Page:My Disillusionment In Russia.djvu/248

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
218
MY DISILLUSIONMENT IN RUSSIA

patients. Ignorant officials are given power over the medical profession, continuously harassing the doctors in their work." The doctor himself had been repeatedly arrested for sabotage because of his inability to comply with the numerous decrees and orders, frequently mutually contradictory. It was the result of a system in which political usefulness rather than professional merit played the main role. It often happened that a first-class physician of well-known repute and long experience would be suddenly ordered to some distant part to place a Communist doctor in his position. Under such conditions the best efforts were paralysed. Moreover, there was the general suspicion of the intelligentsia, which was a demoralizing factor. It was true that many of that class had sabotaged, but there were also those who did heroic and self-sacrificing work. The Bolsheviki, by their indiscriminate antagonism toward the intelligentsia as a class, roused prejudices and passions which poisoned the mainsprings of the cultural life of the country. The Russian intelligentsia had with its very blood fertilized the soil of the Revolution, yet it was not given it to reap the fruits of its long struggle. "A tragic fate," the doctor remarked; "unless one