“Mr Pollock was in Russia from 1915 to 1919, and his book pretends to be nothing more than a calm statement of facts as he saw them.” (Ath) “We gather that until the revolution of November, the author worked on the Red cross committee: when the others left the country, however, he stayed on, though he should have left with them. One day in the summer of 1918, he was told by a friend that the Red guards were in possession of his rooms at the hotel. From that date he lived under a disguise and an assumed name. He got employment as a producer of plays, and to attain membership in the second food category he joined the ‘Professional union of workers in theatrical undertakings.’ He worked in this capacity first at Moscow, and afterwards at Petrograd until January, 1919, when he decided to risk an attempt at escape into Finland.” (Sat R)
Ath p32 Ja 2 ’20 150w
“‘The entire upper class’ is Mr Pollock’s chief concern throughout his book. Everything else in Russia is anathema, to be damned in eternity. Especially the Jews. There are so many Jews in the ‘Bolshevik adventure’ that in reading the book one has the impression that Mr Pollock uses Russia as a misnomer for Jewry.” S. K.
− Ath p111 Ja 23 ’20 1250w
“The like of his book for misstatement, weakness of thought, and excited imagination is not to be found even among books on Russia.” Jacob Zeitlin
− Nation 112:20 Ja 5 ’21 240w
“This book should have been written in two parts, the first containing Chapters I to VI and the second Chapters VII, VIII, and IX. Then the first part should have been filed with the Minister of propaganda at London and pigeonholed in an asbestos-lined receptacle. This treatment would have left us with eighty pages of rather vivid narrative by an English eye-witness.”
− + N Y Evening Post p4 D 31 ’20 780w
“It is a pity that Mr Pollock’s style of writing is not better: some of the confusion of Russia appears to have crept into the construction of his sentences. Apart from such minor defects as these, the book is a magnificent and crushing indictment of the Bolsheviks by one who has lived under their misrule for nearly sixteen months. No other work on the subject has conjured up for us such a vivid picture of the loathsome misery and degradation to which communism can drag a country.”