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i9i7] EARLY MEMORIES OF MOSCOW 483
were, ended by reviewing our recollections of Moscow,
our mutual friends, our relations, our acquaintances.
Those who have read the very vivid memoirs of Prince
Kropotkin know that he was brought up by a grasping
and often brutal father in an atmosphere of revolting
abuse of the serfdom which still existed then. I myself
was fortunate enough to have been only about four
years old when the ever-blessed hand of the Emperor
Alexander II. swept away this blemish which was
disgracing Russia ; my parents had just left foreign parts
and the diplomatic world, and they sought the society of
people, refined like them, like them detesting vulgarity
and coarseness, having like them intellectual interests.
Now Moscow society at that period possessed many
persons and many families with similar tastes.
Consequently my memories were infinitely brighter and
softer than those of my host. But nevertheless this
recalling of the past in its setting—so original, so dear to
every really Russian heart—of old Moscow, established
one more link between me and the old Revolutionist,
the old gentleman who had become an Anarchist through
reaction against the injustice, the cruelty, the
exploitation which had embittered his soul from his earliest
youth. I was sorry to part from this sympathetic,
interesting and sincere man, with whom I had a greal deal
more in common than with many of my good friends
in society or in my profession.
But other revolutionaries were about to return to
Russia—via Stockholm—in quite a different frame of
mind from that of Struve, Burtzeff, or Kropotkin.
I have a most vivid recollection of my first encounter
with the kind of people who have since become so
notorious under the epithet of Bolsheviks (majority
party). I went to a public meeting in the great
"Auditorium " of Stockholm, a meeting presided over by M.
Branting and at which Madame Marika Stjerrnstett, the
brilliant and congenial Swedo-French lecturer, was to
speak on the horrible Armenian massacres and to rouse
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