because of the goods slipping and stretching around under the primitive cutting instruments.
After finishing with the quaint old prison factory, our party went to another shop, also formerly occupied by prisoners. This was in the famous Buteerka prison, not far from the center of Moscow. The shop was situated in a great modern structure, one wing of which was still being used as a jail. Military garments for the Red Army were being made and the place seemed fairly well equipped for the work. About 1000 workers, nearly all of them women, were employed. The whole building was a mass of bolts and bars and the workers had sawed away many of them in order to permit freer operations. Where armed guards had once walked in great cages that separated them from the workers, bevies of laughing girls were now to be found busy at work making clothes for the working-class soldiers at the front. One of the foremen in the shop had been a prisoner there in the days of the Czar because of his revolutionary activities. He smiled broadly as he told of the change that had come about in his position in the shop. As for us, these two old prison workshops, now turned into free shops, seemed very expressive of the new liberative influences that the revolution has brought to Russia.
Nearly all the Buteerka shop workers live together in a splendid big apartment house close by. Formerly it was occupied by social parasites of various sorts, but they have long since been driven away. The place was now run upon a communal basis. Its affairs were managed by a committee elected by the tenants. No rent was charged the workers. Across the street was a "creche" where the women workers left their babies to be taken care of during the day. A little further along the street there was a kindergarten for the larger children. In the same neighborhood were the workers' meeting halls, their club rooms, commissaries, etc. This grouping of the workers and their activities close about the shops in which they work is very characteristic of modern Russian life. It greatly facilitates the development of the budding communistic institutions.
The last place we visited was a general clothing shop making men's, women's and children's garments for civilians. It occupied five floors of a big, up-to-date factory building and employed some 700 workers. The
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