d in the
open market in the district where a workman is employed,
(2)the price of food supplied by the State on the card
system, (3)the quality of the workman. This last is decided
by a special section of the Factory Committee, which in each
factory is an organ of the Trades Union.]

The enormous Communist majority, together with the fact that however
much they may quarrel with each other inside the party, the Communists
will go to almost any length to avoid breaking the party discipline,
means that at present the resolutions of Trades Union Congresses
will not be different from those of Communists Congresses on the same
subjects. Consequently, the questions which really agitate the members,
the actual cleavages inside that Communist majority, are comparatively
invisible at a Trades Union Congress. They are fought over with great
bitterness, but they are not fought over in the Hall of the Unions-once
the Club of the Nobility, with on its walls on Congress days the hammer
and spanner of the engineers, the pestle and trowel of the builders, and
so on-but in the Communist Congresses in the Kremlin and throughout
the country. And, in the problem with which in this book we are mainly
concerned, neither the regular business of the Unions nor their internal
squabbles affects the cardinal fact that in the present crisis the
Trades Unions are chiefly important as part of that organization of
human will with which the Communists are attempting to arrest the steady
progress of Russia's economic ruin. Putting it brutally, so as to offend
Trades Unionists and Communists alike, they are an important part of the
Communist system of internal propaganda, and their whole organization
acts as a gigantic megaphone through which the Communist Party makes
known its fears, its hopes and its decisions to the great masses of the
industrial workers.

THE PROPAGANDA TRAINS

When I crossed the Russian front in October, 1919, the first thing I
noticed in peasants' cottages, in the villages, in the little town where
I took the railway to Moscow, in every railway station along the line,
was the elaborate pictorial propaganda concerned with the war. There
were posters showing Denizen standing straddle over Russia's coal, while
the factory chimneys were smokeless and the engines idle in the yards,
with the simplest wording to show why it was necessary to beat Denizen
in order to get coal; there were posters illustr