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of our States a lax enforcement of the prohibition laws and frequently helped to maintain prohibition as the nominal and legal system. So extensive did this private trading, smuggling and speculation become, that the Soviet officials and the Soviet press repeatedly acknowledged that a new bourgeoisie had arisen, a class of newly-rich composed of food profiteers, smugglers and corrupt officials whose incomes from bribes multiplied their salaries many times over. There was as much inequality of wealth as ever; the basis of division was not changed, merely the beneficiaries.

Gradually, by a very hesitant and uncertain course, attended by various desperate advances and fearful recessions, important concessions to private trade were authorized and given legal status. The "return to capitalism" was widely heralded. As a matter of fact, there was no "return to capitalism' in the real sense of that phrase. There were many concessions to private property, to individualism and to capitalist methods and principles. There were concessions forced from the regime by the stern requirements of life and the majesty of inexorable economie laws.

The same thing appears in the desperate efforts made to restore foreign trade. Having confiscated the properties of foreign capitalists along with those

of Russian capitalists, the Soviet authorities were forced at last to prostrate themselves before the capitalists and governments of nation after nation, seeking to make trade agreements upon almost any terms. They offered to give to foreign capitalists concessions of almost fabulous value, upon terms which promised such profits as capitalist promoters dream of far oftener than they realize them.

The curious anomaly was presented of a great governmental power having despoiled its own capitalists, attempting to replace them by foreign capitalists belonging to powerful nations. In part their efforts were sincere. They aimed at the restoration of Russia's foreign trade, at almost any price, as the essential condition of existence. In part, however, their efforts were clearly dictated by other and less admirable motives. They were intriguing to promote international friction among the great nations, notably Japan and the United States, as Lenin himself admitted during the negotiations over vast concessions offered to an American syndicate headed by a Mr. Washington Vanderlip.

Moreover, the Soviet leaders, including Lenin, avowed that they were offering these concessions in the hope of being thereby enabled to tide over a crisis and to hold on until revolution should break out in Europe and America. Thus there was lacking the

good faith upon which alone foreign capital could give credit to Russia or reasonably embark upon Russian enterprise.

When we turn from industry to agriculture we find the same zig-zag course between futile attempts to establish communism and grudging acceptance of its opposites, private property and individual trading. Having encouraged the peasants to seize the lands of the estates surrounding them in riotous and disorderly fashion, without the careful and scientifically prepared plans of the expert commissions established by the Provisional Government, they had brought about a terrible condition, far worse than the old. Strong villages had seized the communal lands of weaker villages and reduced their inhabitants to beggary. Peasants who already owned as much land as they could use, but who were vigorous and daring, took lands which ought to have gone to peasants who possessed too little land to make a living. The great landed estates, which had maintained the agricultural experiment stations of the country, were despoiled and their machinery destroyed. The best breeding animals in the country were taken away and killed.

When the Bolsheviki seized power they became possessed of a gigantic ruin. They declared the land to be national property and tried to organize agriculture upon communistic lines. In most cases the

peasants rebelled, and the Soviet authorities were unable to cope with their opposition. In certain areas the land came into the possession of the Soviet authorities, and efforts were made to carry on production by government officials and agencies. These farms, instead of helping the food supply of the cities, failed to produce enough to support the workers and officials engaged on them, and the armed forces necessary for their protection against the outraged peasantry. They had actually to be supplied with food requisitioned from individual peasants.

To supply the food needed in the cities, it was found necessary to decree that the peasants themselves should be permitted to reserve no more than a certain per capita allowance from their produce, and that all the rest should be turned over to the Soviet authorities at a fixed price. This price was in currency that was practically worthless, for it did not enable the peasant to purchase the manufactured goods he needed. For these he must deal with the private smugglers and traders. Of course, the peasants resisted. They concealed their stores and made false returns, where they did not openly defy and resist the authorities.

This brought about the sending of armed detachments of trusted troops from the cities to search the villages and seize the stores so concealed and with

held.

Armed conflicts between city and village, between the Government and that part of the population of greatest importance to the national life became general. It was, as Maxim Gorky well said, "a condition of civil war." When the peasants found that they were unable to overcome the troops, or that to do so involved too much suffering, they changed their tactics. They adopted an attitude of passivity. They simply refused to raise more crops than would furnish the minimum they were permitted to keep for their own use. If the peasant could have only so many poods of potatoes for his family, why, then he would raise as little more than that as possible. This was the prime cause of the great famine of 1921-1922, the worst in Russian history, when the United States evidenced its traditional friendship for the people of Russia by coming to the rescue with immense contributions of food.

The Soviet regime was compelled to surrender to the peasants and to legalize private property in land -under guise of legalizing "possession and use" only, with provision for inheritance. It was compelled, too, to legalize the right of the peasants to possess whatever they could produce and to sell it wherever they pleased, upon the best terms they could get. The peasant with his instinct for property and individualism proved to be the real master of Russia.