A question may arise: do not the methods and measures of control represent something extraordinarily complex, difficult, untested, even unknown? Is not the delay explained by the fact that the statesmen of the Cadet party, of the commercial-industrial class, of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties have been laboring in the sweat of their brows for half a year now in the search for, study of, and discovery of measures and methods of control, but the task proves to be incredibly difficult and still unresolved?

Alas! To the dark muzhiks, illiterate and downtrodden, and to the petty bourgeoisie, who believe everything and understand nothing, they attempt to "pull the wool over their eyes" and present the matter in such a light. In reality, however, even tsarism, even the "old regime," in creating military-industrial committees, knew the fundamental measure, the principal method and path of control: the unification of the population by various professions, purposes of work, branches of labor, and so forth. But tsarism feared the unification of the population and therefore in every way limited and artificially constrained this well-known, easiest, wholly applicable method and path of control.

All the warring states, experiencing the extreme hardships and calamities of war, experiencing—to one degree or another—economic ruin and famine, long ago outlined, determined, applied, and tested a whole series of measures of control, which almost always come down to the unification of the population, to the creation or encouragement of unions of various kinds, with the participation of state representatives, under state supervision, and so forth. All such measures of control are common knowledge; much has been said and written about them; the laws enacted by the warring advanced powers and relating to control have been translated into Russian or set forth in detail in the Russian press.

If our state truly wished to implement control in a businesslike, serious manner, if its institutions had not condemned themselves, through their servility before capitalists, to "complete inactivity," then the state would have had only to draw with both hands from the richest store of control measures, already known, already applied. The sole obstacle to this—an obstacle which the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks conceal from the eyes of the people—was and remains the fact that control would expose the frenzied profits of the capitalists and would undermine those profits.

In order to clarify this most important question more vividly (one which is, in essence, equivalent to the question of the program of any truly revolutionary government that wished to save Russia from war and famine), let us enumerate these principal measures of control and examine each of them.

We shall see that the government, not merely in jest called revolutionary-democratic, would have needed, in the very first week of its formation, to decree (resolve, order) the implementation of the principal measures of control, to assign serious, no-joking punishment to capitalists who would attempt to evade control through deception, and to call upon the population itself to supervise the capitalists, to supervise their honest fulfillment of the control decrees—and control would have long since been implemented in Russia.

Here are these principal measures:

1) The unification of all banks into one and state control over its operations, or the nationalization of banks.

2) The nationalization of syndicates, that is, of the largest, monopolistic associations of capitalists (sugar, petroleum, coal, metallurgical syndicates, and so forth).

3) The abolition of commercial secrecy.

4) Compulsory syndication (that is, compulsory unification into associations) of manufacturers, merchants, and proprietors in general.

5) The compulsory unification of the population in consumers' societies, or the encouragement of such unification and control over it.

Let us examine what significance each of these measures would have, on condition of its revolutionary-democratic implementation.