able to make up the prescription for lack of one or
several of the simple ingredients required. Soap has become an article
so rare (in Russia as in Germany during the blockade and the war there
is a terrible absence of fats) that for the present it is to be treated
as a means of safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washing
after and during their work, and in preference to miners, chemical,
medical and sanitary workers, for whose efficiency and health it is
essential. The proper washing of underclothes is impossible. To induce
the population of Moscow to go to the baths during the typhus epidemic,
it was sufficient bribe to promise to each person beside the free bath
a free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into disrepair for want of
plaster, paint and tools. Nor is it possible to substitute one thing for
another, for Russia's industries all suffer alike from their dependence
on the West, as well as from the inadequacy of the transport to bring to
factories the material they need. People remind each other that during
the war the Germans, when similarly hard put to it for clothes,
made paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In Russia the nets used in
paper-making are worn out. At last, in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me),
there seemed to be a hope of getting new ones from abroad. But the
condition of the paper industry is typical of all, in a country which,
it should not be forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulp
for other countries besides itself. The factories are able to produce
only sixty per cent. of demands that have previously, by the strictest
scrutiny, been reduced to a minimum before they are made. The reasons,
apart from the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence of
food, forage and finally labor. Even when wood is brought by river the
trouble is not yet overcome. The horses are dead and eaten or starved
and weak. Factories have to cease working so that the workmen,
themselves underfed, can drag the wood from the barges to the mills.
It may well be imagined what the effect of hunger, cold, and the
disheartenment consequent on such conditions of work and the seeming
hopelessness of the position have on the productivity of labor, the
fall in which reacts on all the industries, on transport, on the general
situation and so again on itself.

Mr. J. M. Keynes, writing with Central Europe in his mind (he is, I
think, as ignorant of Russia as I am of Germany), says: "What then is
our