Government, coffee was bought wholesale in Vladivostok for two rubles
a pound, and the consumer in Petrograd paid thirteen. In all the
stores of the large cities were tons of food and clothing; but only
the rich could buy them.

In a provincial town I knew a merchant family turned
speculator_-maradior_ (bandit, ghoul) the Russians call it. The three
sons had bribed their way out of military service. One gambled in
foodstuffs. Another sold illegal gold from the Lena mines to
mysterious parties in Finland. The third owned a controlling interest
in a chocolate factory, which supplied the local Cooperative
societies-on condition that the Cooperatives furnished him everything
he needed. And so, while the masses of the people got a quarter pound
of black bread on their bread cards, he had an abundance of white
bread, sugar, tea, candy, cake and butter.... Yet when the soldiers at
the front could no longer fight from cold, hunger and exhaustion, how
indignantly did this family scream "Cowards!"-how "ashamed" they were
"to be Russians"... When finally the Bolsheviki found and requisitioned
vast hoarded stores of provisions, what "Robbers" they were.

Beneath all this external rottenness moved the old-time Dark Forces,
unchanged since the fall of Nicholas the Second, secret still and
very active. The agents of the notorious _Okhrana_ still functioned,
for and against the Tsar, for and against Kerensky-whoever would
pay.... In the darkness, underground organisations of all sorts, such
as the Black Hundreds, were busy attempting to restore reaction in
some form or other.

In this atmosphere of corruption, of monstrous half-truths, one clear
note sounded day after day, the deepening chorus of the Bolsheviki,