4 DECEMBER 1920, Page 3

An Exchange telegram from Berlin says that the Russian paper

Rabotehi Golos reports violent dissension among the Bolsheviks owing to the influence exercised over Lenin by a girl named Olga Gorokhoff. She is known as the "Red Ras- putin," and is said to live luxuriously and to require Soviet commissaries to kiss her hands. We should like much more evidence of this before we believe it. Nevertheless, this is the kind of thing that does happen in revolutions. There was a famous mot attributed at Oxford to Dean Buckland. When a don at dinner complained that in the words "Reform Cutlets" on the bill of fare " Reform " was spelt with an "e," Buckland remarked that "Reform always ends with ' e ' mute (dr/mute)." Similarly one might say that Revolution has an essentially feminine ending. Or let us say that a bouleversement du monde generally ends in the demi-monde. Readers of the history of the French Revolution will remember the part played by the "Madonna of Thermidor," Madame Tallien. And if madonnas begin to turn up in the Kremlin at Moscow it will at least be according to plan.