Unless in the imagination of citizens living in an alternative reality or in the descriptions of paid propagandists, the situation in "Russia We Have Lost" seems to be almost an earthly paradise. It is described approximately in the following way: “Before the revolution and collectivization, whoever worked well lived well. Because he lived by his own labor, and the poor were lazy and drunkards. The kulaks were the most hard-working peasants and the best owners, therefore they lived the best. " This is followed by a cry about "Russia-feeding-all-Europe-with-wheat" or, in extreme cases, half of Europe, "while the USSR imported bread", trying to prove in such a cheating way that the path of socialism of the USSR was less effective than the path of tsarism. Then, of course, about the "crunch of a French roll", enterprising and sharp-witted Russian merchants, a God-fearing, kind-hearted and highly moral God-bearing people who were spoiled by the bastards-Bolsheviks, "the best people killed and expelled by the Bolsheviks." Well, really, what an evil monster must be to destroy such a sublime pastoral?
Such leafy tales, however, drawn by unkind and dishonest people, appeared when the overwhelming majority of those who remembered how it really was, died or went beyond the age at which it is possible to receive adequate information from them. By the way, for those who love to feel nostalgic about the wonderful pre-revolutionary times at the end of the 30s, ordinary citizens could easily clean their faces in a purely village style without any party committees, so the memories of “lost Russia” were fresh and painful.
A huge number of sources have come down to us about the situation in the Russian countryside before the Revolution - both documentary reports and statistical data, and personal impressions. Contemporaries assessed the reality of "God-bearing Russia" around them not only without enthusiasm, but simply found it desperate, if not scary. The life of the average Russian peasant was extremely harsh, even more so - cruel and hopeless.
Here is the testimony of a person who is difficult to blame for inappropriateness, non-Russianness or dishonesty. This is the star of world literature - Leo Tolstoy. This is how he described his trip to several dozen villages in different counties at the very end of the 19th century [1]:
“In all these villages, although there is no admixture to bread, as was the case in 1891, bread, although pure, is not given ad libitum. Welding - millet, cabbage, potatoes, even the majority, do not have any. The food consists of herbal cabbage soup, whitened if there is a cow, and unbleached if there is no cow, and only bread. In all these villages, the majority have sold and pledged everything that can be sold and pledged.
From Gushchino I went to the village of Gnevyshevo, from which peasants came two days ago asking for help. This village, like Gubarevka, consists of 10 courtyards. There are four horses and four cows for ten households; there are almost no sheep; all the houses are so old and bad they barely stand. Everyone is poor and everyone begs for help. “If only the guys were resting in the slightest degree,” the women say. "And then they ask for folders (bread), but there is nothing to give, and they will fall asleep without having dinner" …
I asked to exchange three rubles for me. In the whole village there was not even a ruble of money … In the same way, the rich, who make up about 20% everywhere, have a lot of oats and other resources, but in addition, landless soldiers' children live in this village. A whole suburb of these inhabitants has no land and is always in poverty, but now it is with expensive bread and with a meager giving of alms in terrible, terrible poverty …
From the hut, near which we stopped, a tattered, dirty woman came out and approached a pile of something lying on the pasture and covered with a torn and permeated caftan everywhere. This is one of her 5 children. A three-year-old girl is ill with a kind of influenza in the extreme heat. Not that there is no talk of treatment, but there is no other food, except for the crusts of bread, which the mother brought yesterday, abandoning the children and running off with a bag for an extortion … The husband of this woman left in the spring and did not return. These are approximately many of these families …
For us adults, if we are not crazy, it would seem that we can understand where the people's hunger comes from. First of all, he - and every man knows this - he
1) from the lack of land, because half of the land belongs to landowners and merchants who sell both land and grain.
2) from factories and plants with those laws under which the capitalist is protected, but the worker is not protected.
3) from vodka, which is the main income of the state and to which people have been accustomed for centuries.
4) from the soldiery, which takes away the best people from him at the best time and corrupts them.
5) from officials who oppress the people.
6) from taxes.
7) from ignorance, in which he is deliberately supported by government and church schools.
The further into the depths of the Bogoroditsk district and closer to the Efremov district, the worse and worse the situation … Almost nothing was born on the best lands, only the seeds returned. Almost everyone has bread with quinoa. The quinoa is green and immature here. That white nucleolus, which usually happens in it, is not at all, and therefore it is not edible. You cannot eat bread with quinoa alone. If you eat one bread on an empty stomach, you will vomit. From kvass, made on flour with quinoa, people go crazy"
Well, are the lovers of “Russia Lost” impressive?
V. G. Korolenko, who lived in the village for many years, visited other starving areas in the early 1890s and organized canteens there for the hungry and the distribution of food loans, left very characteristic testimonies of government officials: “You are a fresh man, you come across a village with dozens typhoid patients, you see how the sick mother bends over the sick child's cradle to feed him, loses consciousness and lies over him, and there is no one to help, because the husband on the floor mutters in incoherent delirium. And you are horrified. And the "old campaigner" is used to it. He had already experienced this, he was already horrified twenty years ago, had been ill, boiled over, calmed down … Typhus? Why, this is always with us! Quinoa? Yes, we have this every year!..”[2].
Please note that all the authors are talking not about a single random event, but about a constant and severe famine in the Russian countryside.
“I meant not only to attract donations for the benefit of the hungry, but also to present to society, and perhaps to the government, a stunning picture of land turmoil and poverty of the agricultural population on the best lands.
