Date: 1912
Source: ru:PSS/v21

Again, famine—just as in old Russia, up until 1905. Crop failures occur everywhere, but it is only in Russia that they plunge millions of peasants into desperate distress, triggering mass starvation. And the current calamity, as even supporters of the government and the landed gentry are forced to acknowledge, dwarfs the famine of 1891 in both scale and severity.

A population of thirty million has been struck with devastating force. Peasants are selling off their plots of land, their livestock, and everything else that can be put up for sale—at ruinous prices. Young women are being sold into marriage—returning us to the darkest days of slavery. This national catastrophe lays bare, in a single stroke, the true nature of our so‑called “civilized” social order: in different forms, cloaked in different guises, under a different “culture,” this system remains nothing more than the ancient institution of slavery—slavery of millions of toiling workers, enslaved for the sake of wealth, luxury, and the idleness of the “upper” ten thousand. As ever with slaves, labor is grueling and backbreaking; meanwhile, the rich remain utterly indifferent to the fate of their serfs: in the past, slaves were starved to death outright; women were taken directly into the master’s harem; slaves were subjected to brutal torture. Today, the peasants have been robbed—through every conceivable trick, every conquest, every supposed advance of civilization—robbed to the point where they waste away from hunger, subsisting on lamb’s quarters, swallowing clumps of dirt in place of bread, suffering from scurvy, and dying in agony. Meanwhile, Russian landlords, led by Nicholas II, and Russian capitalists are raking in fortunes by the millions: owners of entertainment establishments in the capital cities report that they have not seen such brisk business in ages. Never before has there been such brazen, unrestrained displays of luxury as we see today in the great urban centers.

Why is it that in Russia—and in Russia alone—these medieval-style famines still persist alongside the most modern advances of civilization? Because the new vampire, capital, is descending upon the Russian peasantry under conditions in which the peasants are bound hand and foot by the feudal bonds of serfdom, by the oppressive yoke of landlordism, by the autocratic rule of the tsarist state. Robbed by the landlords, crushed beneath the arbitrary whims of officials, ensnared in webs of police prohibitions, petty harassments, and violent abuses, shackled by the latest apparatus of watchmen, priests, and zemstvo administrators, the peasants are as defenseless against natural disasters as the savages of Africa—and just as vulnerable to the onslaught of capital. Only in the wild lands of Africa can one still encounter such widespread, catastrophic mortality from hunger as in twentieth‑century Russia.

But the famine gripping modern Russia—after all those boastful pronouncements by the tsarist government about the benefits of new land reforms, about the progress of farmstead economies, and so forth—will not pass without teaching the peasants much. The famine will claim millions of lives, but it will also destroy what remains of the savage, barbaric, slavish faith in the tsar—a faith that has long hindered the peasantry from grasping the necessity and inevitability of revolutionary struggle against the tsarist monarchy, against the landlords. It is only through the abolition of landlord landownership that the peasants can find a way out. It is only by overthrowing the tsarist monarchy—the very stronghold of the landlords—that the path to a somewhat humane existence lies open, a path to liberation from famine, from unrelenting poverty.

To explain this—to enlighten the working class—is the duty of every conscious worker, the duty of every conscious peasant. This is our primary task in the face of the famine. Wherever possible, we must organize collections among workers to aid the starving peasants and send these funds through Social Democratic deputies—this, of course, is also one of the essential tasks at hand.

“Workers’ Gazette,” No. 8, March 17 (30), 1912

Printed according to the text of “Workers’ Gazette.”