Committee, gets up at seven in the morning, and goes from
one end of Moscow to the other to lecture to the young men
in training as officers for the Soviet Army, more or less
controls the English soldier war prisoners, about whose
Bolshevism he is extremely pessimistic, and enjoys an
official position as head of the quite futile department which
prints hundred-weight upon hundred-weight of
propaganda in English, none of which by any chance ever
reaches these shores. He was terribly disappointed that I had
brought no American papers with me. He complained of
the lack of transport, a complaint which I think I must have
heard at least three times a day from different people the
whole time I was in Moscow. Politically, he thought, the
position could not be better, though economically it was very
bad. When they had corn, as it were, in sight, they could
not get it to the towns for lack of locomotives. These
economic difficulties were bound to react sooner or later on
the political position.


He talked about the English prisoners. The men are brought
to Moscow, where they are given special passports and are
allowed to go anywhere they like about the town without
convoy of any kind. I asked about the officers, and he said
that they were in prison but given everything possible, a
member of the International Red Cross, who worked with
the Americans when they were here, visiting them regularly
and taking in parcels for them. He told me that on hearing
in Moscow that some sort of fraternization was going on on
the Archangel front, he had hurried off there with two