On the other hand, the state has succeeded in considerably improving the fuel situation through these energetic, frequently quite draconic measures. In the cities of Moscow and Petrograd it has this winter (1920-1921) been a good deal better than it was last year. The city dwellers, including the city proletariat, are the ones who are benefited by this, and not only the bolsheviks but everybody else concedes that the providing of fuel now is somewhat improved. Nevertheless, there are many non-bolsheviks, such as mensheviks, social-revolutionaries and even anarchists who reject the tactics through which the bolsheviks have exacted these performances.
The precarious position of the cities and their dependence upon the country for provisions and, partly, for fuel leads to opposition between city and country. The peasants are hostile to the cities. But above everything they hate the requisitioning soldiers, and they are no friends of the state, as they get nothing from the state, or as good as nothing, while the state wants to get a good deal from them. The opposition, and in a certain sense, the hostility between the peasants and the state took expression, from the side of the peasants, in hostility to the city. There is a danger lurking in this fact, which, however, will be removed as soon as the state (which to the peasants means the city) can again supply them with industrial products.
Through all these circumstances and through the distress in which the peasant finds himself, he has lost his inclination to cultivate the soil. The peasants no longer cultivate the land as intensively as before. The productivity has diminished. When in Germany it is said in influential government circles, that only work, only the raising of the intensity of labor can save German economic life, it is very true. The capitalists, of course, mean the labor of wage slaves, while the socialists, who can also accept this formula, mean the work of the whole population, with elin> ination of the capitalist coupon clipper, snobs and idlers. But this applies in still greater measure to Russia. For, Without doubt, Russian economic life is a hundred times more disarranged than German economic life. Just as little as the German proletarians obey their government's call for more intensive labor but, on the contrary, rather decrease the intensity where possible, so the Russian workers also do not think of any increase of production. Like the German proletarians they say to themselves : "For whom? The fruits of this do not go to me."
Thus it may be recorded that the cultivated area in Russia has considerably decreased. According to the reports of the soviet government the cultivated area in the gouvernement of Charkov has gone down 65% in the year 1920, in the gouvernement of Jekaterinoslov 40%, in the gouvernements of Cherson, Poltava and Odessa 15%. But it is to be noted that in the gouvernements of Jekaterinodav and Poltava large parts have been covered by the war operations, and still the cultivated area has not decreased as much as in the Charkov district, which, since Denikin was beaten, has been free from every kind of invasion and from armies. These figures are of extra-ordinary importance. Unfortunately, it has not been possible for me to get figures for the other gouvernements, particularly from Central Russia.
The decrease in the cultivated area on the part of the peasants corresponds to the falling off in the productivity of the industrial workers and the city proletarians. But, while in regard to the proletarians we must seek the principal reason in poor nourishment and in the general nervous break-down after years of war-like efforts, that is, in unconscious factors, and only partly in conscious will, springing from revolutionary class consciousness (with the Russian proletarians it is almost exclusively the first named causes), we must seek it elsewhere when it concerns the peasants. Only to a small extent are they affected by breakdown and indifference due to many years of war. The principal reason lies in the simple words: We have nothing to gain by it.