# The Russian Revolution (Foster)/Chapter 13

XIII.
WHAT AILS INDUSTRY.
One of the most pronounced features of the revolution is the industrial collapse which is accompanying that great movement. This collapse is profound, far-reaching, and persistent. To remedy it is the supreme problem of the revolution. But it is stubbornly resistent to all treatment: despite heroic measures for many months past the productivity of the basic industries still remains at only 3 to 25 per cent of normal. The consequence is that the Russian people have been forced into such an acute shortage of life necessities as to menace the existence of the revolution itself.
Many factors have combined to bring about this industrial crisis, but here I can touch upon only a few. The first in importance is the blockade, to which Russia has been subjected almost uninterruptedly since 1914, to begin with by the Central Powers during the great war, and then by the whole capitalist world since the revolution. This infamous measure has literally strangled Russian industry.
Russia is not a complete, self-sustaining economic unit. At the outbreak of the world war her industry was still in a primitive state of development. The country produced and exported great quantities of raw and semi-finished materials, such as grain, flax, lumber, leather, textiles, oils, etc. In return it imported enormous amounts of machinery, chemicals, etc., which were either not produced in Russia at all, or to only a limited extent, but which were absolutely indispensible to her industrial life. Much, if not most of Russian industrial equipment was of foreign make. The general condition was well instanced by a power plant I visited not far from Moscow. There were four engines in it: two from Germany, one from England and, one of Russian make. The Russian capitalists drew upon the whole world for their machinery. When the blockade began in 1914 the importation of the many vital industrial necessities stopped short, and as the country was not equipped to produce them itself, industry immediately commenced to suffer. During the great ​war disintegration started to manifest itself, and as time went on and the industries were subjected to intense strain, the situation progressively got worse, until a condition of almost complete collapse resulted. The blockade pulled the very keystone out of the Russian industrial arch.
Let one example suffice to illustrate the ruinous effects of the blockade. Take the commodity wire rope, for instance. That is absolutely indispensible to the operation of the coal mines. Before the war it was all imported, none being made in Russia. And naturally, during the revolutionary crises the beleagured Russian workers were unable to set up the great specialized steel plants necessary for its manufacture. The result was that, with no new supply available, as fast as the wire hoisting cables wore out the mines had to shut down, thus spreading industrial paralysis all about them. In hundreds, if not thousands of instances similar disruption was caused in the industries for want of "key" products, unprocurable because of the blockade.
Pennsylvania is a great industrial state, and her mills and factories operate at wonderful efficiency. But cut them off from the support of related industries in other states, and powerful though they may be they would soon wither and die. That is what was done to Russia's industries by the blockade. Their very roots were cut off. The world's capitalists have shed many crocodile tears over the handful of exploiters who were killed in the revolution, but their own terrible blockade, by ruining Russian industry and starving the people, has cost a hundred times more lives than were lost in the revolutionary riots and executions.
To the disastrous effects of the long blockade have been added the incalculable ruin wrought by the bitter civil wars that followed in the wake of the revolution. The counter-revolutionary armies overran huge sections of the country, thereby sadly disrupting the industries. They captured the coal mines of the Donetz basin and the oil wells of Baku. This cut off the supply of fuel to industry and stopped it almost dead, until, after a terrific effort, the thousands of locomotives and other fuel burners had been re-equipped to burn wood, and a vast organization created to furnish them with sufficient quantities of it. They captured Turkestan, ​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 ​engineers with German methods; the French plants with French management, etc., and nearly all of them imported their machinery from their own countries. There was no standardization anywhere. When the revolution came nearly all these foreign experts went home. For the inexperienced Russian workers, who are only a degree removed from peasantry, the deserted plants, destitute of skilled management, complicated by widely-differing operating systems, and with machinery coming from all over the world, were but little better than so much junk for along time. Many Russian engineers and industrial experts followed the example of their foreigner associates and emigrated. And the majority of those who stayed behind might as well have gone also, because they either went on permanent strike or developed into inveterate sabotagers.
This general defection of the experts and technicans was a grave calamity for industry, and the situation was much worsened by the fact that the revolution literally devoured the skilled mechanics, the only elements who could possibly take the place of the runaway engineers. These skilled workers, because of their intelligence and superior militancy, had to bear the burden of the early revolutionary struggles. Thousands of them perished in the various civil wars, and other thousands were taken from industry altogether and placed in the new Government, political, industrial, and military administration, which was shrieking for help. Other multitudes of them were lost by their wandering off to settle in the country during the periods of extreme economic dislocation.
Consequent upon the loss of so many experts and skilled workers, Russian industry has been decapitated, so to speak. To a very large extent its fate now rests in the hands of the least experienced elements of a particularly inexperienced working class, although desperate efforts are being made to produce, in the trade union and other technical schools, a new crop of skilled workers and industrial experts. This factor alone—the loss of so much industrial skill—would have prevented any real efficiency in the mills, mines, and factories.
