At the Congress of Trades-unions, which met in Moscow in May, 1919, the possibility of using the communes as means of relieving the wide-spread unemployment and distress among the city workers was discussed by Platonov, Rozanov, and other noted Bolsheviki. The closing down of numerous factories and the resulting unemployment of large masses of workmen had brought about an appalling amount of hunger. It was proposed, therefore, that communes be formed in the villages under the auspices of the trades-unions, and as branches of the unions, parcels of land being given to the unions. In this way, it was argued, employment would be found for the members of the unions and the food-supply of the cities would be materially increased. While approving the formation of communes, the Congress voted down the proposal. On June 8, 1919, there was established the Administration of Industrial Allotments. The object of this new piece of bureaucratic machinery was the increase of agricultural production through land allotments attached to, or assigned to, industrial establishments, and their cultivation by the workers. This scheme, which had been promulgated as early as February, 1919, was a pathetic anticlimax to the ambitious program with which the Bolshevist Utopia-builders set out. It was neither more nor less than the “allotment gardens” scheme so long familiar in British cities. Such allotment gardens were common enough in the industrial centers of the United States during the war. As an emergency measure for providing vegetables they were useful and even admirable; as a contribution to the solution of the agricultural problem in its largest sense their value was insignificant. Yet we find the _Economicheskaya Zhizn_, in November, 1919, indulging in the old intoxicating visions of Utopia, and seeing in these allotments the means whereby the cities could be relieved of their dependence upon the rural villages for food: