reduced the production of food and the cities began to feel the pinch of hunger. Then came the revolution. This intensified the industrial crisis and made matters worse. Production of the commodities needed by the peasants fell off, and for the vast quantities of food required by the city population and the army, the Government had practically nothing to offer the peasants except taxation and depreciated paper money. Neither was popular with them. They lost the incentive to produce. Then the Government, under the stern necessity caused by the civil wars, adopted the grain levy, by which the peasants had to give up all the foodstuffs they produced above the minimum required to keep them and their families. Result, a further decrease in production: for the peasants, who altogether lack political vision and idealism, reasoned that if they had to turn over everything to the Government except enough to live on there was no use to produce more than the latter amount. And that became the decided tendency, with the natural consequence that food became constantly more scarce in the cities and the workers were eventually forced down to a diet so meagre that they were no longer able to work efficiently. Industrial production fell sharply because of this, and it may be said that one of the basic causes of the low output in general is simply that the workers do not get enough meat. The whole thing has resolved itself into a baffling vicious circle: The workers cannot work because they have insufficient nourishment, and the peasants will not produce foodstuffs for them because they have no manufactured products—agricultural machinery, fertilizers, shoes, etc.—to give them in exchange. And now this food shortage, created principally by the industrial deadlock between city and country. has been made incomparably worse by the terrible drought which has a up the crops in the Volga district and with which a shocked world is familiar.
The foregoing are some of the principal factors entering into the collapse of Russian industry. Briefly resumed, they are as follows: (a) The blockade, which prevented the importation of vitally necessary machinery and other products not made in Russia and thus starved and disrupted the industrial mechanism; (b) the civil wars, which entirely cut off many industries
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