season apples and pears sold for a little less than a ruble apiece on
the street-corner....

For milk and bread and sugar and tobacco one had to stand in _queue_
long hours in the chill rain. Coming home from an all-night meeting I
have seen the _kvost_ (tail) beginning to form before dawn, mostly
women, some with babies in their arms.... Carlyle, in his _French
Revolution,_ has described the French people as distinguished above
all others by their faculty of standing in _queue._ Russia had
accustomed herself to the practice, begun in the reign of Nicholas
the Blessed as long ago as 1915, and from then continued
intermittently until the summer of 1917, when it settled down as the
regular order of things. Think of the poorly-clad people standing on
the iron-white streets of Petrograd whole days in the Russian winter!
I have listened in the bread-lines, hearing the bitter, acrid note of
discontent which from time to time burst up through the miraculous
goodnature of the Russian crowd....

Of course all the theatres were going every night, including Sundays.
Karsavina appeared in a new Ballet at the Marinsky, all dance-loving
Russia coming to see her. Shaliapin was singing. At the Alexandrinsky
they were reviving Meyerhold's production of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan
the Terrible"; and at that performance I remember noticing a student
of the Imperial School of Pages, in his dress uniform, who stood up
correctly between the acts and faced the empty Imperial box, with its
eagles all erased.... The _Krivoye Zerkalo_ staged a sumptuous version
of Schnitzler's "Reigen."

Although the Hermitage and other picture galleries had been evacuated
to Moscow, there were weekly exhibitions of paintings. Hordes of the