such a pitch. But I have personally met officers on the Northern
Front who frankly preferred military disaster to cooperation with the
Soldiers' Committees. The secretary of the Petrograd branch of the
Cadet party told me that the break-down of the country's economic
life was part of a campaign to discredit the Revolution. An Allied
diplomat, whose name I promised not to mention, confirmed this from
his own knowledge. I know of certain coal-mines near Kharkov which
were fired and flooded by their owners, of textile factories at
Moscow whose engineers put the machinery out of order when they left,
of railroad officials caught by the workers in the act of crippling
locomotives....

A large section of the propertied classes preferred the Germans to
the Revolution-even to the Provisional Government-and didn't hesitate
to say so. In the Russian household where I lived, the subject of
conversation at the dinner table was almost invariably the coming of
the Germans, bringing "law and order."... One evening I spent at the
house of a Moscow merchant; during tea we asked the eleven people at
the table whether they preferred "Wilhelm or the Bolsheviki." The
vote was ten to one for Wilhelm...

The speculators took advantage of the universal disorganisation to
pile up fortunes, and to spend them in fantastic revelry or the
corruption of Government officials. Foodstuffs and fuel were hoarded,
or secretly sent out of the country to Sweden. In the first four
months of the Revolution, for example, the reserve food-supplies were
almost openly looted from the great Municipal warehouses of
Petrograd, until the two-years' provision of grain had fallen to less
than enough to feed the city for one month.... According to the
official report of the last Minister of Supplies in the Provisional