Written: Unknown date, by P. Siropotinin
First Published: Petrograd Pravda, February 23, 1921
Source: The Living Age, July-September, 1921.
Translated: Unknown
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Soviet History Archive 2005. This work is completely free.
The Kostroma-Polotsk train. - The people in the car for Kostroma are of various sorts: there is a speculator, the wife of a workman on the railroad, a woman carrying provisions, a city man on a leave of absence to look after family affairs, and many Red soldiers demobilized or on furlough. The farther we get from Petrograd the more the influence of the village is felt. By the time we leave Obuxovo, long conversations have started on what life is like in Russia now, about what and where you can get things, and how much they cost. Over the other voices rises that of a man formerly of Yaroslav, who may be a speculator or a Soviet specialist in forests, milk, or something else. He discourses eloquently about the wrongs of the peasants whose grain, cattle, hay, and other products are taken away by force. He exaggerates, giving isolated facts, so as to make a hopeless picture of the condition of the country people and of the wickedness and malice of the Soviet authorities. The Red soldiers are perplexed and either protest or ask questions.One happy fellow relates with enthusiasm stories of our military victories over the Whites; but listens with interest to the daily trifles of village life. He has not yet seen the village where he is to live, but already his nature of peasant proprietor is aroused, and by anticipation he instinctively feels hostile to the Communist regulations. Of course some Red soldiers are better instructed in our ideas and stand up for the village grain levies and labor conscription. But they are a minority, and are heckled and fairly overwhelmed with alleged facts.
The burden of all these stories is: They take everything from the peasant and give him nothing. Where is equality, where justice?
Ribinsk. - I am spending the night at the house of a certain house-painter. Again there is talk about village, matters, again a recital of abuses, ignorance, Soviet bureaucratism. An old workman says:
'Not long ago a comrade and I reckoned it up, and it seems that in our Building Division there are for each workman four managers. And in the 'Soviet of People's Economy' there are one hundred and sixty-five employees; managers, commissars, technical engineers, foremen, yes, and the devil knows who-all; and they all write and give orders and there isn't a grain of usefulness that comes out of it. We are working now according to a fixed schedule. We wanted to do the work more quickly, but it was arranged just the opposite. When a thing is to be done in two days, we take two weeks to it. To get a hundred pounds of plaster, paint, or cement, you have to scurry around for a week or two. You wait and wait until they write out an order, then you wait for the signature on it,, and later on it turns out that it has to be written over again because the things that are needed are not in the warehouse for which it is drawn. You happen to know in what warehouse the plaster and paint is; you ask them to make the order out for that; but, no, they make it out for a place five versts off, from which you return with empty hands. Oh, what a system! It would be a good thing to get rid of three-quarters of these people who sit on the-necks of the peasants and workmen.'
'Oh, our directors and our foremen! We have one foreman - he used to be a merchant, and he's a fine honest fellow; but he doesn't know his business, and he gets ridicule instead of work out of his men. The specialists know how to go to work, what materials are needed, and how much to order. Not long ago we papered Ribinsk theatre, and it took three hundred rolls of wallpaper where only sixty were really needed. The foreman himself did not know, so he asked the workmen, "How much do you need, boys?" and they said, "Write down three hundred." Where did the two hundred and forty rolls go? They were stolen and sold in the market. And for other repair-work, if they need three pounds of nails they order twenty. And they steal what's left. So there is always plenty of everything at the market; matches, kerosene, soap, boots. All at speculators' prices. You can get what. you want illegally, if you have the price; but legally, according to the law, neither the workman nor the peasant gets anything. You are allotted fifteen pounds of flour a month, and you have to get along on that as best you may. Now every workman is busy making things to, sell. It's difficult for a single man to speculate successfully; but a family man has it fine. He works at the factory, makes pans, ploughshares, and buckets, and his wife exchanges these things for bread.'
