IMPRESSIONS OF THE EIGHTH CONGRESS OF SOVIETS

Louise Bryant

It was with a much deeper feeling than mere curiosity or a
journalists instinctive desire to be as close as possible to a
great event that I walked through snow-covered Moscow on my way
to the opening of the Eighth All Russian Congress of Soviets.

I was very glad to see the trimness of the cavalry guards
encircling the square around the Grand Theatre. They were as hard
some and as well equipped as any cavalry in Europe. My personal
feeling about the Red Army always is and always will be that the
poorest soldier should have boots and a warm coat before the
first official back of the lines. The danger of softness growing
up in the Communist state does not lie in the direction of the
Red Army. Let us never lose sight of the fact that there would
have been no diplomats and no offices if it had not been for the
heroic endurance and the bared breasts of the soldiers of the
Red Army.

The orchestra pit was reserved for the press. From that
central point I had an excellent view of the speakers and the
presidium as well as of the delegates and the guests. I found no
lack of contrast between the MX plainly clothed delegates and the
old-time ostentatious richness of the red and gold theatre. I
looked about for a long time with the growing satisfaction in my
mind and heart that that gathering had the sublime harmony of
being all that revolutionists could expect it to be. It was
decidedly and strikingly a gathering of representative working
people. Honest and MX serious thoughts were written almost
painfully on the faces of their faces. It was good to see that they took
affair
the of being statesmen as a great and responsible
business. Never from the time Kalenin opened the Congress was
there the slightest lack of interest. During Lenin's long speech
they sat as wrapt in thought, as eager and as apparently capable
of great decisions as Rhodin's symbolic figure of labor. There
was about those men and women none of the nonchalance, the blaze
indifference to the consequences of decisions that one meets in
all the old parliaments of the world. I have had a good deal of