The collapse of industry was the chief cause of the food difficulties, and has in turn been aggravated by them.  Owing to the fact that there is abundant food in the country, industrial and urban workers are perpetually attempting to abandon their employment for agriculture.  This is illegal, and is severely punished, by imprisonment or convict labour.  Nevertheless it continues, and in so vast a country as Russia it is not possible to prevent it.  Thus the ranks of industry become still further depleted.

Except as regards munitions of war, the collapse of industry in Russia is extraordinarily complete.  The resolutions passed by the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party (April, 1920) speak of “the incredible catastrophes of public economy.”  This language is not too strong, though the recovery of the Baku oil has done something to produce a revival along the Volga basin.

The failure of the whole industrial side of the national economy, including transport, is at the bottom of the other failures of the Soviet Government.  It is, to begin with, the main cause of the unpopularity of the Communists both in town and country:  in town, because the people are hungry; in the country, because food is taken with no return except paper.  If industry had been prosperous, the peasants could have had clothes and agricultural machinery, for which they would have willingly parted with enough food for the needs of the towns.  The town population could then have subsisted in tolerable comfort; disease could have been coped with, and the general lowering of vitality averted.  It would not have been necessary, as it has been in many cases, for men of scientific or artistic capacity to abandon the pursuits in which they were skilled for unskilled manual labour.  The Communist Republic might have been agreeable to live in—­at least for those who had been very poor before.

The unpopularity of the Bolsheviks, which is primarily due to the collapse of industry, has in turn been accentuated by the measures which it has driven the Government to adopt.  In view of the fact that it was impossible to give adequate food to the ordinary population of Petrograd and Moscow, the Government decided that at any rate the men employed on important public work should be sufficiently nourished to preserve their efficiency.  It is a gross libel to say that the Communists, or even the leading People’s Commissaries, live luxurious lives according to our standards; but it is a fact that they are not exposed, like their subjects, to acute hunger and the weakening of energy that accompanies it.  No tone can blame them for this, since the work of government must be carried on; but it is one of the ways in which class distinctions have reappeared where it was intended that they should be banished.  I talked to an obviously hungry working man in Moscow, who pointed to the Kremlin and remarked:  “In there they have enough to eat.”  He was expressing a widespread feeling which is fatal to the idealistic appeal that Communism attempts to make.