oilfields, one and all, passed into the hands of our enemies. One needs to have a truly brazen forehead to speak, in face of these facts, of the destructive influence of “premature,” “barbarous,” etc., socialization. An industry which is completely deprived of fuel and raw materials – whether that industry belongs to a capitalist trust or to the Labor State, whether its factories be socialized or not – its chimneys will not smoke in either case without coal or oil. Something might be learned about this, say, in Austria; and for that matter in Germany itself. A weaving factory administered according to the best Kautskian methods – if we admit that anything at all can be administered by Kautskian methods, except one’s own inkstand – will not produce prints if it is not supplied with cotton. And we were simultaneously deprived both of Turkestan and American Cotton. In addition, as has been pointed out, we had no fuel.
Of course, the blockade and the civil war came as the result of the proletarian revolution in Russia. But it does not at all follow from this that the terrible devastation caused by the Anglo-American-French blockade and the robber campaigns of Kolchak and Denikin have to be put down to the discredit of the Soviet methods of economic organization.
The imperialist war that preceded the revolution, with its all-devouring material and technical demands, imposed a much greater strain on our young industry than on the industry of more powerful capitalist countries. Our transport suffered particularly severely. The exploitation of the railways increased considerably; the wear and tear correspondingly; while repairs were reduced to a strict minimum. The inevitable hour of Nemesis was brought nearer by the fuel crisis. Our almost simultaneous loss of the Donetz coal, foreign coal, and the oil of the Caucasus, obliged us in the sphere of transport to have recourse to wood. And, as the supplies of wood fuel were not in the least calculated with a view to this, we had to stoke our boilers with recently stored raw wood, which has an extremely destructive effect on the mechanism of locomotives that are