Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 271, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 December 1917 — THINKING ALOUD IN RUSSIA [ARTICLE]

THINKING ALOUD IN RUSSIA

Crowd* Assemble on Streets to Participate in Debate* Whieh Really Amount to Very Little. Along the Nevsky that evening Id the parks, and open spaces, little herd* of people were packed together as sheep crowd together under a tree on an August afternoon. In the center two persons debated, shaking their hands in each others’ faces. They had been talking like that for weeks all over Russia, writes Arthur Ruble in Collier’s Weekly. * All Petrograd was one big village meeting—the village habit of talking over together the village's business being transferred to the capital. And coming in late at night from the edge of town, you could see every now and then these black little clumps of people, still talking, still huddled there, vaguely pathetic, like sheep under the trees. > - -

‘ Any one of hundreds of excited phrases flung off in these little debating clubs might, I suppose, have sent a man to jail or Siberia a generation ago. Now they could say anything, gather anywhere, listen as long as they wanted. Russians have a gift for talking and a happy lack of self-conscious-ness in doing it They really like to make speeches. Mr. Root, in one of the lighter moments of his stay in Petrograd, remarked that one of the tragedies of the Russian revolution was the turning loose on the world 180,000,000 orators. Now one saw some old peasant a giant of a man, come down with a barge of firewood from the north, perhaps, holding forth with great quaintness of phrase and gesture to an amused group of city folks. Or while one talked some expansive old fellow, in the long coat cap and boots of the old-style merchant would be doing a sort of comic accompaniment on the edge of the crowd, throwing out his arms and putting a “galubchlk moi” (“my little dove”) between every other sentence. - Much of .this talk which looks interesting—so expressive is voice and gesture —turns out to be a mere sort of thinking aloud.