tuting Russia have loosened, and there now remains nothing to bind them together again.
Terror, famine, disease, a struggle for existence baffling all imagination, have demoralised the whole of Russian society. The educated man has become degraded, has let himself go, has again approached the state of primitive nomad who only fights for his crumbs of bread, and is even unable to find sustenance for his own family, which has broken up completely, if not physically, sometimes certainly morally.
The workmen, allured by Soviet promises, have ceased to work and have joined the Red Army. When, later on, they wanted to return to work, they had lost the habit, lost the skill, and could not find the workshops amid the general decay, when everything fell into utter ruin. The peasant ceased to till the soil till, confronted by hunger, he was driven with his family into the towns, where he swelled the cadres of hungry men dispossessed of their class, without work, without profession, without a to-morrow, and without hope.
It was they who killed their children for food, it is their peasant women-mothers who, with their starved and enfeebled babes pressed to their bosoms, drowned themselves in the rivers. It is the declassed peasants who form robber bands, who are as the locust migrating from east to west and from north to south in search of bread, in search of life.
And the Soviet autocrats with their heavy, blood-stained hand, have curbed into obedience the people
