Letters from Russia 1919.

While revolution was spreading throughout Russia and the

Bolsheviks were establishing their reign of terror, Ouspensky was living in conditions of great danger and hardship in various temporary quarters in South Russia. From 1917 to 1919 he, and those around him, were completely cut off from the outside world, unable to receive or send news even as far as the next town, constantly on the alert to avoid being picked up and murdered by the Bolsheviks.

In 1919, Ouspensky, who was a professional journalist, found a means to send a series of articles to the New Age, which, under the skilful editorship of A. R. Orage, was the leading literary, artistic and cultural weekly paper published in England. These Letters from Russia 1919 give a detached but horrific description of the total breakdown of public order in Russia and show that Ouspensky foresaw with unusual clarity the inevitability of the tyranny described by Solzhenitsyn some fifty years later.