EPILOGUE 3I?
But the earnings of an average workman in this region are
from 80 to 100 roubles. How can a man live on that if he has no
claim to privileged treatment as a member of the party or the
privileged classes? Foreign specialists who have lived in Russia
for years have proved by documents and figures that in conse-
quence of the abolition of ration cards—i.e. in consequence of
the raising of the price of bread, etc.—the actual wages of a
workman in the Soviet Union have fallen by about a quarter
ftom the beginning of the first five-year plan down to the autumn
of 1935. Despite, or just because of, the abolition of ration cards
the difference between the position of the privileged and non-
jprivileged classes in the Soviet Union has become greater as
compared with the end of 1933. This is why foreign visitors to
Moscow and other centres, seeing the luxury and dissipation
of the privileged classes, report the development of a bourgeoisie
in the classless state.
In his telegram mentioned above Mr. Harold Denny spoke
of the (in his belief) excellent harvest and announced that the
Soviet Union was likely to increase its exports by about
5,000,000 tons to the level of 1930; indeed, he even mentioned
the pre-war export figure of 100,000,000 tons. When journalists
friendly to Moscow make announcements of this kind, it
usually means that the Soviet Government is preparing the
world public for what it intends to do. Thus the proceedings
described elsewhere are repeated. The grain taken from the
peasants is exported so far as it is not required for the needs of
the State and the privileged classes. Indeed, it looks as if the
exportation of this "famine corn" would assume ever larger
proportions in the near future. Correspondingly large numbers
of the producers and of the "non-privileged" categories in the
towns, thus deprived of the minimum necessary to existence,
will be abandoned to privation and famine. Is this spectacle to
continue for ever? Is human life no longer to have any value
or significance just because the humans are in the Soviet State?
If the bourgeois states* indeed the whole non-Communist