Of course a good many of these stories are simply street gossip and fiction; but when the speaker mentions individuals and produces facts, one is obliged to believe him. Yes, really there are many irregularities, many failings, which we must remedy in time. These bad conditions merely bid us work and struggle the harder in order that they may become good. Unfortunately the peasants and frequently, even the workmen don't reason this way. Although they evade the levies and hang back with their labor obligations, failing to deliver firewood on time, or to bring it to the railroad; although they are busy making things for themselves out of the materials belonging to the community; although they steal a great quantity of goods when unloading them, they do not blame their own demoralization and darlmess, and dishonesty and ignorance for this - but the Soviet government.
In the Country. - I go from Ribinsk to a village. A driver whom I happened upon, an old peasant, asks me cautiously: 'Well, and how is it in Petrograd? They say there are Americans there.' I tell him about the Russian workmen from America, about the American business men and the concessions in Kamchatka. 'Well,' says the old man soothingly, 'here they say that they've sent the Americans out of Petrograd, since they're living out all of our people. People don't know, but they talk.'
Someone wants to know if it is true that shops in Petrograd have been opened by Americans, and many of these Americans have come into Russia. It seems that in the village they took the Russian workmen-emigrants for American traders. The people of Yaroslav, who were formerly traders, scowl and whisper, 'Here they've destroyed our own Russian trade and now they're letting the Americans set up in our place.'
How easily the peasant credits any sort of made-up story, and how quick he is to disbelieve our truth. His instinct for property leads him to it.
We are driving very slowly. The horse is jogging along but seems in poor condition. 'Well, devil, what's the matter with you? Go on!' the peasant shouts now and then.
'Don't you give him oats?' I ask. 'What? Why there ain't enough for ourselves.'
The wind blows across the empty, snowy plain. It is cold and damp. The gray clouds hanging low lend the landscape still deeper melancholy. Only the old birches along the main road relieve the monotony of the view. This is an old, old, unvarying picture. This plain, these clouds, the birches, the old nag, the sledge, and the peasant himself, are alike, related, monotonous and changeless. What if there should come here electricity, machines, smoke, movement!
The second half of the road from Ribinsk is not so dead. In the forest there is a great stock of firewood being cut. Thieving and waste are likewise evident here. In the southern forests a great deal of the finest timber is cut down for fuel. The men at work getting out firewood think only about finishing their stint as quickly and easily as possible. They fell the tree, cut off two or three cords from the thick end for firewood, and throw away the whole top. In the places where they have been cutting there are masses of such tops and branches. In some places one can see a large quantity of seasoned wood which could have been used for construction purposes. Frequently a dead tree is standing; but no one thinks of cutting down this dead stuff for fuel instead of the 'live' wood. There is an unusual amount of killed timber since the fires of last summer. These fires burned not only the moss and upper layer of leaves and bark, but also deep down into the turfy forest soil and the roots of the trees. Unless the Forestry Department looks after these dead trees they will become useless rotten wood within a year. And we really must abandon our present wasteful ways of handling our forests. It would not be difficult to order those who oversee the cutting, to direct the workmen to leave the trees of good size and to stack the branches in piles.
In the Village. - I came to the village, and there was met by the same stories. 'They take everything away from us, and don't give us anything.' At present the principal grievance of the villagers is compulsory-labor service for cutting and hauling firewood. Soviet administrative machinery for this has been created, and is not bad, but it is clear that in many ways this machinery is still rather bureaucratic. Central authorities work out instructions for hauling firewood, in which they give not only the quantity to be hauled but also the date for finishing the work; but they have no knowledge of actual conditions in the locality to guide them. The Provincial Forest Committee and the Provincial Labor Bureau instruct the District Labor Bureau and the District Forest Committee; they instruct the Cantonal Labor Committee and the latter passes the order on to the local soviets; but meantime the actual work goes ahead rather slowly. For example, in the localities where I was, the instructions provided that hauling firewood should begin the fifteenth of November and continue until the fifteenth of March; but when the work had hardly started it was interrupted by a new order, to begin cutting timber again. Even peasants who had horses went to cut wood. As a result the hauling of the wood which had been got ready was left to be done later; perhaps it will be delayed until the season of bad roads; and then, of course, it will not be done at all.
Our railroads and factories are experiencing a fuel crisis because the firewood which has been cut has not been delivered to the railway stations or factories. The railroads are operating irregularly because they lack fuel or have to use green wood cut hurriedly along the line. As a result the railroads do not transport fuel and raw materials to the factories on schedule. Meantime our forest workers apathetically and indifferently muddle their work, doing things hind-side-foremost. First they cut wood for 1922, and then they haul woodcut for 1921. The peasants laugh maliciously.
'We do everything backwards. We cut wood last year and we burned it up, now we are cutting more, and we'll burn that again in the forest next summer.'
The Levy. - The levy is causing less unrest in the village. This may be because it is somewhat delayed and also because it is being collected by the local boards themselves. The latter, though they are not ideal agents for this, have worked out a sort of system of their own. If we redall the howl that formerly reached us from the village, because of the lawless acts of the authorities, we have reason to feel that Soviet local self-government has made real progress. Of course the village administrations still have many failings, especially bureaucratism. They frequently disregard the needs of the population; and enforce all the instructions. of the central government without modification. For example, in collecting the levy of wool, - which, to tell the truth, was done at the right time: in the winter, that is, and not in the fall, - it was discovered that the peasants, even those who had sheep, could not furnish their quotas. Why? They had already used the wool for their own needs, mainly to make their winter felt boots. The peasants did not refuse to furnish the wool demanded, but they asked that delivery be put off until February, which is the time for the winter shearing. But the authorities replied, 'The quota must be furnished at once, or we shall send an armed force to get it.' So the peasants had either to borrow or to buy wool. In another analogous case they took all last year's hay crop from the peasants of Fecdorits, so that some of them had to get straw to feed their cattle.
The local officials have a way of promising to furnish the peasant with things in return for his products, in order to get them more easily, and then not giving him anything.
'They say, "give us milk and we will give you salt and manufactured goods"; but when the time comes they allow only forty rubles a pud for the milk, and let the peasant eat his cabbage soup without salt.'
'There was never before on Bshivka Hill (in Ribinsk) such a time of distress as the peasant is going through now.' But this distress is not universal. Over in Lapel beyond Mologya, where there is much grain, the peasants are not only getting along very well, but they've got by barter gold watches and fox furs.
In conclusion let me say a few words about the mobilization of skilled workers. The mobilization has been completed, and half of the skilled men have managed to be left at home, in some sort of a government job, which usually is not in their special trade. The rest of them have been assembled in Ribinsk, at the factories, although not all of them, especially the carpenters and other craftsmen, are needed there. You know if a factory or mill cannot run to capacity because it lacks raw materials, fuel, or some other essential thing, you cannot remedy it by sending more workmen there. Quite the contrary. Not only do those who have just been mobilized wander idly about through the works, but they interfere with the old workmen, and lessen their output.
Why is it, that in Petrograd it is forbidden to start new enterprises or trades because of the lack of workmen, while those at Ribinsk are busy only two or three days a week?
I noticed as something new in the villages, that in the crowds there is more quarreling, and in the parish more divorces. The latter phenomenon has taken on a mass character. Not only the young people become divorced but also old couples who have two sons in the Red Army and a daughter engaged to be married. And their faith is not so strong. The political revolution and its extension - the economic shaking-up - are moving religion from a dead centre.
All the accounts I received of the peasants' life lead to one conclusion: conditions in the villages are very, very bad. The city working-classes must give special attention to this. They must make a great effort to satisfy both their own requirements and those of the peasants. No matter what happens, we must give the peasants salt, cloth, kerosene, soap, nails and agricultural implements. We Communists must give as much attention as possible to the villages, send our comrades most experienced in economic, matters to them, improve our supervision of the local boards and councils, call unceasingly upon the best sons of the village to cooperate with us.