This may not be a very logical position for the peasants to have taken up, but anyone who knows anything about Russia will see that it fitted their psychology to a fraction.  These people are more ignorant than our worst educated agricultural labourers.  They own and live on huge tracts of land, in most cases as large as a great English estate.  Their method of living is many stages below that of our landless farm labourer.  Their ignorance is colossal, their cupidity and cunning the envy of the Armenians, who openly confess that in a bargain the Russian peasant beats the Jew to a frazzle.  The order of the Soviet Government to the peasants to take possession of the landowners’ estates and property was the trump card which Lenin and Trotsky played to secure immunity in the provinces while they massacred and robbed the property owners in the towns.  These men, who are the natural enemies of all political progress and social reform, and who should have exercised a steadying effect upon the empty idealism of the professional classes, were too busy robbing their neighbours to be able to exert any influence upon the major events of the revolution.  While perfectly willing to use the revolution—­whose principles they abhorred—­for their own personal aggrandisement, this wealthy peasantry are now equally unwilling to render the slightest help in the restoration of order.

It was with profound interest that I read these documents, which entirely exploded the English legend of the landless Russian peasant pining for a few acres of land.

We arrived at Irkutsk and proceeded to investigate the situation.  When we passed here four months before it was the centre of Siberian life; official indolence had, however, again reduced its status to that of a third- or fourth-rate town.

I was anxious to know how the new Rumanian Division under French auspices was progressing.  Fourteen thousand rifles that could be ill afforded from the front had been left here some six weeks previous by one of our British supply trains.  I found that the local Russian military authorities knew nothing, nor had they ever been consulted about it.  They knew that not more than three thousand Rumanians lived in the district, and these had mostly embraced the opinions of the Bolsheviks.  I made inquiries through the usual English channels, but they were equally uninformed.  A visit to the Russian railway department elicited the fact that a French officer had signed the necessary orders for the trucks containing the rifles to remain at Irkutsk, that three thousand rifles had so far been unloaded, and that there was a French proposal to send the remainder to Tomsk, where it was hoped they might be got rid of amongst some Serbian bands with Bolshevik tendencies.  This may or may not represent all the facts, but it indicates the unmistakable necessity that English help shall be given only by English hands.

Russian officers were beginning to recover their old characteristics, and nightly filled the entertainment halls and restaurants and led the gaieties of the town.  Very little thought was given to the grim struggle their half-clad comrades were waging with the forces of anarchy along the Ural mountains.