RUSSIAN PEASANTRY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 147, 24 June 1931, Page 8

RUSSIAN PEASANTRY

BACK INTO BONDAGE MAIN ISSUE OF SOVIET PLANS. LAND UNDER MILITARY RULE. The discussion of forced labour in the Russian timber camps is in danger of taking our attention off the main issue which is at present being decided in Russia, Sir Bernard Pares wrote, in u letter to the Times recently. Just 70 years ago last Alarch—the span of a human life—the Russian peasants were emancipated from serfdom; not only that, but, for payments which were to be scattered over the next 49 years, they received at once in peasant property about half the cultivated land, and, by an Act of Alexander 111., in 1893. no peasant property could ever pass into the hands of another class. Such a settlement would have been regarded as extremely generous in Eng land, but in Russia, while setting free economic forces of the first importance, it still tended to increase the unrest The smaller gentry, paid off in bonds which rapidly deteriorated, were largely eliminated from country life; but the peasants, too, who under serfdom had at least cultivated tho whole of the land, now found themselves faced with a great land shortage, which, with a rapidly growing population, rapidly increased. The Appropriation of 1917. The land remained the principal question in Russia. The peasant sought remedies in renting, in migrating to Siberia, in utilising the admirable but limited improvements made accessible to him by tho zenistva, or county councils, but from 1908 onwards most of all by setting up individual farms in lieu of the old communal tenure, which hc> often described as a second serfdom. But in 1917 he was able to realise all his desires by appropriating the remainder of the land, of course to the complete impoverishment of the gentry. This was far the most “positive achieve ment of the Revolution.

It was tho peasant’s refusal to sur render his surplus crop as a simple requisition of the State that brought, first, punitive expeditions, then wholesale famine and epidemics, and in 192.1 the abandonment of the first experiment in militant Communism; and as soon as he was more or less left alone there came a great wave of individual farming, which restored the prosperity of the countryside. But this, of cou-sc, meant the ultimate defeat of the Communist theory, which the peasants had so clearly refused to share. War Upon Peasant Thrift. The respite was short, and after : whole series of vexatious measures the so-called Government of workers and peasants passed definitely, deliberately, and openly to a campaign of extermina tion of peasant thrift. No other evidence than the clearest possible expressions in the Communist press is required to show that it is roughly a population of between five and six millions of thrifty peasants that is thus to be deliberately “liquidated.” One would have to go very far back in history to find anything like it. This is what, is going on now, and the timber camps arc simply an adjunct of this far greater issue. The land is everywhere being taken away from the peasant and placed under military rule; agriculture is to be mechanised; serfdom is restored with ever so much more far-reaching conditions. Those who resist this gross violation of age-long aspirations and their recent satisfaction have been killed by hundreds and hundreds; the unresisting have been denuded of everything and sent to the timber camps. The peasant is left no way of living but to go into bondage on the State or collective farms. “An Interesting Experiment.” Will the Government ‘‘get away with it?” Russian peasant history, with all its endurance and evasions, is too long for the question to be answered in a year or two. Two years ago the peasants were more or less holding their own, and one year ago the Government itself called a temporary retreat. The very attempt would be impossible but for modern weapons of destruction and the training of some two or three millions of young folk in Communist blinkers. Time will show. But there is no greater proof of the devastating effects of tho reign of force bred by the War—the War that was to “make the world safe for democracy.”—and no greater sign of our own deterioration than that tho spiritless young people of to-day should be content to regard this huge tragedy as simply ‘‘an interesting experiment. ’ ’