Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/114

 by the gift of one good meal, and in some special circumstances, of two meals a day. But it is also true that the Government ration is only half what the people require for health and that men and women must perforce buy in the open market or go without necessary food. According to the prices and wages ruling in Moscow at the present time, the money wage of a very well-paid skilled worker, 4000 roubles a month, would buy ten pound loaves of black bread or four pound loaves of white bread; about seven pounds of horse-flesh, twenty-seven fresh eggs or twenty-four pints of milk (at 180 roubles a pint), and so on. Naturally, he must go without these things and do his best to eke out a living on Government supplies.

There are rows of shaded booths in the marketplace, with regular salesmen and women in attendance; but most of the trading is done by individuals without stalls, refined and gentle folk, bourgeois many of them, coming in the lowest categories for food, untrained in work for the most part, and keeping soul and body together by selling one by one articles of clothing or pieces of jewellery to whoever will buy. Speculators haunt the place, and buy the most valuable jewels and clothes for a mere song, re-selling to others, sometimes peasants, in exchange for food, sometimes foreign profiteers out for big fortunes