Page:Wilfred Rushton Humphries - Life in Russia To-day.djvu/7

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rule, Russia has not nationalised all her industries. Some are still under private ownership. modified by Workers' Control. Committees of workers audit the books of the industry, seeing that there is no watered stock; limit the profits to five or six per cent; require the owner to re-invest in the industry a good portion of his receipts; and regulate hours and wages.

"Lenin says the policy of the Bolsheviki is to take over those industries that have reached the monopolistic stage, and then the others as fast as the new government can swallow them. It may be said that the industries not now owed by the workers are controlled by the workers.

"Under Workers' Control the number of stores and shops has largely decreased, naturally enough with the vanishing of competition.

"Another result of control by the workers, combined with the peasants' ownership of the land and the taking up of work by the parasitical element, has been the 'back to the land' movement. Petrograd and Moscow have materially decreased in population, chiefly as a result of the agitation to go out and take up land, agitation that arose because Petrograd and Moscow were the two places where it was hardest to get food on account of the crippled railroads. But even in those cities during the worst of the railroad demoralization it cost no more than to live in San Francisco. In Moscow I got dinners of soup, meat, vegetables, coffee and sometimes dessert for from five to ten roubles, that is fifty cents to a dollar—and of course conditions have improved since then. Through the darkest days, from the time the Bolsheviki got control, I am sure there was not one starving person in Moscow.

"They had begun to organise the distribution of food in a most fair and thorough manner from the time I arrived in Russia. when the great army of twelve million was still demobilising itself. Even while happy groups of soldiers with their gas masks and tea kettles hung on their backs were trooping home, I saw armed guards handing out leaflets that announced a moratorium on house rents. 'Rentals under one hundred and fifty roubles a month are not payable for three months,' the leaflets said. 'Rentals above this amount