Her successor was Alexandria Kolontai, the Bolshevik. I had imagined Kolontai as a large woman with short black hair and a defiant manner--a picture conjured unconsciously from all the wild stories about her that were afloat. Instead, she was a mild-looking little person, with large soft blue eyes, and wavy brown hair tinged with gray, caught in a simple knot behind her head. She had been arrested following the July riots, when an effort was made to prove Lenin and Trotzky pro-German; but she was released because of lack of evidence to hold her. I met her first at Smolney Institute, immediately after the Soviet had taken over the government. The Bolsheviki were trying to form the first Council of the People’s Commissaries. Kolontai had been mentioned as Commissary of Welfare. A friend introduced me to her, and we had tea together. She proved to be a simple, cultured, gracious person, and the author of an extensive and authoritative volume on the subject of maternity compensation. “Are you going to be a minister?” I asked her. “No, indeed,” she answered, with a laugh. “If I were to be a minister, I should become as stupid as all ministers.” Notwithstanding her denial, she was installed a few days later in the Ministry of Welfare. Several months afterwards I went to see her, to ask about facilities for the distribution of the condensed milk that the Red Cross had just received from America. I wickedly reminded her of that other day. “And I am getting stupid,” she said. “But what are we to do? There are so few of us to do the work.” Kolontai was a product of the upper class. She was married to a Russian engineer, and, according to the story she told me, had never even thought of social conditions until 1889, when she went with her husband to spend a week in a factory town. “I was given permission to spend my days in the factory, and it made such a profound impression on me that it changed my whole life. I went away feeling I could not live unless I did something to help change the condition of the Russian workers. I knew no Socialists, but I began to read, and found my way to Socialism through books. Later I went to Zurich and took a course in economics, became a revolutionist, and spent nine years in exile.” Kolontai shares the general Bolshevist feeling of the hopelessness of their cause, but she said: “Even if we are conquered, we have done great things. We are breaking the way, abolishing old ideas. The creative work of lifting the culture of the world will come first to other countries.”