has from the very beginning proclaimed and carried on a policy of reducing high salaries to the standard of wages of the average worker.

...  The corrupting influence of high salaries is beyond question—­both on the Soviets ... and on the mass of the workers.  But all thinking and honest workers and peasants will agree with us and will admit that we are unable to get rid at once of the evil heritage of capitalism....  The sooner we ourselves, workers and peasants, learn better labor discipline and a higher technique of toil, making use of the bourgeois specialists for this purpose, the sooner we will get rid of the need of paying tribute to these specialists.[68]

We find the same readiness to compromise and to follow the line of least resistance in dealing with the co-operatives.  From 1906 onward there had been an enormous growth of co-operatives in Russia.  They were of various kinds and animated by varied degrees of social consciousness.  They did not differ materially from the co-operatives of England, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, or Germany except in the one important particular that they relied upon bourgeois Intellectuals for leadership and direction to a greater extent than do the co-operatives in the countries named.  They were admirably fitted to be the nuclei of a socialized system of distribution.  Out of office the Bolsheviki had sneered at these working-class organizations and denounced them as “bourgeois corruptions of the militant proletariat.”  Necessity and responsibility soon forced the adoption of a new attitude toward them.  The Bolshevik government had to accept the despised co-operatives, and even compromise Bolshevist principles as the price of securing their services: 

A Socialist state can come into existence only as a net of production and consumption communes, which keep conscientious accounts of their production and consumption, economize labor, steadily increasing its productivity and thus making it possible to lower the workday to seven, six, or even less hours.  Anything less than rigorous, universal, thorough accounting and control of grain and of the production of grain, and later also of all other necessary products, will not do.  We have inherited from capitalism mass organizations which can facilitate the transition to mass accounting and control of distribution—­the consumers’ co-operatives.  They are developed in Russia less than in the more advanced countries, but they comprise more than 10,000,000 members.  The decree on consumers’ associations which was recently issued is extremely significant, showing clearly the peculiarity of the position and of the problem of the Socialist Soviet Republic at the present time.

The decree is an agreement with the bourgeois co-operatives and with the workmen’s co-operatives adhering to the bourgeois standpoint.  The agreement or compromise consists, firstly, in the fact that the representatives of these institutions