[Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman In open-air bazaars where there is little to sell but many to buy, Russia does her marketing] The Russian’s attitude toward his job was the attitude of the slave laborer--something done because it had to be done. The greatest flaw in his revolutionary teaching was that it had not given him a knowledge of the interdependence of people. He had not learned that the only way he could get his share of grain from the peasant was to make the cloth or the plow that was as necessary to the peasant and his wife as bread was necessary to him. Nothing in the Russian system had helped to teach the worker his importance in the social scheme and his social responsibility as a producer. That was a thing he had to discover for himself. The leaders realized this, and the shop committees tried to make the men realize it; but it was the sort of thing that could be learned only through bitter experience. Time was of so little value in Russia that nobody ever bothered to learn how to save it. Production naturally decreased steadily in the first three years of the war, and kept on decreasing after the Revolution. The shop committees did not make the confusion, but, like the committees in the army and in the fleet, they were outgrowths of the confusion that followed the fall of the Tsar, and the economic revolution that deposed the owner from his control over his factory. They were the effort of the men themselves to establish something that would bring order out of confusion. That they failed was due to lack of experience and not to lack of good intentions. The gray wolf cared not how his hour came, only that it came. Even the foreign colony, whose members were far better off than the Russians, heard the gray wolf howling. We were a hungry lot from morning until night. Most of us developed an appetite such as we had never known. We scraped the plates clean. The first time I dined with a man who put the left-over sugar in his pocket, I gasped. It was not until I had drunk many glasses of sugarless tea and eaten many breadless meals that I was able to overcome sufficiently the inhibitions of my early training to permit me to follow his example. Even to the end, I had a guilty sense of committing a horrible crime every time I whisked the last piece of black bread surreptitiously into my hand-bag. Usually, by dint of much scheming, I managed to keep a small quantity of food on hand for the hungry mortals who drifted through my little blue room each day. The original supply came with me in cans across Siberia from China, and it seemed to partake in its stretching quality of the nature of the widow’s cruse.