"Nobody in Russia relying wholly upon 'Sovietsky' food--food handed out through official agencies--gets enough to eat except soldiers, a small percentage of heavy workers and high Soviet officials. Ordinary factory workers seldom receive as much as 60 per cent of their alimentary requirements through the Government. The remainder they must buy at fantastically high prices from speculators. And though they themselves, in collaboration with central dictatorship, fix their own wages, they never earn enough to cover the swift-climbing cost of living. If this is the plight of the workers, that is, of the ruling class, the ghastliness of the situation confronting the less favored elements of the population may well be imagined."
Is it in irony that Eyre speaks of these "workers" as "the ruling class"? What are the real workmen in Russia but victims of this cruel experiment of tyrannizing Socialist "intellectuals"?
We remark next, in the twelfth place, that the Soviet system of food distribution, wholly unequal and thus anti-communistic, has resulted in dividing the Russians into eight classes, each category having a special card defining its special ration. The account of this is given by Lincoln Eyre in a cable dated March 9, 1920, and published in the "New York World" of March 10, 1920, from which we take two sentences:
"The commissariat of food control has gradually built up no less than eight distinct classes.... Special cards also are provided for children from one, two to five and from five to sixteen. It will be seen that this totals eight distinct varieties of card."
The affect of these distinctions may be gathered from the following instance given in the article just cited: