trafficking.

At the same time there was real suffering on the part of peasants in far
distant areas who could not get their currency up for exchange or for
stamping and punching which itself was finally necessary to even get the
eighty-forty rate. They felt mistreated. To their simple hearts and
ignorant minds, it was nothing short of robbery by the distant London
bankers. Soldiers on the far distant fronts were caught also in the
currency reform. Some of the fault was neglect by their own American
officers and some was indifference to the subject by those American
officers at Archangel who were in position to know what was going to be
the result of the attempt to peg the currency at a fixed rate.

An officer who was in Archangel during the summer on Graves Commission
service after the American units had been withdrawn, reports that
speculators for a song bought up great bales of the old Kerensky and
Nickolai currency supposed to be cancelled, dead, defunct stuff, and
when there was a considerable evacuation of central Russians who had
been for months refugees in Archangel, this currency came out of hiding,
and its traffickers realized a handsome profiteerski by selling it to
the returning people at sixty to the pound sterling, for in interior
Russia the old stuff was still in circulation. At any rate that was
Shylokov's advertisement. During the summer, the money market, says
Lieut. Primm, became a violent wonder. On one day a person could not
obtain two hundred and fifty roubles for one hundred North Russian
roubles and a day or two later he might be importuned to take three
hundred old for one hundred new.

Neither the soldiers nor the Russians saw any justice in this
flip-flopping of the currency market, to which of course they themselves
were contributors. The thing they saw clearly was that when they had
need of English credit (that is, checks) to send money to London banks
or when they wanted to buy goods from England or America, then they
could buy only with the new, the guaranteed rouble, which might be dear,
even at one hundred and twenty-five to the pound sterling and was dearer
of course in terms of old roubles, the more the demand was for the new
roubles which were in the hands of speculators who manipulated the
market as sweetly for themselves as the American profiteers with their
oral and written advertisements manipulate our foodstuffs and goods for
us. On the other hand, if the soldier or peasant or