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.

Owing to unpopularity, the Bolsheviks have had to rely upon the army
and the Extraordinary Commission, and have been compelled to reduce
the Soviet system to an empty form. More and more the pretence of
representing the proletariat has grown threadbare. Amid official
demonstrations and processions and meetings the genuine proletarian
looks on, apathetic and disillusioned, unless he is possessed of
unusual energy and fire, in which case he looks to the ideas of
syndicalism or the I.W.W. to liberate him from a slavery far more
complete than that of capitalism. A sweated wage, long hours,
industrial conscription, prohibition of strikes, prison for slackers,
diminution of the already insufficient rations in factories where the
production falls below what the authorities expect, an army of spies
ready to report any tendency to political disaffection and to procure