I had the hope that when I succeeded in announcing all this, when I loudly tell the whole of Russia about these Dubrovtsy, Pralevtsy and Petrovtsy, how they became "undead", how "bad pain" destroys entire villages, as in Lukoyanova himself the little girl asks her mother to "bury her alive in the land", then, perhaps, my articles will be able to have at least some influence on the fate of these Dubrovki, putting bluntly the question of the need for land reform, at least at the beginning of the most modest one. " [2]
I wonder what those who like to describe the “horrors of the Holodomor” - the only famine of the USSR (except for the war, of course) - will say to this?
In an attempt to save themselves from hunger, the inhabitants of entire villages and districts “walked around the world with their bags”, trying to escape from starvation. This is how Korolenko describes it, who witnessed it. He also says that this was the case in the life of the majority of Russian peasants.
Cruel sketches from nature of Western correspondents of the Russian famine of the late 19th century have survived.
Hungry hordes try to escape in cities
“I know many cases when several families joined together, chose some old woman, together supplied her with the last crumbs, gave her children, and they themselves wandered into the distance, wherever their eyes looked, longing for the unknown about the children left behind … stocks disappear from the population, - family after family goes out on this mournful road … Dozens of families, spontaneously united in crowds, which were driven by fear and despair to highways, to villages and cities. Some local observers from rural intelligentsia tried to create some kind of statistics to take into account this phenomenon, which attracted everyone's attention. Having cut a loaf of bread into many small pieces, the observer counted these pieces and, serving them, thus determined the number of beggars who had stayed during the day. The figures turned out to be truly frightening … Autumn did not bring improvement, and winter was approaching amid a new crop failure … In the fall, before the start of loans, again whole clouds of the same hungry and the same frightened people came out of the destitute villages … When the loan came to an end, begging intensified among these fluctuations and became more and more common. The family, which served yesterday, went out today with a bag … (ibid.)
Crowds of starving people from the village reached St. Petersburg. Near the shelter.
Millions of desperate people took to the roads, fled to cities, even reaching the capitals. Crazy with hunger, people begged and stole. The corpses of those who died of hunger lay along the roads. To prevent this gigantic flight of desperate people into the starving villages, troops and Cossacks were sent to prevent the peasants from leaving the village. Often they were not released at all, usually only those who had a passport were allowed to leave the village. The passport was issued for a certain period by the local authorities, without it the peasant was considered a vagrant and not everyone had a passport. A person without a passport was considered a vagabond, subject to corporal punishment, imprisonment and expulsion.
The Cossacks do not allow the peasants to leave the village to go with the bag.
It is interesting that those who like to speculate about how the Bolsheviks did not let people out of the villages during the "Holodomor" will say about it?
This scary but commonplace picture “Rossi-We-Lost” is now being carefully forgotten.
The flow of starving people was such that the police and Cossacks could not stop it. To save the situation in the 90s of the 19th century, food loans began to be used - but the peasant was obliged to give them back from the harvest in the fall. If he did not give the loan, then it was “hung up” on the village community according to the principle of mutual guarantee, and then, as it turned out, they could ruin it clean, taking everything as arrears, they could collect “the whole world” and repay the debt, they could beg the local authorities to forgive the loan.
Now, few people know that in order to get bread, the tsarist government took harsh confiscatory measures - it urgently increased taxes in certain areas, collected arrears, or even simply seized the surplus by force - by police officers with detachments of Cossacks, riot police of those years. The main burden of these confiscation measures fell on the poor. The rural rich usually paid off with bribes.
The sergeant with the Cossacks enter the village in search of the hidden grain.
The peasants covered the bread en masse. They were flogged, tortured, beaten out bread by any means. On the one hand, it was cruel and unfair, on the other hand, it helped to save their neighbors from starvation. Cruelty and injustice were that there was bread in the state, albeit in small quantities, but it was exported, and a narrow circle of "effective owners" fattened from exports.
Famine in Russia. Troops have been brought into the starving village. A Tatar peasant woman on her knees begs the sergeant.
“Actually, the most difficult time was approaching with spring. Their bread, which the "deceivers" sometimes knew how to hide from the watchful eye of the police officers, from zealous paramedics, from "searches and seizures," has completely disappeared almost everywhere. " [2]
Grain loans and free canteens have indeed saved a lot of people and eased suffering, without which the situation would have become simply monstrous. But their coverage was limited and completely inadequate. In those cases when grain aid reached the hungry, it was often too late. People have already died or received irreparable health disorders, for the treatment of which they needed qualified medical help. But tsarist Russia sorely lacked not only doctors, even paramedics, not to mention medicines and means of fighting hunger. The situation was dire.
Distribution of corn to the starving, Molvino village, not far from Kazan
“… A boy is sitting on the stove, swollen from hunger, with a yellow face and conscious, sad eyes. In the hut there is pure bread from an increased loan (evidence in the eyes of the still dominant system), but now, for the recovery of an exhausted body, it is no longer enough to have one, even pure bread.”[2]
Perhaps Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko were writers, that is, sensitive and emotional people, this was an exception and exaggerate the scale of the phenomenon and in reality everything is not so bad?
Alas, foreigners who were in Russia in those years describe exactly the same, if not worse. Constant hunger, periodically interspersed with severe hunger plagues, was a terrible commonplace in tsarist Russia.
The hut of a starving peasant
Professor of Medicine and Doctor Emil Dillon lived in Russia from 1877 to 1914, worked as a professor at several Russian universities, traveled extensively across all regions of Russia and saw the situation well at all levels at all levels - from ministers to poor peasants. He is an honest scientist, completely uninterested in distorting reality.
