Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/85

 war disintegration started to manifest itself, and as time went on and the industries were subjected to intense strain, the situation progressively got worse, until a condition of almost complete collapse resulted. The blockade pulled the very keystone out of the Russian industrial arch.

Let one example suffice to illustrate the ruinous effects of the blockade. Take the commodity wire rope, for instance. That is absolutely indispensible to the operation of the coal mines. Before the war it was all imported, none being made in Russia. And naturally, during the revolutionary crises the beleagured Russian workers were unable to set up the great specialized steel plants necessary for its manufacture. The result was that, with no new supply available, as fast as the wire hoisting cables wore out the mines had to shut down, thus spreading industrial paralysis all about them. In hundreds, if not thousands of instances similar disruption was caused in the industries for want of "key" products, unprocurable because of the blockade.

Pennsylvania is a great industrial state, and her mills and factories operate at wonderful efficiency. But cut them off from the support of related industries in other states, and powerful though they may be they would soon wither and die. That is what was done to Russia's industries by the blockade. Their very roots were cut off. The world's capitalists have shed many crocodile tears over the handful of exploiters who were killed in the revolution, but their own terrible blockade, by ruining Russian industry and starving the people, has cost a hundred times more lives than were lost in the revolutionary riots and executions.

To the disastrous effects of the long blockade have been added the incalculable ruin wrought by the bitter civil wars that followed in the wake of the revolution. The counter-revolutionary armies overran huge sections of the country, thereby sadly disrupting the industries. They captured the coal mines of the Donetz basin and the oil wells of Baku. This cut off the supply of fuel to industry and stopped it almost dead, until, after a terrific effort, the thousands of locomotives and other fuel burners had been re-equipped to burn wood, and a vast organization created to furnish them with sufficient quantities of it. They captured Turkestan,