there is to learn about childbirth and the
proper treatment of babies.
In connection with this department there are big stores, where the clothing and special food necessary for a child are supplied free. This sort of thing does not yet apply everywhere, but Semashko hopes very soon to have a child-welfare exhibition in every centre, not on a large scale but big enough to teach the things needed to be known about children.
It will be a mistake, however, to imagine that plague and pestilence is necessarily associated with the Bolsheviks. This Public Health Commissar is deliberately of opinion that the epidemics which have affected Moscow and Petrograd are directly attributable to the war and especially to the Red Army’s having come into contact with the armies of Denikin and Koltchak. The authorities in Moscow consider that while the Red Army has been marching from victory to victory, they have had working side by side with them an army of devoted men and women, a sort of army of health whose business it is to fight disease. It is the Communists who make up this army : their work in times of epidemic is to bury those who die of disease, disinfect clothes and dwellings and generally take the lead wherever danger is involved. It is on record that when the Red troops took the town of Nicopol