This is how he describes the life of an average peasant in the Tsarist era: “A Russian peasant … goes to bed at six or five in the evening in winter, because he cannot spend money on buying kerosene for the lamp. He has no meat, eggs, butter, milk, often no cabbage, he lives mainly on black bread and potatoes. Lives? He is starving to death due to insufficient supply. " [3]
The scientist-chemist and agronomist AN Engelgardt, lived and worked in the village and left the classic fundamental research of the reality of the Russian village - "Letters from the village":
“Those who know the countryside, who know the situation and life of the peasants, do not need statistical data and calculations to know that we are not selling bread abroad from an excess … In a person from the intellectual class, such a doubt is understandable, because it is simply not believed, how is it that people live without eating. And yet this is really so. Not that they have not eaten at all, but malnourished, live from hand to mouth, eat all sorts of rubbish. Wheat, good clean rye, we send abroad, to the Germans, who will not eat any rubbish … Our peasant farmer does not have enough wheat bread for a child's nipple, the woman will chew the rye crust that she eats, put it in a rag - suck. 4]
It is somehow very much at odds with the pastoral paradise, isn't it?
Perhaps at the beginning of the 20th century, everything worked out, as some "patriots of tsarist Russia" are now saying. Alas, this is absolutely not the case.
According to the observations of Korolenko, a man involved in helping the hungry, in 1907 the situation in the village not only did not change, on the contrary, it became noticeably worse:
“Now (1906-7) in the starving areas, fathers sell their daughters to merchants of living goods. The progress of the Russian famine is obvious. " [2]
Famine in Russia. The roofs are dismantled to feed the cattle with straw
“The wave of the resettlement movement is growing rapidly with the approach of spring. The Chelyabinsk Resettlement Administration registered 20,000 walkers in February, most of the starving provinces. Typhus, smallpox, and diphtheria are widespread among the migrants. Medical care is insufficient. There are only six canteens from Penza to Manchuria. " Newspaper "Russian Word" dated March 30 (17), 1907 [5]
- I mean exactly the hungry migrants, that is, refugees from hunger, which were described above. It is quite obvious that the famine in Russia did not actually stop and, by the way, Lenin, when he wrote about the fact that the peasant ate his fill for the first time under Soviet rule, did not exaggerate at all.
In 1913 there was the largest harvest in the history of pre-revolutionary Russia, but the famine was all the same. He was especially cruel in Yakutia and adjacent territories, where he did not stop since 1911. Local and central authorities were practically not interested in the problems of helping the hungry. A number of villages died out completely. [6]
Are there any scientific statistics of those years? Yes, there is, they were summed up and they wrote openly about hunger even in encyclopedias.
“After the famine of 1891, covering a huge area in 29 provinces, the lower Volga region constantly suffers from hunger: during the XX century. Samara province went on hunger strike 8 times, Saratov 9. Over the past thirty years, the largest hunger strikes date back to 1880 (the Lower Volga region, part of the lakeside and Novorossiysk provinces) and to 1885 (Novorossia and part of the non-black earth provinces from Kaluga to Pskov); then after the famine of 1891 came the famine of 1892 in the central and southeastern provinces, hunger strikes in 1897 and 98. in approximately the same area; in the XX century. famine of 1901 in 17 provinces of the center, south and east, hunger strike in 1905 (22 provinces, including four non-black earth ones, Pskov, Novgorod, Vitebsk, Kostroma), which opened a series of hunger strikes: 1906, 1907, 1908 and 1911 … (mostly eastern, central provinces, Novorossia) "[7]
Pay attention to the source - clearly not the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. So, in an ordinary and phlegmatic encyclopedic dictionary, it tells about an event well-known in Russia - a regular famine. Hunger every 5 years was common. Moreover, it is directly said that the people in Russia were starving at the beginning of the 20th century, that is, there is no question that the problem of constant hunger was solved by the tsarist government.
"French bread crunch", you say? Would you like to return to such a Russia, dear reader?
By the way, where does the bread come from for loans in famine? The fact is that there was grain in the state, but huge quantities of it were exported abroad for sale. The painting was disgusting and surreal. American charities sent bread to the starving regions of Russia. But the export of grain taken from the starving peasants did not stop.
The cannibalistic expression “We’re undernourished, but we’ll take it out” belongs to the Minister of Finance of the government of Alexander III, Vyshnegradsky, by the way, a prominent mathematician. When the director of the department of unreported fees, AS Ermolov, handed Vyshnegradskiy a memorandum in which he wrote about "a terrible sign of hunger," the intelligent mathematician then responded and said. And then I repeated it more than once.
Naturally, it turned out that some were malnourished, while others exported and received gold from exports. Famine under Alexander III became a perfect everyday life, the situation became much worse than under his father, the "Tsar-Liberator." But Russia began to intensively export grain, which was lacking for its peasants.
They called it that, without any hesitation - "hungry export". I mean, hungry for the peasants. Moreover, all this was not invented by Bolshevik propaganda. This was the terrible reality of tsarist Russia.
The export continued even when, as a result of a poor harvest, the net per capita tax was about 14 poods, while the critical level of hunger for Russia was 19.2 poods. Between 1891 and 1892, over 30 million people went hungry. According to official sharply underestimated data, 400 thousand people died then, modern sources believe that more than half a million people died, taking into account the poor registration of foreigners, the mortality rate can be significantly higher. But "they were not fed up, but they were taken out."
The grain monopolists were well aware that their actions lead to terrible hunger and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. They didn't give a damn about it.
“Alexander III was annoyed by the mention of“hunger”as a word invented by those who have nothing to eat. He imperially commanded to replace the word "hunger" with the word "crop failure". The General Directorate for Press Affairs immediately sent out a strict circular,”wrote the well-known Cadet lawyer and opponent of the Bolsheviks, Gruzenberg. By the way, for breaking the circular it was possible to go to jail completely out of joke. There were precedents. [nine]
Under his royal son Nicholas-2, the ban was softened, but when he was told about the famine in Russia, he was very indignant and demanded in no case to hear "about this when he deigned to dine." True, among the majority of the people, who managed to have such, God forgive me, the ruler with dinners was not so successful and they knew the word "hunger" not from stories:
“A peasant family where the per capita income was below 150 rubles (the average level and below) systematically had to face hunger. Based on this, we can conclude that periodic famine was largely typical for the majority of the peasant population. " [ten]
By the way, the average per capita income in those years was 102 rubles [11]. Do modern guardians of tsarist Russia have a good idea of what such dry academic lines mean in reality?
