The value of the rouble in Perm at that time was about one penny.  My officers and men were paid at the rate of 40 roubles to the L1.  The prisoners’ camp was about three and a half versts distant, and the duration of the meeting was one hour and five minutes; the droshky hire for the journey was 100 roubles per droshky.  Everything was in proportion.  For instance, common cigarettes were 1 rouble each.  If I had smoked twenty a day or used them between myself and my numerous official visitors, half my colonel’s pay would have gone.  There must surely have been something wrong in fixing the rate of exchange at Harbin or “Vlady,” 5,000 versts away, and leaving officers at the front in a stage of poverty not one whit better than the people whose all had been destroyed by the Revolution.  I have no remedy to offer, but it is not very satisfactory to receive your rouble at 6d. and spend it at 1d.  What is more!  If I had been paid in L1 notes or sovereigns, I could have got something approaching 200 roubles for each at the Perm rate!  Wages had increased under Bolshevik rule, but prices were such that one of the petitions we had to forward to the Government at Omsk on behalf of the workmen was that the wages and prices should be the same as under the old regime.

On April 24 the ice on the Khama started to move about 5 A.M.  It was a very imposing sight.  It moved first as one solid block, carrying boats, stacks of timber, sledge roads—­everything—­with it.  The point near the bridge held for some time, until the weight behind forced some part down and crunched its way through in one irresistible push; the other part rose over the resistance and rolled like an avalanche over and over, smashing itself into huge blocks which were forced into a rampart fifty feet high, when the enormous weight broke the ice platform on which it was piled, and the whole moved majestically off towards the Volga.  Then one experienced the peculiar illusion of gliding along the river; it was necessary to plant one’s feet far apart to prevent a fall.  The Khama near Perm is over a mile wide, and this method of Nature to herald spring to these snow- and ice-bound regions lacks nothing so far as grandeur is concerned.  During the next few days millions of tons of derelict timber passed on its way to the Caspian.  The careless Russian never thinks of hauling his spare stock off the ice until the ice actually begins to move.  He tells you that the proper time for the ice to move is between May 1 and 5; that if it moves a week earlier it means good crops, which would balance the loss of the timber, so that he has no cause to complain.

It is no part of my business to deal with atrocities such as have disgraced the proletarian dictatorship of Moscow.  Where I could not avoid them in my narrative of events, I have done so without reference to the revolting details which everybody so hungrily devours.  History shows that it is not possible to avoid these excesses whenever the safeguards of civil order are swept away by the passions of the mob.  Our own revolutionaries should remember this before and not after the event.  They should be considered not as a risk but as a certainty when once the foundations of order are uprooted.  At Perm the breaking of the ice revealed some of the truth, and it formed quite sufficient evidence of the callous behaviour of the Bolshevik administrators.