I wonder what sort of jokes or fun G.B.S. could make out of it.  There is fun in it somewhere.  The contrast between the original idea of the revolution and the outcome of those ideas are so grotesque in their realisation that it looks as though some hidden power were indulging in a Mephistophelian laugh at the expense of mankind.

We next arrived at Taighill, where the same effects had been produced, though on a smaller scale.  It was Palm Sunday, and the great bell of the cathedral was booming through the surrounding pine forest calling the faithful to prayer.  In the square of the town near by a statue of Alexander II lay in the mud, having been thrown down by the revolutionaries.  Quite near a white figure of a woman, intended to represent the Enthronement of Liberty, had been hurled from its recently constructed base, and formed the roadside seat of five or six of the raggedest starvelings to be found in the world.  An inscription on Alexander’s statue states that it was raised to commemorate his emancipation of the peasants from serfdom.  The Bolsheviks had not time to write their inscription; but it did not matter—­the empty houses and deserted streets were quite enough.  By means of much elbow labour they had smoothed out the inscription on the statue of the Tsar Liberator and for the time made all things equal again.

The meeting at Taighill was a repetition of the others, and we passed on to Kushva.  This place had been badly mauled.  The Bolshevik Commissar was evidently an anarchist pure and simple.  All the hatred of class and creed which had generated under the Romanoffs found expression in this man’s deeds.  The amount of venom which he put into his administration and work was worthy of his cause.  The effect of his policy, however, produced results exactly opposite to those he hoped for.  The first evidence of his zeal lay upon the snow in front of the railway office.  A huge steel safe with the door wrenched off and the contents missing indicated the strength of his principles.  The official who had lost the key was thrown into the well near by to stimulate the memory of other safe-owners; but this official was not alone in his glory, for several railway workmen who refused to help rob this identical safe found a watery grave with their superior.  Altogether over seventy people met their death in this well, workmen, bourgeoisie—­all in one holocaust.  But the majority were of no class; their only offence seemed to be that they had called themselves Social Revolutionaries.  They have been the subject of the most bitter hatred by the Bolshevik leaders.  The Bolshevik contention is that for men or women to call themselves Socialists, and then to hesitate to take a hand in the complete extermination of the bourgeois ruling classes, now there is a chance of doing so in Russia, is to act the part of poltroon and traitor to the cause.  The “treachery” is all the greater if the objector is a workman or a workwoman.