The two years that have passed since the November Revolution have been marked by civil war, which still continues. Russia’s isolation from the outside world, the loss and, later on, the recapture of entire provinces of decisive importance to her industries, the feverish, and therefore unsystematic, transfer of the industries to a peace basis, and then, during the last year the reorganization of the industries, the unusual conditions of transportation, the fuel and the food questions, and as a result of these, the question of labor power growing more acute—this is the sad picture of conditions under which the Russian proletariat has organized and maintained the nation’s economic life. And though these familiar conditions of actual life have affected all branches of industry, the greatest sufferer in this respect has been the metal industry, which forms the basis for our defence and the foundation for all our industrial life. We might add here that the metal industry, and in particular the metal working industry as its most complicated and many-sided phase, both in assortment of products and in the nature of production, was by no means strong in Russia even under the rule of the bourgeoisie. As compared with the more developed capitalist countries, the metal industry in Russia has been at a disadvantage because of the very geographical situation of its centers, remote from the sources of raw material and fuel, artificially built up and having suffered all the consequences of an unsound foundation. As a result of these conditions, there is lack of specialization and poor development of large scale production which means a lack of the necessary prerequisites for successful production. These are the external conditions under which the administration of our metal industry has been compelled to work.