"Systematically collide" …
“With the average consumption close to the minimum norm, due to the statistical dispersion, the consumption of half of the population turns out to be less than the average and less than the norm. And although in terms of production the country was more or less provided with bread, the policy of forcing export led to the fact that the average consumption balanced at the level of the hungry minimum and about half of the population lived in conditions of constant malnutrition … "[12]
Photo caption: Famine in Siberia. Photograph. pictures from nature, taken in Omsk on July 21, 1911 by a member of the State. Dzyubinsky Duma.
First photo: Family of the widow kr. the village of Pukhovoy, Kurgan. at., VF Rukhlova, going "to the harvest." In harness, a foal is in its second year and two boys on a harness. Behind - the eldest son, who has fallen from exhaustion.
Second photo: Kr. Tobol. lips., Tyukalin. u., Kamyshinskaya vol., village Karaulnaya, M. S. Bazhenov with his family, going "to the harvest." Source: ISKRY JOURNAL, ELEVEN YEAR, under the Russkoe Slovo newspaper. No. 37, Sunday, September 25, 1911.
And this is all constant, "background" hunger, all sorts of tsar-hunger, pestilence, crop failure - this is in addition.
Due to extremely backward agricultural technologies, population growth “ate up” the growth of labor productivity in agriculture, the country confidently fell into the noose of a “black impasse”, from which it could not get out with an exhausted system of government such as “Romanov tsarism”.
The minimum physiological minimum for feeding Russia: at least 19, 2 pounds per capita (15, 3 pounds - for people, 3, 9 pounds - the minimum feed for livestock and poultry). The same number was the standard for the calculations of the State Planning Committee of the USSR in the early 1920s. That is, under Soviet Power, it was planned that the average peasant should have had no less than this amount of grain. The tsarist government was not worried about such questions.
Despite the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, the average consumption in the Russian Empire was, at last, a critical 19, 2 poods per person, but at the same time in a number of regions the increase in grain consumption occurred against the background of a fall in the consumption of other products.
Even this achievement (minimum physical survival) was ambiguous - according to estimates, from 1888 to 1913, the average per capita consumption in the country fell by at least 200 kcal. [10]
This negative dynamics is confirmed by the observations of not just "disinterested researchers" - ardent supporters of tsarism.
So one of the initiators of the creation of the monarchist organization "All-Russian National Union" Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov wrote in 1909:
“Every year the Russian army becomes more and more ailing and physically incapable … It is difficult to choose one out of three guys who is quite suitable for service … Poor food in the village, a wandering life in earnings, early marriages, requiring intense labor at an almost adolescent age - these are the reasons physical exhaustion … It's scary to say what hardships a recruit sometimes undergoes before service. About 40 percent For the first time, recruits ate meat when they entered military service. In the service, the soldier eats, in addition to good bread, excellent meat soup and porridge, i.e. something that many people in the village have no idea about …”[13]. Exactly the same data was given by the commander-in-chief, General V. Gurko - at the call from 1871 to 1901, reporting that 40% of peasant lads for the first time in their lives try meat in the army.
That is, even ardent, fanatical supporters of the tsarist regime admit that the average peasant's diet was very poor, which led to massive illness and exhaustion.
“The Western agricultural population mainly consumed high-calorie products of animal origin, the Russian peasant satisfied his need for food with the help of bread and potatoes with a lower calorie content. Meat consumption is unusually low. In addition to the low energy value of such nutrition … the consumption of a large mass of vegetable food, which compensates for the shortage of the animal, entails severe gastric diseases”[10].
Famine led to serious mass diseases and severe epidemics. [14] Even according to the pre-revolutionary research of the official body (department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire), the situation looks simply terrifying and shameful. [15] The study provides a mortality rate per 100 thousand people. for such diseases: in European countries and individual self-governing territories (for example, Hungary) within the countries.
In terms of mortality for all six major infectious diseases (smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus), Russia was in the lead by a colossal margin.
1. Russia - 527, 7 people.
2. Hungary - 200, 6 people.
3. Austria - 152, 4 people.
The lowest total mortality rate for major diseases is Norway - 50.6 people. More than 10 times less than in Russia!
Disease mortality:
Scarlet fever: 1st place - Russia - 134, 8 people, 2nd place - Hungary - 52, 4 people. 3rd place - Romania - 52, 3 people.
Even in Romania and dysfunctional Hungary, the mortality rate is more than two times less than in Russia. For comparison, the lowest death rate from scarlet fever was in Ireland - 2, 8 people.
Measles: 1. Russia - 106, 2 people. 2nd Spain - 45 people 3rd Hungary - 43, 5 people The lowest death rate from measles is Norway - 6 people, in impoverished Romania - 13 people. Again, the gap with the nearest neighbor in the list is more than doubled.
Typhoid: 1. Russia - 91, 0 people. 2. Italy - 28, 4 people. 3. Hungary - 28, 0 people. The smallest in Europe - Norway - 4 people. Under typhus, by the way, in Russia-which-we-lost, they wrote off the losses from hunger. So it was recommended for doctors to write off hungry typhus (intestinal damage during fasting and concomitant diseases) as infectious. This was reported quite openly in the newspapers. In general, the gap with the closest neighbor unfortunately is almost 4 times. Someone seems to have said that the Bolsheviks falsified statistics? Oh well. And here, at least fake it, at least not - the level of an impoverished African country.
