Most of the land-owners insisted that the peasant was at heart bourgeois, and that his interest in revolution would cease as soon as he got his land. Not long after the Bolshevik Revolution, I talked one day with one of the former secretaries in the Foreign Office. He was managing the strike of the employees of the various ministries against the Soviet government, and explained an elaborate scheme by which he and his associates expected to cut off the grain districts of the south and starve the revolutionary masses of the cities into submission. “The Bolsheviki,” he said, “are our real enemies. We don’t care about the theoretical Socialists--they just talk. But with the Bolsheviki it is a fight to a finish, and of course in the long run it can result only one way. When the soldier peasant returns to his earth and his family, he will become bourgeois. The peasant does not want to own land, as the Socialists want it. He wants his own private property. Eventually he will be on our side.” Many of the revolutionists shared the same belief about the peasants; but thus far they had proved as Nicholas Tchaikovsky said--as radical as the city workers. The greatest difficulty that each succeeding government experienced was that of making the peasants give up their grain. They wanted plows, cotton for their looms, shoes for themselves and their children; and the rubles they received had depreciated so greatly in value that they had no purchasing power. The peasants looked upon them as so many scraps of worthless paper. A Russian who had two estates down in the south told me of an excursion that he made to the government of Chernigoff in September. He went there to try to induce the peasants to sell their grain to the army. “There was one village,” said he, “where there were two thousand inhabitants. It was in the heart of the rich grain country. Since the previous December no official had been allowed to enter the village. The people had isolated themselves from the rest of Russia, and officials remained away under threat of being killed. I went alone on horseback, with a rifle and some ammunition. As I neared the place I saw the villagers coming out to meet me. I told them they must give bread to the army, which was in danger of starving at the front. I made what I thought was a forcible plea. When I finished, an old gray-haired peasant, who seemed to be the spokesman of the crowd, said: “‘That’s all very clever talk, but now listen to what we have to say. You want our bread. You offer to give us five rubles a _pood_ (forty pounds). What is five rubles to us? We want to buy shoes. For shoes we must pay a hundred rubles. We will keep our grain.’ “‘All right,’ I answered. ‘If you want to keep your grain you can keep it; but you need petrol, and sugar for your tea, and iron for your plows. If you do not give us grain we will not give you these.’