The red heart of Russia

Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely from the marshes. I pressed my face c...

It was less than a week after my early morning advent in Petrograd when I once more passed before the candle-lighted ikons in the Nicolaiski Station and out to the platform. Thi...

War and revolution are irreconcilable bed-fellows. Mars is a jealous god, demanding more and ever more sacrifice. Revolution cries incessantly for larger freedom. Out in that ne...

of his military life, and snapped its fingers in the face of all the traditions upon which his world was founded, left him hurt and helpless and bewildered. I fell asleep still...

War as Russia has known it, war as they know it on the western front, is a different thing from war as I saw it made in the dark forests in July. Yet war as it came to me in fla...

Marie Bachkarova was slicing off a hunk of sausage for the boy Vashka, whose father was killed in the first clash of Russian flesh and German arms. She looked up and saw Petroff...

Turning into the Nevsky Prospect was like opening a telegram. I could never be quite certain what I would find there, but the first glance always told the whole story.

Leon Trotzky, Bolshevist leader, was secure in jail. Nicolai Lenin was in hiding. Those who believed he was in the employ of the German government declared he had escaped to Ber...

September came. The padlocked doors of Nizhni Novgorod and the quiet waters of the Volga seemed far, far away. Farther still were the hectic days of early June when the recalcit...

Since the days of the March Revolution, women have not been permitted aboard the Russian fleet. The sailors, with the memory of Rasputin still fresh in their minds, settled this...

Late one afternoon in early November, I walked through the gray streets of Petrograd, and shivered. It was not cold as the thermometer speaks, but cold as a room where death awa...

However much the rest of Petrograd talked that night, there was one spot in the storm-tossed city where no words were wasted. This was the office of the Voina Revoliutsiony Komi...

Sunday, November 11, must go down on the calendar of the red Russian year as a day of shame. On that day there was a sacrifice of the innocents as needless as it was useless, an...

Mystery shrouded the Petrograd front. In the days that followed the battles of Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo only a few meager facts came out of the background of wildly conflictin...

It was midsummer when I went first to Moscow, and the trees against the old Kremlin wall were deep in green. Mother Moscow was haughty then--aloof, superior. She sat serene amid...

Revolution is unconstitutional and illegal. In the scramble that follows the fall of tsar or kaiser, the spoils are to the nimblest. Any government that ensues is an illegitimat...

Organized punishment was no part of the revolutionary scheme, but every group of revolutionists who took power discovered, to their distress, that it was easier to will people i...

When revolution was still only a vague dream of the future, an American traveler, finding his way into a peasant’s hut in a remote Siberian village, discovered an American flour...

When the peasants in a remote South Russian village received word from the great city that the “Little Father” had been put off his throne, and that they, the Russian people, we...

People usually become class-conscious in response to class oppression. In the old days in Russia the rights of women were slightly fewer than those of men, but the difference wa...

Ex-Tsar Nicholas and two able-bodied assistants could have conducted a successful counter-revolution on December 25, 1917. But the Tsar, whatever else may be said of him, was a...

The Constituent Assembly met under the Bolshevik guns of Smolney Institute. Although it was the hope and fear of the Russian Republic, it came and went in the space of twelve ho...

At the hour when the delegates were supposed to reassemble, the Tauride Palace was dark. In the white hall at Smolney the members of the Central Executive Committee of the All-R...

On a gray November evening out on the Russian front not far from Dvinsk, the gunners, delivering a daily salute to the German trenches, heard a muttered command to stop firing....