It is no longer surprising that the picture is practically the same further on.
Whooping cough: 1. Russia - 80, 9 people. 2. Scotland - 43, 3 people. 3. Austria - 38, 4 people.
Smallpox: 1. Russia - 50, 8 people. 2. Spain - 17, 4 people. 3. Italy - 1, 4 people. The difference with a rather poor and backward agrarian Spain is almost 3 times. It is even better not to remember the leaders in the elimination of this disease. Beggar, oppressed by the British Ireland, from where the people fled in thousands across the ocean - 0, 03 people. It is even indecent to say about Sweden 0.01 people per 100 thousand, that is, one in 10 million. The difference is more than 5000 times.
The only difference is that the gap is not so terrible, just a little more than one and a half times - diphtheria: 1. Russia - 64, 0 people. 2. Hungary - 39, 8 people. 3rd place in mortality - Austria - 31, 4 people. The world leader of wealth and industrialization, Romania, only recently got rid of the Turkish yoke - 5, 8 people.
“Children eat worse than the calves of the owner with good livestock. The mortality of children is much higher than the mortality of calves, and if the mortality of calves was as great as the mortality of children in a man, if the owner with good livestock, then it would be impossible to manage…. If mothers ate better, if our wheat, which the German eats, remained at home, then the children would grow better and there would be no such mortality, all these typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria would not rage. By selling our wheat to a German, we are selling our blood, that is, peasant children”[16].
It is easy to calculate that in the Russian Empire, just because of the increased morbidity from hunger, disgustingly delivered medicine and hygiene, just like that, by the way, by the way, for a pinch of tobacco, about a quarter of a million people died a year. This is the result of the incompetent and irresponsible state administration of Russia. And this is only if the situation could be improved to the level of the most disadvantaged country of "classical" Europe in this respect - Hungary. If the gap was narrowed to the level of the average European country, this alone would save about half a million lives a year. For all 33 years of Stalin's rule in the USSR, torn apart by the consequences of the Civil, brutal class struggle in society, several wars and their consequences, a maximum of 800 thousand people were sentenced to death (significantly fewer were executed, but so be it). So this number is easily covered by only 3-4 years of increased mortality in "Russia-we-have-lost."
Even the most ardent supporters of the monarchy did not speak, they simply shouted about the degeneration of the Russian people.
“The population, existing from hand to mouth, and often simply starving, cannot give strong children, especially if we add to this those unfavorable conditions in which, in addition to lack of nutrition, a woman finds herself during and after pregnancy” [17].
“Stop, gentlemen, deceive yourself and cheat with reality! Do such purely zoological circumstances as the lack of food, clothing, fuel and elementary culture mean nothing among the Russian common people? But they are reflected very expressively in the impoverishment of the human type in Great Russia, Belarus and Little Russia. It is precisely the zoological unit - the Russian people in many places, engulfed in fragmentation and degeneration, which forced in our memory to lower the rate twice when hiring recruits for service. A little over a hundred years ago, the tallest army in Europe (Suvorov's "miracle heroes") - the present Russian army is already the shortest, and a terrifying percentage of recruits have to be rejected for service. Doesn't this “zoological” fact mean anything? Does our shameful, nowhere in the world, infant mortality rate, in which the vast majority of the living mass of the people do not live up to a third of the human century, mean nothing?”[18]
Even if we question the results of these calculations, it is obvious that the dynamics of changes in nutrition and labor productivity in agriculture of tsarist Russia (and this was the overwhelming majority of the country's population) were completely insufficient for the rapid development of the country and the implementation of modern industrialization - with the massive departure of workers to factories they would have had nothing to feed them in the conditions of tsarist Russia.
Maybe this was the big picture for that time and it was like that everywhere? And what about the nutritional status of the geopolitical opponents of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century? Something like this, data on Nefedov [12]:
The French, for example, consumed 1.6 times more grain than the Russian peasants. And this is in a climate where grapes and palms grow. If in numerical terms, the Frenchman ate 33.6 pounds of grain per year, producing 30.4 pounds and importing another 3, 2 pounds per person. The German consumed 27, 8 poods, producing 24, 2, only in the dysfunctional Austria-Hungary, surviving the last years, the consumption of grain was 23, 8 poods per capita.
The Russian peasant consumed meat in 2 times less than in Denmark and 7-8 times less than in France. The Russian peasants drank milk 2.5 times less than the Dane and 1, 3 times less than the French.
The Russian peasant ate eggs as much as 2, 7 (!) G per day, while the Danish peasant - 30 g, and the French - 70, 2 g per day.
By the way, dozens of chickens from Russian peasants appeared only after the October Revolution and Collectivization. Before that, feeding chickens with grain that your children lacked was too extravagant. Therefore, all researchers and contemporaries say the same thing - Russian peasants were forced to stuff their belly with all sorts of rubbish - bran, quinoa, acorns, bark, even sawdust, so that the pangs of hunger were not so painful. In fact, it was not an agricultural, but a society engaged in farming and gathering. Roughly as in the less developed societies of the Bronze Age. The difference with developed European countries was simply devastating.
“Wheat, good clean rye, we send abroad, to the Germans, who will not eat any rubbish. We burn the best, pure rye for wine, and the most bad rye, with fluff, fire, sivets and all the waste obtained when cleaning rye for distilleries - this is what a man eats. But not only does the peasant eat the worst bread, he is still malnourished. … from bad food people lose weight, get sick, the guys grow tighter, just like it happens with bad-fed cattle …"
What does this dry academic expression mean in reality: "the consumption of half of the population is less than the average and less than the norm" and "half of the population lived in conditions of constant malnutrition", this is: Hunger. Dystrophy. Every fourth child who has not even lived to be one year old. Children dying before our eyes.
