day by day less true. The fundamental reasons of low
productivity will not be found in any sudden or unusual
efflorescence of idleness, but in economic conditions which
cannot but reduce the productivity of idle and industrious
alike. Insufficient feeding is one such reason. The
proportion of working time consumed in foraging is another.
But the whole of my first chapter may be taken as a compact
mass of reasons why the Russians at the present time should
not work with anything like a normal productivity. It is said
that bad workmen complain of their tools, but even good
ones become disheartened if compelled to work with
makeshifts, mended tools, on a stock of materials that runs
out from one day to the next, in factories where the
machinery may come at any moment to a standstill from lack
of fuel. There would thus be a shortage of labor in Russia,
even if the numbers of workmen were the same today as
they were before the war. Unfortunately that is not so.
Turning from the question of low productivity per man to
that of absolute shortage of men: the example given at the
beginning of this chapter, showing that in the most important
group of factories the number of workmen has fallen 50 per
cent. is by no means exceptional. Walking through the
passages of what used to be the Club of the Nobles, and is
now the house of the Trades Unions during the recent
Trades Union Congress in Moscow, I observed among a
number of pictorial diagrams on the walls, one in particular
illustrating the rise and fall of the working population of
Moscow during a number of years. Each year was
represented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which
rose and fell with the population. From that diagram I took