It was easy to understand why these people, beset on all sides, were carrying on propaganda to defend their country. But I found that their propaganda did not end with this defensive material. By far the greater proportion of it was what might be called cultural. It was intended not only to waken the people to a realization that their own lives were threatened, but to teach them that they were a part of the great world that lay outside their own land. The art, the music, the literature and the science of the world was brought to them in simple form so that they could comprehend it and be stimulated to further reading and study. Whatever else the Russians may be they are not materialistic. I found them more eager for news and knowledge than for food, of which they got so little. Whatever news is obtained from the outside world is disseminated at once, by telegraph and bulletins, to all parts of the country. At the town of Praele a Bolshevist soldier said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “You have a great country in America.” “Why do you think it a great country?” I asked. “They are shooting negroes in Chicago and Washington now,” was his answer; “and that’s the country that talks about Soviet Russia being barbarous.” Naturally I was interested in the confirmation or refutation of the reports I had heard, that the Bolsheviki intend to spread their propaganda all over the world. Soviet officials talked frankly to me about prisoners and propaganda. They liked to take prisoners, they said. They only wished they had more food so that they could afford to take more of them. They didn’t want them to starve. They would like to take a million prisoners a day if they had enough food and paper. “After all,” they said, “our war is primarily a war of education.” At many points along the battlefronts I saw great banners stretched between posts, with letters large enough to be read a hundred yards away, telling the other side what the war was about. One, which I had translated for me on the Lettish front, read, “The Germans are marching on Riga. German soldiers are helping you to destroy the working class republic in Russia. If you want to defend Lettland go back and drive the Germans out of Riga.” The Russians placed great reliance on this battlefront propaganda. I found evidence in the Lettish ranks of the effectiveness of these tactics.