ABSTRACT
It is possible to gain a valuable insight into the standard of living of the labouring classes in Soviet Russia by discovering what the workers are paid in wages and what is the duration of their working day. The constant violation of the eight-hour day law has been pointed out in the accounts already given of conditions affecting women and children. Many men workers are not better protected. The eight-hour day was decreed by the leaders of the bourgeois democratic Revolution of March 1917. It was incumbent on the leaders of the Soviet Revolution to carry it out. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution the Soviet Government issued a manifesto promising the workers a seven-hour day, a reform which would have been comparatively easy to carry out in a country where the unemployment question was acute and wages were of the starvation order.
