After so long a bombardment, I expected to find Irkutsk laid waste. But, on the whole, surprisingly little damage was done. Certain buildings held by the Younkers had been battered about, one or two schools and a printing establishment had been burnt outright. The soldiers had plundered and then set fire to Vtorova’s--the Harrod’s of Irkutsk. There was also some miscellaneous bombardment of houses in which lived capitalists obnoxious to the Bolsheviks. This was mean and dastardly, but fortunately the shooting was very bad, and the houses suffered little. Considering that the town was quite at the mercy of a victorious and revolutionary soldateska, it came off marvellously well. The soldiers looted whatever houses they were quartered in, but there was little forcible entry. One Jewish tradesman told me how a party of soldiers broke into his shop and demanded food. He was in great fear of the Bolsheviks, and thought they were going to rob him of all he possessed. But they only took thirty pounds of sausage, and left him without troubling about anything else. He was amused, because the sausages happened to be “kosher,” and contained no pork at all. I am the more inclined to insist on the comparative moderation of the soldiers, because the most alarming reports of the Irkutsk fighting have appeared in American and English magazines. Here is a specimen. In an article which appeared in _Harper’s_ and the _Fortnightly_ for November, 1918, an American journalist says that a Russian gave him the following account of the fight: “We had a nice little fuss here in January at the time the Red Guards captured the city. Some of the finest buildings were shelled. Three thousand citizens lost their lives after a terrible siege in the public museum. Several Englishmen and Americans were killed.” Scarcely one of these statements is true; in fact, the passage is pure invention on the face of it. The fighting took place, not in January, but in December. Only two thousand fell altogether, of these few were non-combatants, and not a single one was American or English. [SN: UNCHAINED RUSSIA]