The Russian peasant is locally minded, and tied all his life to his one little patch of earth. He has thought little of Russia as a whole. Patriotism, as the French peasant knows it, is quite foreign in Russia. It was as easy for the Russian peasant to accept the doctrine of internationalism as that of nationalism. The Bolshevist idea of a community Soviet, electing delegates to a national Soviet, which could in turn elect delegates to an international Soviet forming the brotherhood of the peoples of all the world, appealed to his need for local self-government, and gave him at the same time a large ideal. It took little more effort to conceive oneself as belonging to a world than it took to imagine oneself part of an empire as vast as Russia. Even the city workers have a strong pull back to the soil. Many of them work in the factories in the winter, and return to the villages to help harvest the crops in summer. A friend of mine asked an _izvostchik_ where he came from. “I am one of Count Cherimesoff’s peasants,” he said. “How long have you been in Petrograd?” my friend questioned. “Thirty-five years,” he answered. After thirty-five years he still thought of himself, not only as a peasant, but as the property of a particular estate. I once said to a peasant from the government of Pskoff: “Are you a Russian?” “No; we are Pskovians.” A hungry student, who went to Pskoff during the holidays for the purpose of getting enough to eat, visited the local Peasants’ Council. The business before the meeting had to do with a drunken member. He had been drinking _hunja_, a home-made substitute for vodka, and was captured with a bottle of it in his possession. The council discussed his case, and wrote a paper to send to the committee whose business it was to handle such offenders. It takes much time to write a paper at a peasants’ meeting, and while it was being compiled the bottle, which was to have been offered as evidence, was emptied of its contents. An investigation was made, and it was found that one of the peasants had drunk it. The council debated some minutes, then wrote at the bottom of the paper: “The hunja being taken by Stepanoff, he is added to above-mentioned bottle and man, and sent to the committee.” The local Peasants’ Soviets were not always as expeditious as an efficiency age might demand; but usually there was a crude, simple justice in their decisions that was unknown in the days when their destinies were decided by the high-handed officers of the Tsar.