LIFE IN MOSCOW TO-DAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18459, 24 July 1923, Page 7

LIFE IN MOSCOW TO-DAY.

PHYSICAL AND MORAL DECAY A special correspondent of the Times, who recently returned from Moscow after a stay of ■ several months, in a series of articles on " Russia as it is to-day, gives the •. following description of conditions of life in Moscow:— " Before the Bolshevik revolutions house property in Moscow was in very much tne same position as house property in London. Some of it was Crown land. The rest belonged to private • owners and to great companies and these collected their rents in the usual way. Immediately after the Revolution all houses were declared Government property, and a Government bureau called ' The House Bureau' was formed to administer _ it. This burea - "a at present under the direction of a gentleman who calls himself Comrade London. • That is not ■ his real name, of course, - but few of the Bolsheviks seem to have real names. The result of this change is that rents -now less than they, were before the Revolution; in other words, the oocupant of a flat pays less to the Bolsheviks than he did to the former landlords. . This satisfactory state of things is not, however, without its drawbacks, for. as no citizen of _ Moscow has a right- to more than a ridiculously small cubio space (which space was twice lessened during my seven months' stay), outsiders' can be planted on a family at the whim of Comrade London, and even a person of the opposite sex may be put into your room. The Houre Committee displays as much hostility . to the idea of the family as the Soviet Government does it-self, and it takes every, opportunity of breaking the family up, or at least of violating the privacy of family life.

No Privacy of Homo Life. " It is most difficult to prevent strangers being quartered on one, and these strangers are generally the worst specimens of Red . workmen, permanently workless, and, in addition, dirty and quarrelsome, or the worst type of Jewish student. Cultured peopia of good family and former wealth e*<i especially liable to- be thus persecuted by Bolshevik officials, who seem intent on destroying every vestige of decency and civilisation. I know dozens of respectable people who have had persons eminently undesirable forced upon them, with the result that their home privacy has been utterly ruined. 'In one flat, occupied •by a professor, the inmates are now so numerous that to {jet a wash at the water-tap in the morning, it is necessary to take one's place; in a long queue; and the queue system also prevails in other parts of' the fl&t. Firewood, cutlery, and cooking utensils are constantly being stolen, with the result: that, instead of storing all , the ■ firewood ; in the : basement, as was done in pre-revolutionary times, each of the occupants of a house stores it in his own room, making that boom smaller and scarcely habitable. " I cannot describe in detail how unspeakably soiled are the bathrooms, etc. I must leave that to the reader's imagination. Some of the unsuitable inmates introduce men and women even more unsuitable than themselves, with the result that there is sometimes noise , all night long, and occasionally loathsome diseases are contracted by innocent children.

Bolshevism a Levelling Down. " Bolshevism is a< levelling down instead of a levelling up. I never realised what a levelling down it was until.on one occasion when I called on a Moscow lady whom I had known formerly—not as a rich woman, for she had never been rich but as a cultured person with an exquisite taste in music, • literature;, and painting. Her husband and brother had been murdered in atrocious circumstances by , the Bolsheviks, and all the male members of her family but one had died or been killed in the war. She was trying to support seven young children on the equivalent of two pounds sterling a month, and in order to gain this miserable pittance she had to absent herself from home all day. Even when she returned, late at night, and very tired, she spent some time making artificial flowers for the children to sell in the street. The inevitable result was that' the children were neglected, and had developed a coarseness of mariner which contrasted disagreeably; with the fine manners of their mother.

"As a- matter of .. fact, the v so-called ' workers ' ; are devouring the fine city of Moscow as a swarm of . locusts devours standing crops. I have visited many of the houses they occupy, and found them in a lamentable plight. Valuable mahogany furniture : has been burned for fuel door-knobs, , electric fittings, locks, hooks, water-cocks, marble mantelpieces, waterclosets. window glass, and , even nails have been wrenched from their places and sold in the market. Some members of the ' Workers' Fractions ' seemed to have no other work to do than to sell these, things. The outsides of some fine houses, once as good as the best in Park Lane, have become - caked with filth owing to the slops which are thrown from the windows and which sometimes drench pas-sers-bv who do not attend quickly enough to the warning shouts from above. Hundreds of these homes have been reduced to s"ch a condition that they are uninhabitable, and the " workers " are now moving into other houses, which thev will soon reduce to the same condition. Thus, here as in everv other ''department/ of the national life. Bolshevism is eating up the reserve capital of the Russian people "