Moscow to obtain ten eggs for a box of matches, and the rarity of
goods requiring distant transport became such that in November, 1919, in
Western Russia, the peasants would sell me nothing for money, whereas
my neighbor in the train bought all he wanted in exchange for small
quantities of salt.

It was not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in a
satisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a country
of huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is no
exaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transport
able to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before the
war began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops
and the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with each
succeeding week of war, although in 1916 and 1917 Russia did receive
775 locomotives from abroad, Russian transport went from bad to worse,
making inevitable a creeping paralysis of Russian economic life, during
the latter already acute stages of which the revolutionaries succeeded
to the disease that had crippled their precursors.

In 1914 Russia had in all 20,057 locomotives, of which 15,047 burnt
coal, 4,072 burnt oil and 938 wood. But that figure of twenty thousand
was more impressive for a Government official, who had his own reasons
for desiring to be impressed, than for a practical railway engineer,
since of that number over five thousand engines were more than twenty
years old, over two thousand were more than thirty years old, fifteen
hundred were more than forty years old, and 147 patriarchs had passed
their fiftieth birthday. Of the whole twenty thousand only 7,108 were
under ten years of age. That was six years ago. In the meantime Russia
has been able to make in quantities decreasing during the last five
years by 40 and 50 per cent. annually, 2,990 new locomotives. In 1914 of
the locomotives then in Russia about 17,000 were in working condition.
In 1915 there were, in spite of 800 new ones, only 16,500. In 1916 the
number of healthy locomotives was slightly higher, owing partly to
the manufacture of 903 at home in the preceding year and partly to the
arrival of 400 from abroad. In 1917 in spite of the arrival of a further
small contingent the number sank to between 15,000 and 16,000. Early
in 1918 the Germans in the Ukraine and elsewhere captured 3,000.
Others were lost in the early stages of the civil war. The number of
locomotives f