remained that the dictatorship of the Soviets had employed itself systematically on cutting the connecting nerves of the economic organism and had thereby produced a state of paraly- sis which it was out of question to heal by a few decrees.
One of the hateful consequences of this self-inflicted disorder was the severance between town and country. The rise and the growth of towns depend directly on ways of communication and the circulation of men and goods. They are primarily cen- tres of distribution and exchange, and if the roads to them are obstructed they are unable to perform their economic functions of distribution and exchange. There was, of course, a secondary cause to their decay in " Sovdepia," namely the fact that they were centres of industry and affected by the ruin. But their de- cay as centres of commerce was bound in itself to produce a back flow of the population towards the villages. Such a back flow was especially indicated in Russia, where the distinction be- tween rural and urban life was never a very marked one, and where large numbers of the inhabitants, such as cabmen, carriers, porters, small tradesmen, were recruited from the villages for a time and accustomed to return to their rural homes at certain periods of the year. In " Sovdepia " this mixed population tried to escape from the deadening grip of the Bolsheviks in the towns to the rural districts. It could live a freer life there, and, besides, it was nearer to the direct source of food-stuffs the tilled soil. In this way the economic evolution of " Sovdepia " might be described as a regress from commercial to natural husbandry.
Another side of this process of " naturalization " was con- nected with the disappearance of the mainspring of flourishing commerce credit. The causes of this phenomenon are partly of an economic and partly of a political nature. As the whole system of Communism is based on war against capital, no accumulation of wealth or resources should be allowed in private hands. This being so, no transactions can be carried out in the strength of confidence in a person's ability to meet engagements in thefuture. Cash payments and (in view of the worthless currency) barter are the only legitimate forms of exchange. To this must be added the effect produced by arbitrary expropriations by the renuncia- tion of State liabilities, at home and abroad, by the absence of any legal security against dispossession. In such conditions there can be no talk of prosperous economic intercourse. Not the market but the barrack is the social center.
The will of a people to live cannot be entirely extinguished even by a Communist regime. Practice reacts by all conceivable means against the theory. Clandestine trade had been going on in Russia all through the years 1918-21. The Sukharevka mar- ket in Moscow teemed with people bidding all kinds of goods for sale. Those who succeeded in getting a passage by rail or by river-craft carried little stores of merchandise in sacks, ostensibly for their own use, in reality for trade purposes. What prices such contraband goods fetched was another matter: people had to pay fantastic sums for the risks incurred by the traders, besides mak- ing up for the depreciation of the currency. Anyhow the flow of speculation had never ceased in spite of all the decrees of the Soviet, and the rulers had recently made up their mind to recog- nize the existence and to admit in half-hearted way the legality of local trade (March 1921). This was proclaimed in the west as a great victory of common sense over extremist doctrine : it was in truth an inevitable admission which did not do away with the main causes of the disorder insecurity, disruption of com- munications, distrust, corrupt and arbitrary interference by the commissars. As long as these causes continued to operate, the economic life of Russia would be suffering from their cumulative effects, and the social intercourse of the country was bound to be disturbed by the fever of fraudulent and rapacious profiteering in an atmosphere of misery and disease.
Agriculture. State of Peasantry. One of the first decrees of the Bolshevjks proclaimed the abolition of private property and the nationalization of the land. In practice this decree sanctioned the disorderly grabbing of estates by the adjoining peasantry, and the new rulers connived at this form of appropriation for the sake of its psychological effect as a revolutionary act. This meant that they renounced " nationalization " at the same time
as they professed to carry it out, and although they tried to save their face by distinguishing between the ownership attributed to the republic and the possession of land snatched by the peasants, the fact remained that the October Revolution as translated into agrarian terms meant the passage of some 50 million dessiatins (135 million ac.) from former landowners into the hands of " petty bourgeois " of the peasant class. The fact that some of the new proprietors held in village groups while others held in individual homesteads did not alter the fundamental opposition between the two social conceptions. The history of the years of Soviet domination up to July 1921 showed that the Communists did not realize at once the consequences of the agrarian revolu- tion registered by their decree. They strove to carry out their programme of nationalization in two directions: they kept in the hands of the Commonwealth a considerable number of estates which had belonged to the State, the Imperial family and certain private landowners they based their policy of food supply on the principle that the peasants were tenants at will of the repub- lic liable to unlimited exactions for the benefit of the whole.
Under the first head a series of measures were adopted for the exploitation of estates on communistic principles. In the pecu- liar terminology of the Soviet a number of " Sovkhoses " and " Kolkhoses " were carved out of the land fund and put under the economic control of the administration. The " Sovkhoses " were economic organizations carried on under the immediate direc- tion of the Government while the " Kolkhoses " were communes and associations of peasants enjoying economic support from the Government. Sovkhoses either carried on agriculture in general or cultivated special kinds of technical plants such as beetroot or tobacco. In the first case the Sovkhoses were mainly organized as colonies of industrial workers fitted out with agricultural implements of all kinds, cattle, seeds, etc. The object was to make town workers more independent of the " yoke " of the villages by giving them the opportunity of growing their own corn and vegetables, managing their own dairy farms, etc. These annexes of the factories, designed to rear privileged proletarians in a healthy atmosphere of occasional rural occupation and to provide the surrounding villages with examples of model farming, proved a dismal failure. According to a report presented to a congress of agricultural workers in July 1920 the delays and red tape of administrative patronage rendered the condition of the proletarian husbandmen exceedingly precarious. 1 And as for the workers it could not be expected that they would be able to give satisfaction in their amphibious pursuits. The progress of the Kolkhoses was not more successful. Some were started as actual " communes " with individual cooperation and individual " prof- its," and those were doomed to be a failure; other Kolkhoses merely drew assistance from the Government, and had to en- counter the hostility of neighbouring, less-privileged villages. The negative results of this experiment may be gauged from the fact that the number of Kolkhoses in action decreased in one year from 1,900 to 1,500.
The immense area covered by peasant tenures on the old lines was little affected its constitution by the Bolshevik usurpation. The attempt of the Soviet to bait the well-to-do peasants by the needy folk proved that the Communist intellectuals did not know the material with which they had to deal. There was no " village proletariat " to speak of, which could serve as a basis for the in- tended subversion of social relations in the villages; and such tramps and drunkards as the Bolsheviks were able to bring to- gether in their crusade against welfare and order did not succeed in effecting much more than occasional disturbances, which ended mostly in the suppression of the " needy folk " by the peasantry.
'According to the decree of June 8 1919, the control of the Sovkhoses farms was given to the Glavsemkhose (the Central Board of Agriculture), which (l) united all agricultural farms or- ganized by the industrial proletariat ; and (2) united all the central boards controlling those branches of industry which were in need of agricultural plants for their production, such as " Glavsakhar," " Glavtabak," " Glavkrachmal," " Centrochai," and " Pharma- centre" (Economic Life Oct. 2 1919). The original area allotted to different industrial boards amounted to 200,000 dess. (540,000 ac.), but the area actually distributed amongst them was much smaller, amounting only to 80,000 dess. (Russian Economist, Jan. 1921).
