When people speak of serfdom in Russian life generally, and in the Russian village in particular, this provokes a protest from our liberals — especially those liberals who love to present themselves as almost Marxists. Well, they say, what sort of serfdom is this in Russia in the twentieth century! It's simply "agitation"…

And yet astonishingly vivid pictures of serfdom in contemporary Russian villages are encountered at every turn, and only the accursed ossification of the "inured" Russian philistine compels him to pass indifferently by these pictures.

Here is one of them, which we take from the data of the official collection of resolutions of the Chernigov provincial zemstvo assembly for ten years, 1900–1909.

"A dark stain upon our zemstvo," writes on this matter Mr. Knizhnyakov (*Russkoe Bogatstvo*), "is the preservation down to the present time of an archaic method of maintaining country roads through natural corvée… Setting aside the profound injustice of this corvée being borne exclusively by peasants, the very method of performing this corvée is revolting. After the melting of snow and after torrential rains, village elders, usually at the menacing command of a police official, 'drive together the people,' as we say, to repair the road. The work is performed without any sense, without leveling, without any technical instructions. I happened to witness such work being performed with particular energy, with menacing shouts from the officials, with compulsion of the negligent by whip blows. This was in late summer, before the expected visit of the governor… Over a distance of about three versts, up to 500 men and women with spades were driven together. They, by command of the officials, dug out ditches that no one needed, which afterwards had to be filled in… And our zemstvo, over nearly 50 years of its existence, not only has not taken care to remove this burden from the peasant population, but has further increased it…"

This zemstvo, like all Russian zemstvos, is a landowner's zemstvo.

So then, the landowners are further increasing the ancient "corvée" of the peasants. At the command of the landowners, officials and elders "drive together the people," forcing hundreds of peasants to tear themselves away from their farms and "dig out ditches that no one needed," "without any sense," "with compulsion of the negligent by whip blows."

Here lie the roots of the power of the Purishkeviches, the Markovs, and Company. And how repulsively hypocritical, when set alongside such roots, are our sleek, proper, well-intentioned reformist liberal programs!

*Pravda* No. 149, July 2, 1913. Signed: T—in

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*