There are three classes.  The first can buy, for example, 1-1/2 pounds of bread a day; the second, three-quarters of a pound; the third, only one-quarter of a pound; no matter how much money they may have.  The first class includes soldiers, workers in war, and other essential industries, actors, teachers, writers, experts, and Government workers of all sorts.  The second class is of all other sorts of workers.  The third is of people who do not work—­the leisure class.  Their allowance is, under present circumstances, not enough to live on, but they are allowed to buy surreptitiously from speculators on the theory that the principal of their capital will soon be exhausted, and, since interest, rent, and profits—­all forms of unearned money—­are abolished, they will soon be forced to go to work.

The shock of this, and the confusion due to the strange details of it, were, and they still are, painful to many minds, and not only to the rich.  For a long time there was widespread discontent with this new system.  The peasants rebelled, and the workers were suspicious.  They blamed the new system for the food shortage, the fuel shortage, the lack of raw materials for the factories.  But this also was anticipated by that very remarkable mind and will—­Lenin.  He used the State monopoly and control of the press, and the old army of revolutionary propagandists to shift the blame for the sufferings of Russia from the revolutionary government to the war, the blockade, and the lack of transportation.  Also, he and his executive organization were careful to see that, when the government did get hold of a supply of anything, its arrival was heralded, and the next day it appeared at the community shops, where everybody (that worked) got his share at the low government price.  The two American prisoners we saw had noticed this, you remember.  “We don’t get much to eat,” they said, “but neither do our guards or the other Russians.  We all get the same.  And when they get more, we get our share.”

The fairness of the new system, as it works so far, has won over to it the working class and the poorer peasants.  The well-to-do still complain, and very bitterly sometimes.  Their hoardings are broken into by the government and by the poverty committees, and they are severely punished for speculative trading.  But even these classes are moved somewhat by the treatment of children.  They are in a class by themselves:  class A,—­I.  They get all the few delicacies—­milk, eggs, fruit, game, that come to the government monopoly—­at school, where they all are fed, regardless of class.  “Even the rich children,” they told us, “they have as much as the poor children.”  And the children, like the workers, now see the operas, too, the plays, the ballets, the art galleries—­all with instructors.

     The Bolsheviks—­all the Russian parties—­regard the
     communists’ attitude toward children as the symbol of their
     new civilization.