I am not here concerned with criticizing Soviet Russia; that is a thing which we in the present period must leave to the Russian workers themselves. What interests me here is to depict the economic conditions of the peasants. That this condition is not brilliant the descriptions given have proven. The Russian peasants are suffering want, dire want, but less for ivant of food than for want of industrial products. If the Russian revolution, the party ruling at present, succeeds in appeasing the hunger for industrial products, then the revolution will develop into freer forms, then no reaction can any longer interrupt its progress ; but, if not, then the fate of the revolution is in the dark.
As I am writing down my experiences not that they may merely be condemned to an archive existence as dead matter, nor in order to give the counter-revolutionaries water on their mills, nor in order to call on the German workers for a spiritless and apelike imitation of the Russian bolshevik and revolutionary policy, but rather have been inspired with the sincere desire that the revolutionary workers should benefit from the experiences of the Russian revolution and learn from it, I cannot abstain from pointing out that the world's hand and brain workers, as well as the peasants, must guard against turning over the organization of distribution to a soulless and lifeless state bureaucracy — even if it be a communist bureaucracy. Revolutionary workers! You see from the examples of Russia that the state was not able to get the seed grain and the vegetable seeds and the seed potatoes to the peasants, through its organs! You have also learnt that the peasants, when they had a free hand to supply their own needs themselves, as happened in the gouvernement of Petrograd, solved these problems quicker, easier and better. May this be an admonition and a hint fo>r the world's workers not to trust too much to the state and its omnipotence. Even a communist-proletarian state is no exception to this; yes, in such a state it might be still more difficult, because, to begin with, the workers are not trained and accustomed to organizatory state work, and because the old bureaucrats will sabotage as far as possible. This is also what they did in Russia. Besides, the state is compelled, in all urgent cases, to turn the matter over to free organizations or private persons, who are then better able than the state to find the right way and complete the organization. With this we will not say that the private initiative of the capitalist ought to be restoredalthough this also is done in Russia, inasmuch as more important purveying for the army and other similarly important matters were turned over to private parties ; we only wish to point out that there is no \more incompetent apparatus for organizing the economic life than the state. The bolsheviks may try to maintain as often as they please that it was not possible to organize all this in a satisfactory manner, as long as it was necessary to concentrate all power on the war, but that now, the war being over, the economic side of reconstruction can begin. The fact that during the war time, when the state made its greatest efforts to solve all problems quickly, when the knife was on its throat and it did not shrink from any measures, it was not able to solve the problems that confronted it, but placed the most difficult matters in the hands of free organizations or even individual persons, is a striking proof of the incapacity of the state, for when it cannot make good at a time when it is strongest, when idealism is in danger, then it is still less capable of doing it in less dangerous times.
The Political Conditions of the Peasants