For those illiterates in occupations requiring eight hours labor, the working day was reduced to six, giving them the opportunity to spend the full two hours in school. The six-hour day in force in the hazardous occupations was reduced to four hours. Soviet officials informed me that passage of the decree did not mean that those who were unable to assimilate knowledge would be denied the right to work. That disciplining would be invoked only for those capable ones who wilfully refused to study. The measure was but one of the efforts of the Soviet Government to hasten the development of the intellectual side of the people’s life and to raise culture in general. Under Czars there were few public schools, and these were inefficiently conducted. Seventy-five percent of the people could not read or write. I inquired about the “Red Terror” in Petrograd. “Yes,” I was informed, “there were two or three days of Red Terror in August, 1918, when Lenin was shot, in Moscow.” The rank and file were devoted to this man, and when they heard of the attempt on his life they turned loose, and it took three days of hard work on the part of the government officials and the government party members to stop the rush of the mob. Probably two thousand were killed, and during the six weeks that Lenin lay between life and death great crowds of working people watched the bulletins from his physicians that were posted on walls in all parts of the city from day to day. I was told that quite aside from his value to the government itself, it was a godsend to Russia that he survived, because his death would have meant an uprising that would have spared no human being believed to be in opposition to Lenin and the Soviet Government. Even Zinovieff is reported to have lost his head for a little time, when he heard of the precarious condition of his old friend and comrade. A Russian friend of mine in America had asked me to look for his father who lived two or three blocks from St. Isaac’s Square when last heard from four years before. I found the old man in his place of business—a picture frame store. He lived with his wife in two or three rooms in the rear. He had been in business for years, and was one of the bourgeoisie of the olden days. When I asked him if he had been disturbed by the Bolsheviki he said that during the two years since the revolution his store had been visited once by the authorities—an officer came to inquire for the address of some person living in the immediate neighborhood. I asked him how he liked the new regime. “I don’t like it because food is scarce and prices high.” He showed me a small picture frame. “Before the war I could sell this for 70 kopecks, now I must charge 40 rubles,—but then maybe it was the war and not the revolution that caused the high prices,—I don’t know.”