It was especially hard for the children. In the event of hunger, it is most rational for the population to leave the necessary food for workers, reducing it to dependents, which obviously include children who are unable to work.
As the researchers frankly write: “Children of all ages who, under any conditions, have a systematic calorie deficit.” [10]
"At the end of the 19th century in Russia, only 550 out of 1000 born children survived to the age of 5, while in most Western European countries - more than 700. Before the Revolution, the situation improved somewhat -" only "400 children out of 1000 died." [19]
With an average birth rate of 7, 3 children per woman (family), there was almost no family in which several children would not die. That could not but be deposited in national psychology.
Constant hunger had a very strong impact on the social psychology of the peasantry. Including - on the real attitude towards children. L. N. Liperovsky, during the famine of 1912 in the Volga region, was involved in organizing food and medical aid to the population, testifies: “In the village of Ivanovka there is one very nice, large and friendly peasant family; all the children of this family are extremely beautiful; once I went to them in a piece of clay; in the cradle a child was screaming and the mother shook the cradle with such force that it was thrown up to the ceiling; I told the mother what harm to the child could be from such a swing. "Yes, let the Lord clean up at least one … And yet this is one of the good and kind women in the village" [20].
“From 5 to 10 years old, the Russian mortality rate is about 2 times higher than the European one, and up to 5 years old - an order of magnitude higher … The mortality rate of children older than one year is also several times higher than the European one” [15].
Photo caption: Aksyutka, satisfying hunger, chews white refractory clay, which has a sweetish taste. (v. Patrovka, Buzuluk)
For 1880-1916 The excess death rate of children compared with amounted to more than a million children a year. That is, from 1890 to 1914, only because of mediocre state administration in Russia, about 25 million children died for a pinch of tobacco. This is the population of Poland in those years, if it had died out completely. If you add to these the adult population, who did not live up to the average level, then the total numbers will be simply terrifying.
This is the result of tsarist rule in "Russia-We-Lost."
By the end of 1913, the main indicators of social well-being, the quality of nutrition and medicine - life expectancy and infant mortality in Russia - were at the African level. Average life expectancy in 1913 - 32, 9 years V. A. Mel'yantsev East and West in the second millennium: economics, history and modernity. - M., 1996. While in England - 52 years old, France - 50 years old, Germany - 49 years old, Central European - 49 years old. [21]
According to this most important indicator of the quality of life in the state, Russia was at the level of Western countries somewhere in the early to mid-18th century, lagging behind them by about two centuries.
Even the rapid economic growth between 1880 and 1913. did not close this gap. Progress in increasing life expectancy was very slow - in Russia in 1883 - 27.5 years, in 1900 - 30 years. This shows the effectiveness of the social system as a whole - agriculture, economy, medicine, culture, science, political structure. But this slow growth associated with an increase in the literacy of the population and the spread of the simplest sanitary knowledge [12] led to an increase in the population and, as a consequence, a decrease in land plots and an increase in the number of "mouths". An extremely dangerous unstable situation arose from which there was no way out without a radical reorganization of social relations.
However, even such a small life expectancy, this applies only to the best years, during the years of mass epidemics and hunger strikes, life expectancy was even shorter in 1906, 1909-1911, as even committed researchers say, life expectancy “for women did not fall below 30, but for men - below 28 years of age”. [22] What can I say, what reason for pride - the average life expectancy of 29 years in 1909-1911.
Only Soviet Power radically improved the situation. So just 5 years after the Civil War, the average life expectancy in the RSFSR was 44 years. [23]. While during the war of 1917 it was 32 years, and during the Civil years - about 20 years.
Soviet Power, even without taking into account the Civil War, made progress in comparison with the best year of Tsarist Russia, adding more than 11 years of life per person in 5 years, while Tsarist Russia during the same time in the years of greatest progress - only 2.5 years in 13 years. By the most unfair estimate.
It is interesting to see how Russia, starving itself, “fed the whole of Europe”, how some peculiar citizens are trying to convince us. The picture of "feeding Europe" is as follows:
With an exceptional combination of weather conditions and the highest harvest for tsarist Russia in 1913, the Russian Empire exported 530 million poods of all grain, which amounted to 6.3% of the consumption of European countries (8.34 billion poods). [24] That is, there can be no question that Russia fed not only Europe, but even half of Europe. [25]
Grain imports are generally very typical for developed industrial European countries - they have been doing this since the end of the 19th century and are not at all shy about it. But for some reason there is not even a talk about inefficiency and agriculture in the West. Why is this happening? Very simply - the added value of industrial products is significantly higher than the added value of agricultural products. With a monopoly on any industrial product, the position of the manufacturer becomes generally exclusive - if someone needs, for example, machine guns, boats, airplanes or a telegraph, and no one has them, except for you, then you can wind up just a frantic rate of profit, because if someone does not have such things that are extremely necessary in the modern world, then they do not, there is no question that it is not possible to do it quickly yourself. And wheat can be produced even in England, even in China, even in Egypt, from this its nutritional properties will change little. Will not buy Western capitalized wheat in Egypt, no problem - buy in Argentina.
Therefore, when choosing what is more profitable to produce and export - modern industrial products or grain, it is much more profitable to produce and export industrial products, if, of course, you know how to produce them. If you don’t know how and you need foreign currency, then all you have to do is export grain and raw materials. This is what tsarist Russia was doing and the post-Soviet EER is doing, which destroyed its modern industry. Quite simply, skilled workers provide much higher profit margins in modern industry. And if you need grain in order to feed poultry or livestock, you can buy it in addition, taking out, for example, expensive cars. A lot of people know how to produce grain, but not all of them do modern technology, and the competition is incomparably less.
