In the seat next to me was a little Bessarabian soldier with black beady eyes and a short, bristling mustache. He had a merry face that crinkled when he smiled. Every now and then he gave his head a queer little shake of amazed admiration and whispered: “He’s a wise man. He’s a wise man.” Lenin was saying for the simple Bessarabian just what he would like to have been able to say for himself. A few of the most conservative men remained unconvinced. The irrepressible Krameroff shouted: “Stydno, Lenin, stydno!” (Shame.) But the vote proved that Lenin was voicing the will of all but a small minority. Soukhonoff, of the Novia Jizn group, whose leader was Maxim Gorky, gained the floor, and protested against the suppression of the press. “The people even in Petrograd don’t know what transpired in the walls of Tauride. It is more than a crime; it is a blunder,” he said. Soukhonoff voiced the attitude of the _Intelligentzia_. The case of Maxim Gorky is rather typical, though Gorky is of a more extreme nature and expresses himself more violently than most of the _literati_. They were all theoretical advocates of revolution, but they shrank from the practice of it. The logic of events found them out of sympathy with revolution in the very stage of development that they had prayed and fought for. During the Kerensky régime, Gorky, through his paper, blasted at the government, and his voice was the loudest, urging the crowd to more extreme measures. When the crowd moved, as crowds always move, in its own way, Gorky could not follow. Ever since the March Revolution he had been ill most of the time, and thus shut off from contact with facts. His opinions necessarily had to be based on reports carried in to him. The woman who has been his companion for many years was a Cadet, and bitter against the Bolsheviki. Much of his news sifted in through her, and naturally he has been influenced by her. Gorky has made his great contribution to Russian revolution--a contribution no man can deny. It is a pity that in his old age he should find himself out of step with his comrades. The revolutionists of the literary group are not happy in the present situation. Through the years they fought for free speech, free press, and free ballot. Suddenly they found the new revolutionists, pragmatists to the last degree, being forced by the exigencies of the situation to use the very same weapons as those of monarchical invention. In order to accept the new gods set up in the economic temple by the proletariat leaders, the literati had to deny, for the moment at least, their old gods. Few of them could make the necessary mental somersault. They found themselves, by virtue of denouncing something in which they did not believe, forced into a defense of something in which they also did not believe.