…..seed and the people are too weak.  We are all weak and hungry.   The winter sowing was bad and the winter ploughing also bad.

             He took me along to his cottage.  His daughter and three little children.  Two of the smaller children were swollen.

 

         “If you had come before the Rev[lution] we would have given you chickens and eggs and milk and fine bread.  Now we have no bread in the house.  They are killing us.  People are dying of hunger.”

 

            There was in the hut a spindle and the daughter showed me how to make thread.  The peasant showed me his shirt which was home made and some fine sacking which was home-made.  “But the Bolsheviks are crushing that.  They won’t take it.  They want factory to make everything.

          The peasant ate some v[ery] thin soup with a scrap of potato.  No bread in the house. The white bread they thought was wonderful.     The hut had eight ikons, ?path. tawdry and cheap.

         Two soldiers came and they asked heaps of questions.  The bourgeoisie were crushing the working classes in England.  They shot down demonstrations.  Communists sat in prisons and England was going to declare war on Russia.

 

             They had come to arrest a peasant thief who had killed another. The thief had gone to steal potatoes from the hut of the other.   The owner of the hut had come out and the peasant had stabbed her with a knife. There were many cases of that happening.

 

               The Red Army soldier who came also said: “Don’t travel by night.  There are many wild uncultured men who want food and to steal.”

 

              Went to bed late, slept on floor.  In one bed president, his wife and her sister in small bed of child.

               Woke up next morning before eight.  The Communist leader of the next Kolkhoz was there.  Keen  rev:. “We’ve difficulties but they have to be overcome.

 

“There is seed in this village. Cattle decrease is disastrous.    There used to be 200 cattle.    Now 6 horses and cattle down by tremendous amount.” The New Tax, the Communists