ave a long talk with him (although more than once he snatched moments
to answer particular questions) was on a holiday, when the old Siberian
Hotel, now the offices of the Council, was deserted, and I walked
through empty corridors until I found the President and his secretary at
work as usual.

After telling of the building of the new railway from Alexandrovsk
Gai to the Emba, the prospects of developing the oil industry in that
district, the relative values of those deposits and of those at Baku,
and the possible decreasing significance of Baku in Russian industry
generally, we passed to broader perspectives. I asked him what he
thought of the relations between agriculture and industry in Russia, and
supposed that he did not imagine that Russia would ever become a great
industrial country. His answer was characteristic of the tremendous
hopes that nerve these people in their almost impossible task, and I
set it down as nearly as I can in his own words. For him, of course, the
economic problem was the first, and he spoke of it as the director of
a huge trust might have spoken. But, as he passed on to talk of what he
thought would result from the Communist method of tackling that problem,
and spoke of the eventual disappearance of political parties, I felt I
was trying to read a kind of palimpsest of the Economist and

News from Nowhere, or listening to a strange compound of William Morris
and, for example, Sir Eric Geddes. He said: "We may have to wait a
long time before the inevitable arrives and there is a Supreme Economic
Council dealing with Europe as with a single economic whole. If that
should come about we should, of course, from the very nature of our
country, be called upon in the first place to provide food for Europe,
and we should hope enormously to improve our agriculture, working on
a larger and larger scale, using mechanical plows and tractors, which
would be supplied us by the West. But in the meantime we have to face
the fact that events may cause us to be, for all practical purposes, in
a state of blockade for perhaps a score of years, and, so far as we
can, we must be ready to depend on ourselves alone. For example, we want
mechanical plows which could be procured abroad. We have had to start
making them ourselves. The first electric plow made in Russia and used
in Russia started work last year, and this year we shall have a number
of such plows made in our country, not because it is economic so to