and the ordinary “inhabitants”. Proportions that corresponded more or less 
to the necessary minimum for every-day subsistence, were only distributed 
to the army and the workers employed in the war-industry. A higher 
standard of provisioning was applied to Communists, and also, since the 
beginning of 1921, to higher officials and to the so-called “specials” 
‘specialists in the domain of economics and technics). 
As a result of that, the town population was obliged to seek an additional 
ncome for their subsistence, an employment which would be independent 
from the utilisation of their power of working for the Government. The 
source of such an additional income, is principally to be found by the 
population in various kinds of abuses of the employment. Such an abuse 
of employment was carefully secreted as a matter of course; but at times 
it was also carried out with the consent of the controlling organs of the 
Government. However, as under this fixed regime, there were no other 
possibilities of existence alongside of these abuses, this system of abuses 
decame a sort of standard: the officials who had to issue orders for raw 
materials for tradesmen, as well as orders for clothing and foodstuffs, 
received bribes, and shared them with their fellow-workers; the workers 
smployed at the factories — which being three-parts at a standstill — are 
active in their own interests by making small articles of utility for peasants, 
such as cigarette-lighters and the like; and also by selling the driving-belts, 
orass parts of the machines; etc. The employees of the people's commissariat 
for provisioning, sell foodstuffs which they have purloined. The workers 
and employees of the railways rob the consignments, which have officially 
oeen declared as State property, etc. 
In order to get the return from agriculture also into their hands, a 
military organisation was created under the direction of the people’s com- 
missariat for provisioning, which took away the foodstuffs from the pea- 
sants by virtue of a “plan for distributing foodstuffs”, i. e., a regulation 
carried out according to the bureaucratic discretion, by means of which 
contributions of provisions were to be levied in the various districts. The 
expropriation was carried out in such a way that only a minimum, absolutely 
necessary for the feeding of the family and the cattle (livestock), as well 
as for sowing the fields, was left to the peasants. 
A complete realisation of the policy of 1919/21 had failed, for the 
town population threatened by starvation, in its struggle against permanent 
hunger, kept up by diverse means a certain contact with the country, and 
by this means succeeded in continuing a primitive exchange of goods. 
As a result of the government's stubborn fight lasting for two years. 
for carrying out the principles of putting all economic organisations under 
socialistic State-control, a retrogressive movement of the whole economic 
condition of the country to primitive economic forms took place, in the 
7X