of parcelling out the habitations has at least one virtue: it solves the vexatious problem of house-hunting. All one has to do is to go to the housing committee, make his application, and then, if he is lucky—take what he gets. It is very simple.
The nobility and bourgeoisie have been long since chased out of their palaces, mansions, villas, club-rooms, hotels, and apartments. These have all been turned to practical uses. For the most part the Government is using the great palaces for museums, special assembly halls, and offices. Thus the magnificent Kremlin, with its dozens of palaces and churches, is being preserved just as it was under the Czars, as a sort of gigantic national monument of the old regime. The Czar's palace itself was used by the III International to hold its recent congress. The same organization makes its headquarters in the former German Embassy, which still bears the marks of the bomb that killed Mirbach. In Petrograd the unions have their home in a magnificent palace, while those in Moscow occupy what was formerly a gorgeous club-room for the nobility. The Red Trade Union International has its main office in the former swell Elite Hotel.
Thousands of splendid country villas, scattered around the various cities have been turned into summer colonies for children and rest homes for industrial workers. Great numbers of town mansions have been changed to schools and hospitals; while others are used to house visiting foreigners—for three months I lived in a magnificent mansion formerly owned by a rich sugar king. The big former hotels are devoted chiefly to Government offices of various sorts, although three or four of the best of them were used to accomodate the crowds of delegates during the recent world congresses. As for the many fancy apartment houses, they have fallen to the lot of the workers, furniture and all. Many of them are occupied by the employees of single large factories and are run upon a communal basis by committee systems,
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