Diary Revealed

At Tobolsk, Siberia, a bearded man, guarded by respectful soldiers, scratched peacefully in his diary:

"Nov. 4. ... For the last two days no agency telegrams. . . . Perhaps nothing of importance is happening in the large cities. . ."

This "nothing of importance" was the "November Revolution" of 1917. Out of it clanked and reared the present Communist State, trampling down Kerensky's puny and irresolute Republic. Last week the present masters of Communist Russia made public, contemptuously, the diary of the onetime Tsar of all the Russias, written at Tobolsk. On Nov. 14, when Nikolai Lenin's dictatorship was six days old, Diarist Nicholas Romanov was still in ignorance of its existence and jotted placidly: "Today is the birthday of dear mama* and the 23rd anniversary of our marriage. At noon we heard prayers. The choir muddled and sang false, doubtless from lack of practice." Three days later the shattering news reached even Tobolsk. Nicholas the Last pondered well, then wrote: "It is disgusting to read in the papers what happened a fortnight ago in Petrograd and Moscow." Perhaps the true import of "what happened" was not realized by His Majesty, sheltered, fatalistic, until eight months later, when he was herded with his wife & family into a cellar at Ekaterinburg, in southern Russia, and shot July 16, 1918).

* The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, now NO, and resident in Copenhagen, Denmark (TIME, March 28).