r many years, to
achieve any degree of internal prosperity. The situation, therefore,
is one in which, even from the narrowest point of view, peace is to
the interest of both parties.

It is difficult for an outsider with only superficial knowledge to
judge of the efforts which have been made to reorganize industry
without outside help. These efforts have chiefly taken the form of
industrial conscription. Workers in towns seek to escape to the
country, in order to have enough to eat; but this is illegal and
severely punished. The same Communist Report from which I have already
quoted speaks on this subject as follows:

_Labour Desertion._--Owing to the fact that a considerable
part of the workers either in search of better food conditions
or often for the purposes of speculation, voluntarily leave
their places of employment or change from place to place,
which inevitably harms production and deteriorates the general
position of the working class, the Congress considers one of
the most urgent problems of Soviet Government and of the Trade
Union organization to be established as the firm, systematic
and insistent struggle with labour desertion, The way to fight
this is to publish a list of desertion fines, the creation of
a labour Detachment of Deserters under fine, and, finally,
internment in concentration camps.

It is hoped to extend the system to the peasantry:

The defeat of the White Armies and the problems of peaceful
construction in connection with the incredible catastrophes of
public economy demand an extraordinary effort of all the
powers of the proletariat and the drafting into the process of
public labour of the wide masses of the peasantry.

On the vital subject of transport, in a passage of which I have
already quoted a fragment, the Communist Party declares:

For the most immediate future transport remains the centre of
the attention and the efforts of the Soviet Government. The
improvement of transport is the indispensable basis upon which
even the most moderate success in all other spheres of
production and first of all in the provision question can be
gained.

The chief difficulty with regard to the improvement of
transport is the weakness of the Transport Trade Union, which
is due in the first case to the heterogeneity of the personnel
of the railways, amongst whom there are still a num