LIFE IN RUSSIA TO-DAY.
"I SAW more opera in Petrograd during the months it was supposed to be running knee deep in blood, than I ever did in all the rest of my life," said Wilfred R. Humphries, worker for the American Y.M.C.A. and later for the Americar Red Cross in Russia during its reddest months. Humphries, young, unaffected, eager-eyed, of the college organisation worker type, was giving his first lecture on Russia at the People's Institute, 1256 Market St., San Francisco, Thursday evening April 10, and in the course of it showing slides of Bolshevik scenes that he brought with him when he left Russia four months ago. "Besides the opera, there were Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, Shakespeare's plays and vaudeville. In two weeks that Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" ran, I never succeeded in getting in line early enough to get a ticket.
"In Moscow I went to night school three evenings a week to learn Russian, and other evenings attended political meetings at Smolny Institute and other places. And every evening I saw women coming out of theatres in twos and threes unattended by men, Starting out across the city, street-carless and dark, with no fear whatever.
"At this time schools were being organised all over Russia, I remember in Petrograd seeing a poster announcing the opening of a kindergarten that said the children would be served with a hot lunch. This was the chaos and anarchy you read about.
"I heard stories of chaos and anarchy in Russia too. From the time I landed in Vladivostok—where then the red flag was flying—through the seven thousand miles of the journey to Moscow, we were met by the fleeing bourgeoisie and regaled with stories of terror and atrocity, hunger, typhus and murder. Typhus was killing a thousand a day, said the fugitives. Three-fourths of Moscow was burned to the
