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CHAPTER VI

children and education

There is one outstanding thought in connection with my short stay in Russia which never leaves me, and that is the conditions under which I found children living. I saw them at railway stations on the long journey to and from Petrograd to Moscow, in small villages on a drive 40 versts out of Moscow, and in the streets of the two capital cities ; and nowhere in Russia at any time did I see children who in appearance or physique could match the terrible specimens of child life I saw in Cologne in February, 1919. That children in Russia suffer hardships and privation from cold, hunger and disease is only too true. Typhus, cholera, smallpox are epidemic diseases which carry off old and young indiscriminately in Petrograd and Moscow. The Soviet Councils have put forth every effort to save the children : nowhere else in the world

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