saw him, was praying that the Allies should give him
machine rifles to use against the Germans in the Ukraine,
had been the first President of the Ukrainian Soviet
Republic, but had since been replaced by Rakovsky. It had
been found that the views of the Pyatakov government
were further left than those of its supporters, and so
Pyatakov had given way to Rakovsky who was better able to
conduct a more moderate policy. The Republic had been
proclaimed in Kharkov, but at that time Kiev was still in the
hands of the Directorate.


That night my room in the Red Fleet was so cold that I went
to bed in a sheepskin coat under rugs and all possible
bedclothes with a mattress on the top. Even so I slept very
badly.



The next day I spent in vain wrestlings to get a better room.
Walking about the town I found it dotted with revolutionary
sculptures, some very bad, others interesting, all done in
some haste and set up for the celebrations of the anniversary
of the revolution last November. The painters also had been
turned loose to do what they could with the hoardings, and
though the weather had damaged many of their pictures,
enough was left to show what an extraordinary carnival that
had been. Where a hoarding ran along the front of a house
being repaired the painters had used the whole of it as a vast
canvas on which they had painted huge symbolic pictures