But enough of politics, which to my simple mind is usually a bore. I might add, however, as a personal chuckle, that my case came perilously near causing a ministerial crisis and overturning the Mongol cabinet. Not that this is anything to boast of in these days when cabinets almost daily stump their toes on this or that insignificant pebble and sprawl headlong; but it was some satisfaction to know that, if I could not snap-shot Urga, at least I could put it in an uproar. The cabinet, it seems, deeply resented the action of the upstart _Okhrana_, both in replying to me direct and in reversing the decision of the ministers, and the question of resigning _en bloc_ as a protest was, I am creditably informed, debated long and vigorously. I could not of course, even as an unofficial representative of the slandered American nation, take such an attack as the _Okhrana_ document lying down. I replied to it sternly, therefore, in proper diplomatic form, addressing myself to the foreign minister, who received my reply in due humility. But my hope that by thus again stirring things up I might still succeed in being the cause of a national crisis did not, according to the latest reports from Urga, materialize.
There can be no other reason than pique or pure ignorance for refusing any one permission to take photographs in Urga. It has no fortresses or works of defense surrounded with secrecy; as far as the presence of Soviet soldiers and “advisers” is concerned, the lens could catch nothing that could not be told as effectively in words. Simple, rather brute-faced young Russians in shoddy gray uniforms with a red star sewed upon them were about the only outward evidences of Bolshevik occupation. Here or there one or two of them stood on guard with fixed bayonets which they were even more careless than the average soldier in flourishing about unoffending ribs. Others, off duty, prowled about singly or in small groups in quest of anything appealing to their rudimental appetites which might turn up. Out toward the wireless station erected by the Chinese, where the Russian soldiers used the war-ruined office of an American mining company as barracks, detachments of fifty to a hundred of them might be met marching in close ranks at a funeral pace and singing in chorus, a rather engaging custom inherited from czarist days. It was evident, not merely from their appearance but by the way any suggestion of authority went quickly to their heads, that almost all these uncouth youths were of the peasant or the lowest city class. Though I had business in the _Okhrana_ several times a day during all my stay in Urga, never once was I permitted to enter it, even when officially summoned, until whatever dull-faced soldier happened to be on guard at the door had halted me long enough to emphasize his authority and his dislike of the class which still dared to wear white collars. What was worse, as in every case of evil example copied by still lower strata of society, was the studied rudeness, the childish yet overbearing insolence of the Mongol soldiers, who were much more numerous, in their efforts to outdo in “redness” their Russian models.