply came from government sources, we had veal or its derivatives, hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Sometimes they offered what they called beef, but it wasn’t. It was horsemeat, coarse and strong. Once a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change. When August came we began to have game, grouse of various kinds mostly. Game is very plentiful in Russia and Finland this year, because since the war men have hunted only one another. But game, which is a treat when you have it occasionally, is a punishment when you have it more than once or so a week. You detest it when it appears on the table three times a week, and if it appears oftener you choose a meatless day as an alternative.
Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not so bad, and tea was even more moderate in price. What the Russian people would do if the tea gave out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scalding hot, several times a day. Even the babies drink tea, and it is a fact that in the best babies’ hospital I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly showed me, in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles full of tea for the sick babies’ evening repast. Tea they still have, but they are almost out of sugar to go with it. In a hotel or restaurant they serve you with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass of tea, and that is all you can have. If for any reason you do not use all your sugar you put it in your pocket. You do this whether you keep house or not, because you can’t buy much candy, and when meat is scarce everybody craves sweets.
Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me a dollar and ten cents.
Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people, men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long, patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line.
Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner.
It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food, and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki will not be the people to overcome it.
CHAPTER XVII GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR
After Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeated legions had fled from Russia to freeze and starve and die by thousands in a frenzied attempt to get back to France, the victorious commander of the Russian army said that his two greatest aides had been General January and General February. The relentless cold and storm of a Russian winter were foes too strong for Bonaparte to conquer. They sent him to St. Helena, and the same strong foes this winter are going to rout and banish the Bolsheviki. The Russian revolution began with a bread riot and it will culminate in a bread riot. When the people of Russia get hungry enough, they are going to stop talking about “no annexations or contributions,” “all the power to the soviets,” and the rest, and demand a government that shall govern, and as soon as possible put the country back on a normal basis. When the thermometer falls to 45 degrees below zero, and a fifty-miles-an-hour wind is driving sleet and snow in their faces, people can no longer stand twenty-four hours in line to buy food for their children. Especially when their clothes are thin and worn and their boots are dropping off their feet.