thus cutting off Russia's supply of cotton and ruining the textile industry. They captured the Ukraine and other rich grain-growing districts, leaving to the Soviets the tremendous problem of feeding a country that had never produced enough to feed itself. And when the workers succeeded in driving the counter-revolutionary armies out of these districts the latter systematically crippled the industries as they retreated. They dumped locomotives into rivers and lakes, burned freight cars, dynamited 1600 railroad bridges, flooded coal mines, ruined oil wells. With diabolical cunning their engineers, bearing in mind the blockade, robbed the factory machinery of "key" parts without which it could not be operated, and which could not be made in Russia. They devastated industry generally.
But even worse than the open vandalism of Kolchak, Denekin, Yudenitch, Wrangel, and other counter-revolutionaries was the unparalled campaign of secret sabotage carried on by the anti-Soviet elements behind the Bolshevik lines: the engineers and other bourgeois sympathizers who did not leave Russia. This sabotage began at the very outbreak of the revolution, when the employers, seeing that they could no longer hold the industries themselves, set out to ruin them. And it has continued ever since. The counter-revolutionists within Russia know to a man that the fate of the revolution turns on the industrial situation, and their universal plan is to worm themselves into strategic positions in the industries and then to use their power to demoralize the productive organization. The amount of damage that has thus been done is incalculably enormous. Considering their bitter experiences in this respect, it is no wonder that the Communists so sweepingly condemn sabotage as a dangerous weapon of the exploiting class and will have none of it practiced by the workers neither before nor after the revolution.
Another great factor in breaking down Russian industry was the vast loss of skilled labor—managerial, technical, and manual—occasioned by the revolution. It seems almost as if industrial skill has flown from Russia. Before October, 1917, many of the industries were owned ouright by foreigners and directed mainly by foreign staffs. Thus the American plants were operated chiefly by American engineers according to American efficiency systems; the German plants by German
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