Therefore, Russia was forced to export grain to the industrial West in order to receive currency. However, over time, Russia was clearly losing its position as an exporter of grain.
Since the early 90s of the 19th century, the rapidly developing and using new agricultural technologies, the United States of America, has confidently ousted Russia from the place of the main exporter of wheat in the world. Very quickly, the gap became such that Russia, in principle, could not make up for the lost - 41.5% of the market was firmly held by the Americans, the share of Russia dropped to 30.5%
All this despite the fact that the US population in those years was less than 60% of the Russian - 99 versus 171 million in Russia (excluding Finland). [25]
Even the total population of the USA, Canada and Argentina was only 114 million - 2/3 of the population of the Russian Empire. Contrary to the widespread recent misconception, in 1913 Russia did not surpass these three countries in aggregate in the production of wheat (which would not be surprising if it had one and a half times more population employed mainly in agriculture), but was inferior to them, and in terms of the total harvest grain inferior even to the United States. [26] And this is despite the fact that while in the agricultural production of the Russian Empire almost 80% of the country's population was employed, of which at least 60-70 million people were employed in productive labor, and only about 9 million in the USA. The USA and Canada were at the head of the scientific and technological revolution in agriculture, widely using chemical fertilizers, modern machines and new, competent crop rotation and highly productive varieties of cereals, and confidently squeezed Russia out of the market.
In terms of grain harvest per capita, the United States was two times ahead of Tsarist Russia, Argentina three times, and Canada four times. [24, 25] In reality, the situation was very sad and the position of Russia was getting worse - it lagged more and more behind the world level.
By the way, the US also began to reduce the export of grain, but for a different reason - before the First World War, they had a rapid development of more profitable industrial production and with a small population (less than 100 million), workers began to move into industry.
Argentina also actively began to develop modern agricultural technologies, quickly squeezing Russia out of the grain market. Russia, "which fed all of Europe", exported grain and bread in general almost as much as Argentina, although the population of Argentina was 21.4 times less than the population of the Russian Empire!
The United States exported a large amount of high-quality wheat flour, while Russia, as usual, exported grain. Alas, the situation was the same as with the export of unprocessed raw materials.
Soon Germany ousted Russia from the seemingly unshakable first place as an exporter of the traditionally main grain culture of Russia - rye. But in general, in terms of the total amount of exported "classic five grains", Russia continued to hold first place in the world (22, 1%). Although there was no longer any talk of unconditional domination and it was clear that the years of Russia as the world's largest exporter of grain were already numbered and would soon be gone forever. So the market share of Argentina was already 21.3%. [26]
Tsarist Russia lagged behind its competitors in agriculture more and more.
And now about how Russia fought for its market share. High quality grain? Reliability and stability of supplies? Not at all - at a very low price.
Agrarian economist-emigrant P. I. Lyashchenko in 1927 wrote in his work dedicated to the grain export of Russia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century: “The best and most expensive buyers did not take Russian bread. Russian exporters opposed to American clean and high-grade grain of monotonously high standards, American strict trade organization, endurance in supply and prices, contaminated grain (often with direct abuse), varied grain that did not correspond to commercial samples, thrown out on the foreign market without any system and aging at the moments of the least favorable market conditions, often in the form of unsold goods and only in the way of a seeking buyer. " [26]
Therefore, Russian merchants had to play on the proximity of the market, price half duties, etc. In Germany, for example, Russian grain was sold cheaper than world prices: wheat by 7-8 kopecks, rye by 6-7 kopecks, oats by 3-4 kopecks. for a pood. - in the same place
These are they, "excellent Russian merchants" - "excellent entrepreneurs", there is nothing to say. It turns out that they were unable to organize grain cleaning or supply stability, and could not determine the market situation. But in the sense of squeezing grain from peasant children, they were experts.
And where, I wonder, did the proceeds from the sale of Russian bread go?
In a typical 1907 year, the income from the sale of bread abroad amounted to 431 million rubles. Of these, 180 million were spent on luxury goods for the aristocracy and landowners. Another 140 million Russian nobles, crunching with French rolls, left abroad - they spent in the resorts of Baden-Baden, drank in France, lost in casinos, bought real estate in "civilized Europe". On the modernization of Russia, effective owners have spent as much as one-sixth of the income (58 million rubles) [12] from the sale of grain beaten from starving peasants.
Translated into Russian, this means that “effective managers” took bread from the starving peasant, exported it abroad, and the gold rubles received for human lives were spent on drink in Parisian taverns and blown through in casinos. It was to ensure the profits of such bloodsuckers that Russian children died of hunger.
The question whether the tsarist regime could carry out the rapid industrialization necessary for Russia with such a management system does not even make sense to pose here - this is out of the question. This is, in fact, a verdict on the entire socio-economic policy of tsarism, and not just the agrarian one.
How did you manage to siphon food out of a malnourished country? The main suppliers of marketable grain were large landowners and kulak farms, which maintained themselves at the expense of cheap hired labor of land-poor peasants who were forced to hire workers for a pittance.
Exports led to the displacement of traditional Russian grain crops, which were in demand abroad. This is a classic sign of a third world country. Likewise, in all sorts of "banana republics" all the best lands are divided between Western corporations and local comprador-latifundists, who produce cheap bananas and other tropical products for a pittance by the cruel exploitation of the poor population, which are then exported to the West. And local residents simply do not have enough good land for production.
The desperate famine situation in the Russian Empire was quite obvious. It is now the kind of gentlemen who explain to everyone how, it turns out, it was good to live in tsarist Russia.
