Dismay darkened their days throughout the twenty months of their sojourn in Russia. Their official welcome quickly spent itself. They began to look about for themselves, to speak privately with fellow anarchists, and to seek explanations of events and practices not to their liking. The twin demons of inefficiency and stupidity--judged by their American and anarchist standards respectively--leered at them wherever they went; the black walls of bureaucracy rose before them at every turn. Perverse cruelty on the part of the government came to their attention with distressing frequency. All their early efforts at rationalization failed to excuse the needless hunger, the mass arrests, the arbitrary executions. They discussed these events with prominent Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky and Lenin, in the hope of persuading them to mitigate conditions injurious to the revolution. In each instance the response was either enigmatic or equivocal. Angelica Balabanova, then secretary of the Third International and later as disaffected an exile as herself, told Emma that life was "a rock on which the highest hopes are shattered. Life thwarts the best intentions and breaks the finest spirits." Alexandra Kollontay, the hard-headed diplomat, chilled her with the advice to stop "brooding over a few dull gray spots." Even Lenin impressed her and Berkman as callous and unsympathetic. Time only deepened their perturbation. After eight months of life in Russia, Emma began to doubt the revolution itself. "Its manifestations were so completely at variance with what I had conceived and propagated as revolution that I did not know any more which was right. My old values had been shipwrecked and I myself thrown overboard to sink or swim." The climax of her quarrel with the Bolsheviki came a year later during the attack upon the mutinous Kronstadt sailors. That hundreds of true sons of the revolution should be shot down for sympathizing with striking workers seemed to her a crime worse than any committed by the Czarist regime. Neither she nor Berkman could any longer stomach such ruthless authoritarianism and both left the country as soon as they were able to obtain visas. Once past the Soviet border, the hapless pair became true Ishmaelites, without either home or country. No government offered them asylum, and few were willing to provide them with even temporary visas. Devoted friends had great difficulty in getting Swedish officials to permit the two refugees a long-enough stay in Stockholm to procure visas for a sojourn in Germany.