Entry 3 - Busy Faces

A colossal statue of Tsar Alexander III being dismantled (1918)

Everybody is sure and proud that he is building up the new Russia.
Lawyers and doctors, engineers and priests, all run with busy
faces -- they think a statesman of today must run -- everybody gives
orders, counter-orders, nobody carries them out, nobody listens. There
are about 200,000 Napoleons in Petrograd today; as they multiply by
section, this number will be enormous before long. The situation,
however, does not improve....

In the office there was quite a discussion of the probabilities, and
I was listening to the younger people. Criticism and "my own opinion"
are the main sicknesses. Perhaps the private initiative used to be so
hardly oppressed, that it comes out at present in excess.

Why should lawyers be convinced, that their profession gives them
the right, primo genio, to be statesmen? I should suggest an
archeologist, or a man in charge of a lighthouse.