170 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
decisive factor, the explanation of which is the key to a propei
understanding of what is happening in the Soviet State, and
the opportunity it affords the Soviet regime of exploiting the
famine in the struggle against its enemies.
In the Soviet Union, that classless state, all ranks, titles and
social distinctions have indeed been abolished. But the old
distinctions have been replaced by new and much greater ones.
To put it shortly, they consist above all in the fact that a limited
number of privileged persons are given sufficient food, while
the rest are undernourished or in some cases have to starve.
This contrast dominates the life of the population to-day, from
the Black Sea to the Arctic and from the Baltic frontier to
Siberia.
Even M. Herriot, in Odessa, was struck by the fact that in
the summer of 1933 there were different categories of shops
or of bread-card holders in the Russian towns. He found that
there were the following different kinds of bread-shops: (i) the
co-operatives, (2) the Odessatorg, etc., which sold food at high
prices but without bread cards, and (3) the Torgsin, which
sold to foreigners and others bread which had to be paid for in
gold roubles or in foreign currency. (Natives also were allowed
to buy food in the Torgsin shops for gold.)
M. Herriot thus distinguished between three different
methods of obtaining bread and other necessary food supplies.
Even this cursory observation indicates the principles on which
the whole Soviet system is based. The chief of all Soviet
principles is that it is the business of the State to maintain the
supporters of the regime by the system of State rationing or
even to give them food in plenty, according to their usefulness
to the regime; but at the same time to restrict to a mini-mum of
food those who are not particularly useful or positively harmful
to the regime. The category of the privileged—i.e. of the well-
fed, for everything depends on food nowadays—Is contrasted
with the suffering masses far more acutely than in the old
Tsarist Russia*