Sketches of Soviet Russia Author:John Varney Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ENTERING A NEW RUSSIA There was a hidden perturbation of heart and of head as we were leaving England in April, 1918, for a new country, Russia! — for a count... more »ry of strange social monsters with uncertain and inaccurately- reported habits and disposition. So affected by the prospects was I, myself, that that last evening we spent in London, I could not laugh at my roommate when he asked me for directions in writing a will. From Newcastle we steered a zig-zag course through submarine territory. German submarines were watching for English boats off the North Cape at that time, and, in cases, failing to destroy these, would, just out of spite, sink little Norwegian fishing smacks in the vicinity. To our surprise, we did not find it excessively cold in those arctic waters, the reason being that we were following the Gulf Stream to one of its termini in the neighborhood of Murmansk. Murmansk was our terminus, a Russian port open the year round, located about 200 miles east of the Norwegian North Cape, at the inner extremity of an indentation of the Kola Peninsula, rather difficult to navigate. The town of Murmansk, built up with the coming of the railroad just completed, resembled an American western boom-town or one of the new small cities of Siberia. Most of the structures, excepting the substantial log government buildings, were low log shacks, protected in the winter from the cold by moats and banked walls of close-fibered roots and tree branches, and by wool stuffed into the cracks between the logs. The many-houred sun of the northern spring had then — about April 20 — half- melted the snow and brought the roads to a very muddy and almost impassable condition. The following winter many Allied troops were quartered in Murmansk, and it was feared that with the coming of sprin...« less