hatsoever. The only way to prevent a Russian from talking is to cut out
his tongue. The real reason for the apathy is that, for the moment, for
almost everybody political questions are of infinitesimal importance in
comparison with questions of food and warmth. The ferment of political
discussion that filled the first years of the revolution has died away,
and people talk about little but what they are able to get for dinner,
or what somebody else his been able to get. I, like other foreign
visitors coming to Russia after feeding up in other countries, am all
agog to make people talk. But the sort of questions which interest me,
with my full-fed stomach, are brushed aside almost fretfully by men who
have been more or less hungry for two or three years on end.

I find, instead of an urgent desire to alter this or that at once,
to-morrow, in the political complexion of the country, a general desire
to do the best that can be done with things as they are, a general fear
of further upheaval of any kind, in fact a general acquiescence in
the present state of affairs politically, in the hope of altering the
present state of affairs economically. And this is entirely natural.
Everybody, Communists included, rails bitterly at the inefficiencies of
the present system, but everybody, Anti-Communists included, admits that
there is nothing whatever capable of taking its place. Its failure is
highly undesirable, not because it itself is good, but because such
failure would be preceded or followed by a breakdown of all existing
organizations. Food distribution, inadequate as it now is, would come to
an end. The innumerable non-political committees, which are rather like
Boards of Directors controlling the Timber, Fur, Fishery, Steel, Matches
or other Trusts (since the nationalized industries can be so considered)
would collapse, and with them would collapse not only yet one more hope
of keeping a breath of life in Russian industry, but also the
actual livelihoods of a great number of people, both Communists and
non-Communists. I do not think it is realized out-side Russia how large
a proportion of the educated classes have become civil servants of one
kind or another. It is a rare thing when a whole family has left
Russia, and many of the most embittered partisans of war on Russia have
relations inside Russia who have long ago found places under the new
system, and consequently fear its collapse as much as any one. One case
occurs t