The Council of People’s Commissaries has already decided to call upon individual workmen as well as groups of them to repair the rolling-stock, granting them the right to use the equipment which they shall have repaired with their own forces for the transportation of food to those factories and mills which repair the locomotives and cars. Recently this decision has been also extended to the fuel-supply. Each factory and each mill now has the opportunity to carry its own fuel, provided they repair with their own forces the disabled locomotives and cars they obtain from the commissariat of ways and communications. Was ever such madness as this let loose upon a suffering people? Let those who have dilated upon the “statesmanship” and the “organizing genius” of these men contemplate the picture presented by the decision of the Council of People’s Commissaries. Each factory to repair with its own forces the disabled locomotives and cars it needs to transport fuel and raw materials. Textile-workers, for instance, must repair locomotives and freight-cars or go without bread. Individual workmen and groups of workmen and individual factories are thus to be turned loose upon what remains of an organized transportation system. Not only must this result in the completion of the destruction of railway transportation, but it must inevitably cripple the factories. Take workers from unrelated industries, unused to the job, and set them to repairing locomotives and freight-cars; every man who has ever had anything to do with the actual organization and direction of working forces knows that such men, especially when the special equipment and tools are lacking, cannot perform, man for man, one-tenth as much as men used to the work and equipped with the proper tools and equipment. And then to tell these factory workers that they have “the right to use the equipment which they shall have repaired” means, if it means anything at all, that from the factories are to be diverted further forces to operate railway trains and collect food, fuel, and raw materials. What that means we have already noted in the case of the decline of production in the match-factories, “owing to the wholesale dispersing of workmen in the search for bread, to field work and unloading of wood.”[59] Of all the lunacy that has come out of Bolshevist Russia, even, this is perhaps the worst. [59] _Economicheskaya Zhizn_, No. 225.