Added to the foregoing factors tending to check industrial production was another of prime importance. This was the profound change wrought in labor dis​cipline by the revolution. When capitalism prevailed the employers used the customary methods of the wages system, brutally driving the workers to their tasks and making them produce enormous quantities of commodities. But with the revolution this external compulsion was abolished and the workers had to discipline themselves in industry; they had to secure quantity production practically upon a voluntary basis. This has proved one of the very greatest problems of the revolution, because masses of the workers, densely ignorant in consequence of a thousand years of working class slavery and accustomed to forced labor, had hardly an inkling of what the social upheaval was all about. They thought that the revolution meant that they did not have to work any more, or at best, only at such odd times and in such haphazard fashion as they saw fit. They were unable to discipline themselves. If they went to the plants at all it was only to idle and fool about. They had next to no understanding of the needs of industry. The general consequence was a serious drop in production, and the inauguration of a great educational campaign by the militants to show these ignorant masses that only when they keep society supplied with a plentitude of products can they hope to enjoy a high standard of living. Unforunately this simple lesson has not been driven entirely home. Russian industry is still afflicted with large numbers of slacker workers who as yet are intellectuallly unable to rise to the heights of the new revolutionary system of voluntary labor discipline. It is for them that the compulsory labor laws had to be promulgated.
The industrial collapse was further hastened by the food shortage which has existed for many months. This shortage was caused in the first place largely by the industrial breakdown, which it in turn reacts against and tends to make worse. Let us examine briefly the cause and effects of the food shortage:
The end of the world war found Russian agriculture in a badly run-down state. Millions of the peasants had been killed and other millions hopelessly mutilated, thus making labor scarce. Likewise great numbers of draft animals perished in the war and the plagues that accompanied it, making that type of labor scarce also. Farm machinery was worn out, and the land impoverished for want of fertilizers. All these things seriously ​reduced the production of food and the cities began to feel the pinch of hunger. Then came the revolution. This intensified the industrial crisis and made matters worse. Production of the commodities needed by the peasants fell off, and for the vast quantities of food required by the city population and the army, the Government had practically nothing to offer the peasants except taxation and depreciated paper money. Neither was popular with them. They lost the incentive to produce. Then the Government, under the stern necessity caused by the civil wars, adopted the grain levy, by which the peasants had to give up all the foodstuffs they produced above the minimum required to keep them and their families. Result, a further decrease in production: for the peasants, who altogether lack political vision and idealism, reasoned that if they had to turn over everything to the Government except enough to live on there was no use to produce more than the latter amount. And that became the decided tendency, with the natural consequence that food became constantly more scarce in the cities and the workers were eventually forced down to a diet so meagre that they were no longer able to work efficiently. Industrial production fell sharply because of this, and it may be said that one of the basic causes of the low output in general is simply that the workers do not get enough meat. The whole thing has resolved itself into a baffling vicious circle: The workers cannot work because they have insufficient nourishment, and the peasants will not produce foodstuffs for them because they have no manufactured products—agricultural machinery, fertilizers, shoes, etc.—to give them in exchange. And now this food shortage, created principally by the industrial deadlock between city and country. has been made incomparably worse by the terrible drought which has a up the crops in the Volga district and with which a shocked world is familiar.
The foregoing are some of the principal factors entering into the collapse of Russian industry. Briefly resumed, they are as follows: (a) The blockade, which prevented the importation of vitally necessary machinery and other products not made in Russia and thus starved and disrupted the industrial mechanism; (b) the civil wars, which entirely cut off many industries ​from their raw material supplies and ruined them, and which brought about wholesale destruction of mines, mills, and factories by the retreating counter-revolutionary armies; (c) the deadly sabotage practiced by the counter-revolutionaries in Soviet Russia, which poisoned industry at its heart; (d) the fatal loss of skilled labor by the defection of the industrial experts, the death of thousands of the best mechanics in the revolutionary struggles and the unavoidable removal of many thousands more from industry to fill positions in the new Soviet Government institutions; (e) the great loss in efficiency caused by the revolutionary change in labor discipline from the old basis of capitalistic slave driving to the new system of industrial self-control by the workers; (f) the food shortage, which, originating to a great extent from the industrial breakdown, reacted to make that breakdown still worse by forcing the workers down to such an inadequate diet that their productive power has been seriously impaired.
Taken altogether these factors, and many others of lesser importance, have resulted in a general industrial crisis so intense and disastrous as to constitute probably the very greatest economic problem that any nation has ever been confronted with. The fate of the revolution depends upon its outcome. If it is solved and the industries are got to working again, then the revolution will be safe and the Russian people will march rapidly forward to the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. But if the industrial crisis is not solved, sooner or later the revolution will go down with a crash and the whole nation will be plunged into the deepest chasms of reaction. That is what is at stake in the breakdown of Russian industry.