The prices ran high. But--the people had plenty of Bolshevist money. However, this money was greatly depreciated in value. Nevertheless, the vendors at the market expected as many of my Imperial rubles for any purchase as they asked the residents of the city, who, of course, had local currency. So now I understood that the apple which I had bought in the restaurant at a dollar and twelve cents (or nine Imperial roubles), would, at nine roubles Bolshevist money, have cost a resident of Chita, only about ten cents. What had happened to me, can best be expressed in this wise: A man takes silver dollars to a city where disks have been stamped “One dollar,” and where the merchants do not care whether he gives them tin or silver--the price is the same! So the apples were not high; the explanation is that money was plentiful and cheap. And now I understood why Vladivostok was worrying over interior statistics. The department heads mistook high costs reported in Bolshevist rubles, for lack of food. But those statistics related mainly to sugar, tea, salt, candles and other staples, commonly regarded as necessities, but turned by the speculators into luxuries. Most of the Siberian speculators are of the pack-peddler variety, because freight shipments are costly, and the goods liable to loss. One Chita shipper paid seventy-five thousand rubles for a car in Harbin to move sugar to the Trans-Baikal. The engineer got one thousand rubles to haul it; the conductor of the train got one thousand rubles to insure the car’s being cut off at Chita; and I heard that the side-track was rented to the shipper while the car was being unloaded. He assured me that he had doubled his money in spite of paying so much “grease.” But the railroad men, who are opposed to “Exploitation of the masses,” thought they were making the capitalistic speculator pay the “grease!” Those railroad men had not been paid for six months, and some of us Allied officers worried about it, and gave the crews credit for staunch loyalty to the Russian cause by sticking to their jobs. Also, a large Red Cross train went up the line and presented these poor, starving magnates who ran the trains, with new clothing! Captain B----, a Russian serving Semenoff, invited me to his room in the hotel for tea. His wife brought from the wardrobe baskets of cookies and candies. Trunks disgorged tinned fish, bar chocolate and tinned milk. In one corner of the room was a sack of sugar; in another were sacks of flour. Those living quarters resembled a corner in the warehouse of a wholesale grocer. And everybody was stocked up like that. Moreover, they all had orders with the local dealers to send them more provisions whenever more arrived. It was a case of everybody his own grocer. I had found the Chita stores bare. No wonder.