“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I was afraid of this, and I voted to put the wine in the Neva; but we needed money so badly, some of the others thought it was a shame to destroy it. The sailors were going to load it on the barges and take it to Kronstadt to keep until we could send it away. But provokators told the soldiers the sailors were taking it to drink. Now we are going to break the bottles, and pump out the cellars, and finish with it all.” It was harder to do than to say. For weeks afterward they kept discovering more and more wine-cellars. The wine pogroms seem always to have started in the same way. Some unknown person would telephone to a hospital where there were convalescing soldiers, or to a barracks in the neighborhood, and announce that there was free wine to be had at such and such an address. As the crowd began to gather, there was usually some one in the street with a few bottles of wine to get things started. Before long the soldiers were demanding wine and more wine. Some one conveniently broke in the door, or perhaps an irate proprietor in opposition to the Soviet government invited them in to help themselves. Frequently, before the disturbance was quelled, there was shooting. The People’s Commissaries went systematically to work to find all the cellars. Wherever they discovered one, they sent in a group of trusted soldiers and Red Guardsmen whose revolutionary spirit was sufficiently strong to withstand the temptation of the liquor, to smash the bottles. One afternoon I was motoring over on the Petrograd side of the Neva, when I passed a big public garden. A guard of soldiers had been placed around the entrance to warn all passers-by to walk in the street. A fire-engine was busily pumping. At first I thought it was a fire, but I saw neither smoke nor flames. I got out of the car, and asked one of the guards what was happening. He told me they were smashing three hundred thousand bottles and pumping the wine out with the fire-engine. From a back entrance two soldiers came with a third whose steps were suspiciously unsteady. His companions, leading him off to arrest, were pouring a volley of abuse upon him, accusing him in picturesque language of being a traitor to the Revolution and several kinds of good-for-nothing with which only the Russians are familiar. The man had slipped in through the back gate when no one was looking. The young soldier in command of the crowd ordered that an extra guard be placed at the gate and no one allowed to pass.