DECAY OF PETROGRAD.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLV, Issue 157, 1 October 1923, Page 1

DECAY OF PETROGRAD.

CITY FALLING DOWN. CHILDREN IN THE STREETS. A letter recently received in Riga from Petrograd, describing the state of affairs in that city, say;— “Many things have changed recently. The Government has allotted 10,000,000 gold roubles to. put the town in order, and some effort, not wholly unsuccessful, is being made to repair the drainage system and water supply. If -a further one billion roubles, could be added to the 10,000,000, Petrograd might really be made comparatively presentable again, but such fantastic sums are naturally unavailable, and so nothing hut patch work can be attempted. “Meanwhile destruction continues apace. First the great house on the Yekaterisky Prospect falls in. This is followed by one on the Sadovaya, another in Tairov, in Pereuloka, and so on. We have got so used to these collapses that they have ceased to arouse comment, though in other parts of Europe they would still be treated as sensations. Nothing- of the sensational is left for us. We have, gone through tire and water and nothing in heaven or earth ean astonish us any more. MISERY OE CHILDREN. “Physically and spiritually we are already condemned to death. In spite of our efforts we can hardly keep our heads above water now. It is unspeakably difficult for, on one hand, ive have nothing left to sell, and on the other hand the peasant who a year ago Avould snap up whatever useless articles might he offered to him in exchange for produce, has ceased to have any interest in the feiv things we can dispose of. “We still exist, hut avc cannot tell you how. Our misery is indescribable —our moral misery greater than our material. We have to give up our children to make them join in the struggle for bread by means inconceivable to western Europeans. The forms which the struggle takes would be beyond the power of a Bret Ilarte to describe. It is beyond dispute that most of the bourgeois children are utterly lost. “The fate of children who have no parents or relations is something teirible. They wander about in tlieir tens of thousands, cruel though it may sound. I can only compare them to homeless dogs, prowling through the streets of Stamboul. They are constantly being killed off by hunger and disease, but their ranks are rapidly refilled.”