Page 45 - 1926 February - To Dragma

208 TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI

the so-called Northwestern Railways and gained a rather sub-
stantial idea of the extent of broken-down transportation, which
after the war, the revolution, the civil wars and the experiment-
ing of the new administrations had been reduced to a chaotic
state.

Much of my interest in those days was absorbed by looking
up friends and delivering messages to people whose names had
been given me by various people in America. M y trips would
take me f r o m opera singers to peasant homes, one of these trips
taking five days. I can see myself—starting out eager-eyed on
some such mission on some f r i g h t f u l l y cold day with nothing but
camouflage tea f o r breakfast. But to see conditions, to learn
how other peple were braving the storm, seemed to hold an
opportunity of getting a wealth of knowledge of mankind, of
enriching my life with broad experience.

When I joined the American Relief Administration during
the great famine along the Volga, I found plenty of people to
whom my interest was far f r o m strange. Here were newspaper
men, diplomats, professors, writers, sociologists in quest of the
same thing. Now it became my job to look up needy families
in a far-away city, to interpret during interviews, to accompany
the officers on inspection trips through asylums, hospitals, refugee
stations and feeding posts. One of my daily itineraries stands
out in my mind: a former lady-in-waiting, a communist family
in need, a widow with nine children, and a Tartar woman who
had just sold her chief means of support—a goat. I shall never
forget these days, although I am a great believer in the general
policy of the American Relief Administration of not elaborating
on the harrassing details.

* **

Since I am back here, I am keeping in close touch with con-
ditions and I can see things straightening out. The crisis oc-
curred while I was there. Pressed by the famine, the new Gov-
ernment gradually began to relinquish the Utopian ideas to
which it had clung with a tenacity which seems criminal. Free
trade was resumed, shops started opening up timidly, money was
again in circulation, the newspaper boys counting in millions,
while the peasants still preferred to be paid in kind f o r anything
they sold. A State Bank was reinstalled and the gold basis of