s the workers are not sufficiently supplied. The workers cannot possibly live on their rations. They are to receive 1 Ib bread daily. (1 Russian Ib. equal to .88 Ib. American weight or 400 gram).
But it happens often that they get no bread for days at a time. In a chocolate and confectionery factory in Charkov, the seat of the present Ukrainian Soviet government, the workers, in September 1920, received no bread ration for 4 days in succession. This is state factory No. 22, for chocolate and confectionery manufacture.
As the workers do not receive sufficient bread in the factories through the government, they are compelled to procure their bread themselves, privately. In Russia, bread is the principal food stuff. Most people subsist almost exclusively o<n bread and Kascha (a kind of millet mush). But the workers can not pay the market price of bread. We should remember that the wages in this chocolate factory are 2,400 rubles per month. But the price of a Ib. of bread amounted at the same time (Sept. 12, 1920), in the fish market of Charkov, to 500 rubles for white bread and 340 rubles for black bread. The monthly wage will, consequently, buy barely 5 Ibs white bread and a good 7 Ibs. of black bread.
Irresistibly the question arises; how can the workers live that way. But it is to be noted that in many factories the noonday meal is delivered to> the workers. This lunch is certainly not very good, but on the contrary, of a very inferior quality. Only in one factory have I found the lunch really nourishing, even if simple. This was in the 4th government factory for the textile industry. But this is still only in the initial stage. In this factory there are 1,500 workers. Only 500 can get their lunch delivered. It still remains necessary to fix up things for the rest of them also. But this meets with great difficulties. There must be space for serving the meals, and there must be food stuffs. For this lunch the workers pay only 20-30 rubles.
Wtiat do those workers do who get no lunch? They try to procure it themselves. But how? Of the 1500 workers employed there, 10% do not come to work. They remain away from work, although heavy penalties are inflicted for such conduct. Those who remain away from work three days in succession, without being sick, or without some other urgent cause, are legally condemned to* a concentration camp. In practice this is not sternly enforced. Even if the government would like to do it, the workers do not want it done. The first court passing sentence on workers for staying away from work is in many places the factory committee. And as these are workers themselves, few of them being communists, they are naturally inclined to be lenient with their fellows and do not sentence them. In this factory of 1,500 workers there is a relatively high percentage of communists, namely 200, about 13.3%. But in a locomotive factory in the same city there are among 3,350 workers only 100 communists, or 2.9%. It frequently happens that the communists in each factory form a communist group, the principal function of which is spying. Of these some are at the same time in the tscheka (extra-ordinary commission or secret police). At the end of August, 1920, 172 workers were arrested in the locomotive factory because they, under the influence of anarchists and left social-revolutionaries, wanted to organize the food stuffs distribution among themselves and remained away from the job.