IN SOVIET RUSSIA.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 15223, 22 May 1920, Page 9

IN SOVIET RUSSIA.

| AMSTERDAM, . Feb. 26.— Conditions j among" the Soviet peasantry, coat of liv- j ing and scenes at Moscow and the other i Soviet centres are given by ..the staff cor- : respondent of the Handeisblad, G. , Nypels, who is back from an extended j tour through Soviet Russia. • j "At the railway station m Smolensk," he writes, "thei'e is a long row of stalls m which people', sit behind little barred] windows "and sell all sorts of mei'chau* )' disc I noticed the prices. One pound . of salted meat -was 320 roubles; a pound of black bread .100 roubles; a little - piece of pptatb' cake 40 roubles ; a little ' water "glass of Makhorka (tobacco root) was 100 roubles, pn ]bh© station, plat-, form one sees the soldiers lying about amidst dirt. /They 7 roll their cigarettes with bits of paper, torn from newspapers. • ; By the side of a big cash register stands . a. barmaid selling salted meat, cake and . past.ry to the smartly-dressed men gath- , jered. about her. The poor devils lying' •on. the ground" do-not even notice it, f6r they know very well that m the new i State there are rich mon and poor men just as before. Ths. Communist Government pays, its skilled 1 laborers 6000 rouble^ a month and the unskilled at least 3000 roubles. But he who wants to keep his stomach filled needs at lea-st 30,000 roubles a month." • . The correspondent found much vodka (some of it deadly stuff) and grea.t .usury m tho • Bolshevist - commissar messes, and asserts that many Russian officers have formed the cocain-s hnHit. ' This drug, he declares, costs the addicts 100 roubles a day to sniff their co-' came. °™ c £ rs> P a y» he says, may seem hifrh at 3200 to -6000 roubles a month and every aheeft. -out: of an old copybook from -which h£"may cut a dozen cigarette papers, costs him two roubles.