The Crisis in Russia | Page 8

three times
as much wood has been prepared as the available transport has
removed.
The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the combined effect
on the country of their productive weakness and of the loss of their old
position as centres through which the country received its imports from
abroad. Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials
and much else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life.
Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there were no
means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrial centres
where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and in winter,
cold. People living in rooms in a flat, complete strangers to each other,
by general agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen. In the
kitchen soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth there beside
the natural warmth of several human beings in a small room. There it is
possible to sleep. During the whole of last winter, in the case I have in
mind, there were no means of heating the other rooms, where the

temperature was almost always far below freezing point. It is difficult
to make the conditions real except by individual examples. The lack of
medicines, due directly to the blockade, seems to have small effect on
the imagination when simply stated as such. Perhaps people will realize
what it means when instead of talking of the wounded undergoing
operations
without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, a Bolshevik,
working in a Government office, who suffered last summer from a
slight derangement of the stomach due to improper and inadequate
feeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen different
apothecaries were unable to make up the prescription for lack of one or
several of the simple ingredients required. Soap has become an article
so rare (in Russia as in Germany during the blockade and the war there
is a terrible absence of fats) that for the present it is to be treated as a
means of safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washing
after and during their work, and in preference to miners, chemical,
medical and sanitary workers, for whose efficiency and health it is
essential. The proper washing of underclothes is impossible. To induce
the population of Moscow to go to the baths during the typhus
epidemic, it was sufficient bribe to promise to each person beside the
free bath a free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into disrepair for want
of plaster, paint and tools. Nor is it possible to substitute one thing for
another, for Russia's industries all suffer alike from their dependence
on the West, as well as from the inadequacy of the transport to bring to
factories the material they need. People remind each other that during
the war the Germans, when similarly hard put to it for clothes, made
paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In Russia the nets used in paper-making
are worn out. At last, in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me), there seemed to
be a hope of getting new ones from abroad. But the condition of the
paper industry is typical of all, in a country which, it should not be
forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulp for other
countries besides itself. The factories are able to produce only sixty per
cent. of demands that have previously, by the strictest scrutiny, been
reduced to a minimum before they are made. The reasons, apart from
the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence of food, forage
and finally labor. Even when wood is brought by river the trouble is not
yet overcome. The horses are dead and eaten or starved and weak.

Factories have to cease working so that the workmen, themselves
underfed, can drag the wood from the barges to the mills. It may well
be imagined what the effect of hunger, cold, and the disheartenment
consequent on such conditions of work and the seeming hopelessness
of the position have on the productivity of labor, the fall in which reacts
on all the industries, on transport, on the general situation and so again
on itself.
Mr. J. M. Keynes, writing with Central Europe in his mind (he is, I
think, as ignorant of Russia as I am of Germany), says: "What then is
our picture of Europe? A country population able to support life on the
fruits of its own agricultural production, but without the accustomed
surplus for the towns, and also (as a result of the lack of imported
materials, and so of variety and amount in the salable manufactures of
the towns) without the usual incentives to market food in exchange for
other wares; an industrial population unable