The dream of the Soviets was communally owned modern farm machinery that would lift Russian agriculture out of its primitive state and lessen the dreary drudgery of the peasant’s desperate struggle for life. No one who has not seen those peasant homes can know the sordidness of that struggle. Often the live stock, which was the peasants’ entire fortune, shared the same roof with the family. In one peasant hut I found the cow occupying the most comfortable corner of the room. I picked my way to the door through a barn-yard full of oozing black mud and refuse. A flock of chickens ran in and out, leaving the marks of their feet on the floor; and the barefoot peasant’s wife, on her frequent excursions to and fro, tracked the vile-smelling slush in with her. Plumbing there was none. Except in the big cities, there is none worthy of the name in Russia. The peasant’s weekly steam bath is his one debauch of cleanliness. Every village has its public bath. In the more primitive ones, a fire is built in a Russian stove. When the stones are thoroughly heated, tubs of water are thrown over them, and the steam pours forth. The bathers, after a good scrubbing, climb up on the wooden shelves that are built in tiers along the walls, and enjoy a thorough steaming. The fires are kept burning, and occasionally one of the bathers throws a fresh dipper of water on the stones. The samovar was frequently the one luxury. In the days before the vodka prohibition, the white liquor was the peasant’s only escape from the sordidness of life. It was a poor escape, because it meant that his wife and children paid with greater misery for his momentary relief. The unhappy peasant, harassed by political and economic oppression, did what miserable people do the world over--tried to make some one else miserable. Usually the peasant took it out on his wife, who in turn took it out on the children. Given the least opportunity, the Russian is the kindest, simplest, happiest soul in the world. Illiterate as he is, he frequently reveals a deeper wisdom than his more fortunate brothers overseas. We can teach him plumbing and tilling and business management. We can help him to a knowledge of things that grow between the covers of books. But we can learn from him also--those truths that are minted in misery, those truths that come out of the depths of the forest and off the vast silent spaces of the steppe, into the soul of a man. CHAPTER XIX WOMEN IN THE REVOLUTION There was no feminist movement in Russia. People usually become class-conscious in response to class oppression. In the old days in Russia the rights of women were slightly fewer than those of men, but the difference was so small as to be negligible. Their separate grievance as a class was swallowed up in the greater grievance of the mass. Russia’s struggle was the struggle of human beings as human beings, rather than human beings as males or females.