The fisheries of Russia are being organised co-operatively, as is all industry, but this will be useless unless the oil from Baku is available for use on the Volga steamers and for locomotives. I have read in The Times that it is lack of foresight and organising ability which has produced the food and fuel shortage in Russia. This is nonsense : a great part of the shortage is due to the shutting down of traffic on the Volga, caused solely by lack of the oil which the British authorities preferred should pour into the sea rather than be used for the service of the people of Russia.
There is one other thing to be said on the question of co-operation. As is well understood by all who have the most elementary knowledge of Russia, there is much, very much, ignorance amongst all classes. Millions, at the time of the fall of Czardom, could neither read nor write. Even now painted signs appear outside shops describing what is on sale within because people cannot read. This fact alone makes all work of reconstruction and reform doubly hard.
Andre Leshava, like all other leaders of thought and action in Russia, was keen to know what our wholesale co-operative societies intended to do with regard to international trade. He realises that Russia cannot stand alone as a co-operative State but must find some bond of union with other lands, and
