PREFACE 15
military coat was found in his rooms. He left the fortress to
appear before his judges a dying man, and he actually died
soon after. His body, as I learned later, was buried in a common
grave. In Petrograd I had to visit the German cemeteries one
after the other and look through the burial certificates in
order to discover the place of his interment. On looking through
these certificates I discovered that dozens of the people in
question had died of starvations or, as the technical expression
was, "of exhaustion/5 The certificates I held in my hands bore
the names of famous men of science, members of ancient and
noble families, and all of them had died of starvation. . . *
It was just a sample of the great tragedy which had been enacted
in Petrograd during the previous year. For the first time I saw
exactly what the failure of our endeavours at Geneva had meant.
I must here record another grievous experience in Petrograd.
On the day bo§>re Palm Sunday of 1921 I went to look for
certain relatives whose house was in the Galernaya. It was a
glorious day. On reaching the house I was told that my relatives
had gone to Estonia and that I should obtain further informa-
tion from another tenant living in the house. I called on the
lady, the widow of an official, and found her in the middle of
the room, while on the sofa in the corner lay a boy of about six,
worn to a skeleton. The woman told me, weeping, that he was
her last child, and that two other boys had died of malnutrition
(i.e. famine) during the previous winter. The piteous sight of
the starving boy on that glorious early spring day always comes
before my eyes when I think of the position of suffering people
in Russia.
I called on some other acquaintances during this visit, and
everywhere I found the same picture of half-starved people
in a state not only of physical, but also of mental collapse.
Once proud men and women were now broken to such a
degree that they would have been ready to debase themselves
before anyone in exchange for a piece of meat or any other
food* I also began to understand how it was possible for