BEFORE going to Russia I was warned by people I met in Scandinavia and Finland that disease of every sort and kind was raging in both Petrograd and Moscow ; that it was sheer madness on my part to go into the country without previously being inoculated against half-a-dozen diseases. As it turned out I […]

I LEFT MOSCOW on Saturday, February 28th, at midday. Accompanying mewere two British soldiers who were being released owing to ill-health. They had been placed in my charge by the Soviet, Government. We were a merry party on the platform. To see us off were the British chaplain and two or three other friends of […]

DURING My not short life I have met distinguished people in all parts of the world. In our own country the late King Edward took part in a meeting of a Royal Commission before which I was a witness. At the close of my evidence, together with a number of other people, I talked and […]

The great monastery of Simonof, about four miles distant, will probably be the first which travelers will visit from Moscow. The drive would be a pleasant one if the pavement were not so agonizing. We turn to the left by the bridge beneath the Kremlin, and skirt the river for some distance. There are many […]

From the Volga look in another direction—across the Okka—and there, on a low, almost inundated flat, exposed to the waters of both rivers, lies a scene of bustle and activity unparalleled in Europe. A vast town of shops, laid out in regular streets, with churches, hospitals, bar-racks, and theaters, now tenanted by more than a […]

The people of Warsaw appeared to us wonderfully lively and cheerful compared with the Russians. Michelet, who calls the Lithuanians “children of the shadows,” speaks of the Poles as “children of the sun,” and they seemed to us to deserve it. The writings of the great national poet Mickiewicz are full of vigor and animation, […]

We set out at nine o’clock to explore the Winter Palace. It forms a quadrangle with several courts, about the size of the palace in Berlin, but the exterior of the latter is much more imposing; it has one story more and the great dome. The Winter Palace, with all its pillars half inserted into […]

In the beginning of the eleventh century, Kieff, after Constantinople, was the largest and richest town in Eastern Europe; but the chronicler Ditmar records that in 1124, the year before the death of Monomachus, in a great fire which occurred, as many as six hundred churches and chapels were burned in Kieff. This fact shows […]

Classic architecture, with its grand, cold out-lines, is more wearisomely solemn than ever amid these grotesque, high-colored palaces, and this tumultuous crowd of churches, darting toward heaven a gilded forest of cupolas, domes, pyramidal towers, and bulbous belfries. You might believe yourself, at sight of this Muscovite architecture, in some chimerical Asiatic city—you could easily […]

It overhangs a wide and beautiful bay of the Black Sea, situated near two important estuaries, called the Khodjabeyskoi and the Kuialskoi estuaries, both formed by the great Kuialnek rivers. Its principal division extends along the top of a bold range of cliffs, commanding an extensive seaview, and the ever-varying clusters of the ships of […]