but further development is impossible for lack of forage. A
telegram bitterly reports, "Two trains of oats from Ekaterinburg are
expected day by day. If the oats arrive in time a considerable success
will be possible." And if the oats do not arrive in time? Besides, not
horses alone require to be fed. The men who cut the wood cannot do it
on empty stomachs. And again rises a cry for trains, that do not arrive,
for food that exists somewhere, but not in the forest where men work.
The general effect of the wreck of transport on food is stated as
follows: Less than 12 per cent. of the oats required, less than 5 per
cent. of the bread and salt required for really efficient working, were
brought to the forests. Nonetheless three times as much wood has been
prepared as the available transport has removed.

The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the combined effect
on the country of their productive weakness and of the loss of their old
position as centres through which the country received its imports from
abroad. Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials and
much else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life.
Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there were
no means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrial
centres where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and in
winter, cold. People living in rooms in a flat, complete strangers to
each other, by general agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen.
In the kitchen soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth there
beside the natural warmth of several human beings in a small room. There
it is possible to sleep. During the whole of last winter, in the case I
have in mind, there were no means of heating the other rooms, where the
temperature was almost always far below freezing point. It is difficult
to make the conditions real except by individual examples. The lack of
medicines, due directly to the blockade, seems to have small effect on
the imagination when simply stated as such. Perhaps people will
realize what it means when instead of talking of the wounded undergoing
operations without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, a
Bolshevik, working in a Government office, who suffered last summer
from a slight derangement of the stomach due to improper and inadequate
feeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen different
apothecaries were un