the villages and theatres in all the towns and were maintained at the public expense.
The First Real Test of Popularity.
The popularity which the Bolshevik Government earned by its measures was not seriously tested till the spring of 1918, because it had no serious rivals who could call for the allegiance of the people on the strength of their programme for internal reforms. In the early summer, when civil war was financed from abroad and supported at home by large sections of the upper classes, the first real test came. Districts which had tried both the Bolshevik régime and that set up under the Czechs when free to do so reverted to Bolshevism. The Czechs were forced to retire from the Volga to the Urals because of uprisings among the people. The Soviet of Vladivostok was returned at the July election though the "Reds" were in prison. From the Urals to the eastern coast the people were discontented with the directorate and the dictatorship and preferred a return to the Soviets.
No body of people I met feared the Bolshevik Government except the rich merchant and landowning classes, and among them I noticed a phenomenon not uncommonly seen in the last few years, that supreme sacrifices are easier to ask for and easier to make in many cases than smaller ones. When all rich people were losing their property it was not in accordance with the temperament of the better Russian to display great grief at an irreparable loss. I think there was hardly more grumbling than occurred in England over the Budgets and the Insurance Act of a recent Government. Through their losses some perceived, often with mixed feelings, the increasing sense of equality, and many contrasted the smallness of their loss with the great sacrifice of the war.
Bolshevik Finance.
The Bolsheviks, in the opinion of the writer, used the repudiation of the foreign debts as a measure of internal politics, when the country was loath to assume any obligations contracted by the Tsar, but would in time have persuaded the people willingly to pay interest on the foreign loans because they realised that no further money would be lent to them unless they did.
Bearing in mind the exhausted condition of Russia due to the
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