Let us now examine the combined effect of ruined transport
and the six years' blockade on Russian life in town and
country. First of all was cut off the import of manufactured

goods from abroad. That has had a cumulative effect
completed, as it were, and rounded off by the breakdown of
transport. By making it impossible to bring food, fuel and
raw material to the factories, the wreck of transport makes it
impossible for Russian industry to produce even that
modicum which it contributed to the general supply of
manufactured goods which the Russian peasant was
accustomed to receive in exchange for his production of
food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather
more than he did before the war. But he has no matches, no
salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are
trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages
the most frequent excuse for keeping children from school is
a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as
I have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove,
without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go
and learn to read and write. Clothes and such things as
matches are, however, of less vital importance than tools, the
lack of which is steadily reducing Russia's actual power of
food production. Before the war Russia needed from
abroad huge quantities of agricultural implements, not only
machines, but simple things like axes, sickles, scythes. In
1915 her own production of these things had fallen to 15.1