Although “the NKVD instituted severe police measures to round up Fifth Columnists,” nevertheless the net effect of the impact of the war upon the Soviet population must have been very much like the opening of jail doors. The national emergency and the necessity for all to get together and fight for their lives, I am sure had an inspiriting effect even greater than it would have in a less primitive Western community. That wartime spirit of exaltation is not true of the Soviet Union in peacetime. In ordinary times, the Soviet population is surely the unhappiest 200,000,000 ever to live under one flag in one vast succession of barracks and slums covering one-sixth of the land surface of the globe and stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic. Think of that immense area with its huge population and reflect that from one end of the country to the other there cannot be found a single household (aside from those of high Soviet officials, and a few artists, journalists, and other privileged classes--not more than a few thousand out of 200,000,000) possessing the food, clothing, furniture, the necessities and conveniences of an ordinary workman’s family in the United States. After two years of warfare and bombing and blockade it would be difficult to find in all England a workman compelled to live as uncomfortably, unhygienically, and with as poor food and clothing as the ordinary Moscow workman. The average family on relief in America lives better than the privileged Moscow workman’s family. I particularly emphasize “Moscow workman” because he is the best-off person in the Soviet Union with the exception of the tiny privileged group I have mentioned. The revolution was made for the proletariat and what there is to enjoy goes to the workman. The peasants on their collective farms live on the whole on a level beneath that of any large group of white people in the world. The Soviet peasant’s condition is substantially that of a serf. He is bound to his collective and may not leave without permission. He is paid chiefly in kind and his pittance of cash is almost useless, since there are such small supplies of anything in the stores to buy. He eats day in and day out, year in and year out, for breakfast, dinner, and supper black bread and cabbage soup and little else.