Ivan Solonevich, an ardent monarchist and anti-Soviet, described the situation in the Russian Empire before the Revolution:
“The fact of the extreme economic backwardness of Russia in comparison with the rest of the cultural world is beyond any doubt. According to the figures of 1912, the national income per capita was: in the USA (USA - P. K.) 720 rubles (in gold pre-war terms), in England - 500, in Germany - 300, in Italy - 230 and in Russia - 110. So, even before World War I, the average Russian was almost seven times poorer than the average American and more than twice as poor as the average Italian. Even bread - our main wealth - was scarce. If England consumed 24 poods per capita, Germany - 27 poods, and the USA - as much as 62 poods, then Russian bread consumption was only 21.6 poods, including all this for livestock feed. (Solonevich uses somewhat overstated data - P. K..) At the same time, it should be taken into account that bread occupied such a place in the food ration of Russia as it did not occupy anywhere else in other countries. In rich countries of the world, like the USA, England, Germany and France, bread was replaced by meat and dairy products and fish - in fresh and canned form …”[27]
S. Yu. Witte at a meeting of ministers in 1899 emphasized: “If we compare consumption in our country and in Europe, then its average per capita amount in Russia will be one fourth or one fifth of what is recognized in other countries as necessary for ordinary existence” [28]
These are the words of not someone else, the Minister of Agriculture of 1915-1916. AN Naumov, a very reactionary monarchist, and not at all a Bolshevik and revolutionary: “Russia does not actually get out of a state of hunger in one or another province, both before the war and during the war.” [29] And then he says: “Bread speculation, predation, bribery are flourishing; grain brokers make a fortune without leaving the phone. And against the background of the complete poverty of some - the insane luxury of others. A stone's throw from the convulsions of starvation - an orgy of satiety. Villages are dying out around the estates of those in power. Meanwhile, they are busy building new villas and palaces."
In addition to the "hungry" comprador export, the constant famine in the Russian Empire had two more serious reasons - one of the lowest in the world yields of most crops [12], caused by the specific climate, extremely backward agricultural technologies [30], leading to the fact that, formally a large area of land, land available for cultivation with antediluvian technologies in a very short period of time for Russian sowing was extremely insufficient and the situation only worsened with the growth of the population. As a result, in the Russian Empire, a widespread misfortune was land scarcity - a very small size of the peasant allotment.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the situation in the village of the Russian Empire began to acquire a critical character.
So, just for example, on the Tverskaya lips. 58% of the peasants had an allotment, as bourgeois economists gracefully call it - "below the subsistence level." Do the supporters of the Russia-We-Lost understand well what this means in reality?
“Look into any village, what kind of hungry and cold poverty reigns there. The peasants live almost together with the cattle, in the same dwelling. What are their allotments? They live on 1 tithe, 1/2 tithe, 1/3 tithe, and from such a small scrap they have to bring up 5, 6 and even 7 souls of the family … "Duma meeting 1906 [31] Volyn peasant - Danilyuk
At the beginning of the 20th century, the social situation in the countryside changed dramatically. If before that, even during the severe famine of 1891-92, there was practically no protest - the dark, downtrodden, en masse illiterate peasants, duped by the churchmen, dutifully chose a bag and accepted starvation, and the number of peasant demonstrations was simply insignificant - 57 single protests in 90- e years of the 19th century, then by 1902 mass peasant demonstrations began. Their characteristic feature was that as soon as the peasants of one village protested, several nearby villages immediately burst into flames. [32] This shows a very high level of social tension in the Russian countryside.
The situation continued to worsen, the agrarian population grew, and the brutal Stolypin reforms led to the ruin of a large mass of peasants who had nothing to lose, the complete hopelessness and hopelessness of their existence, not least of all this was due to the gradual spread of literacy and the activities of revolutionary educators, as well as a noticeable weakening of the influence of the clergy in connection with the gradual development of enlightenment.
The peasants tried desperately to reach out to the government, trying to talk about their brutal and hopeless life. Peasants, they were no longer wordless victims. Mass demonstrations began, squatting landowners' lands and inventory, etc. Moreover, the landowners were not touched, as a rule, they did not enter their houses.
The materials of the courts, peasant orders and appeals show the extreme degree of despair of the people in "God-saved Russia." From the materials of one of the first ships:
“… When the victim Fesenko asked the crowd that came to rob him, asking why they want to ruin him, the accused Zaitsev said,“You have one hundred dessiatines, and we have 1 dessiatine * per family. Would you try to live on one tithe of land …"
the accused … Kiyan: “Let me tell you about our unhappy man's life. I have a father and 6 young (without a mother) children and I have to live with an estate of 3/4 tithes and 1/4 tithes of field land. For grazing a cow, we pay … 12 rubles, and for a tithe for bread we have to work 3 tithes of harvest. We live so badly, - continued Kiyan. - We're in a loop. What do we do? We, peasants, applied everywhere … nowhere they accept us, nowhere do we have any help”; [32]
The situation began to develop on the rise and by 1905, mass demonstrations had already captured half of the country's provinces. A total of 3228 peasant uprisings were registered in 1905. The country openly talked about the peasant war against the landlords.
“In a number of places in the fall of 1905, the peasant community appropriated all power and even declared its complete disobedience to the state. The most striking example is the Markov Republic in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow province, which existed from October 31, 1905 to July 16, 1906.”[32]
For the tsarist government, all this turned out to be a big surprise - the peasants endured, obediently starving for decades, endured here on you. It is worth emphasizing that the performances of the peasants were, in the overwhelming majority, peaceful, they basically did not kill or hurt anyone. Maximum - they could beat the clerks and the landowner. But after massive punitive operations, the estates began to burn, but still they did their best not to persecute. The frightened and embittered tsarist government began brutal punitive operations against its people.
“Blood was shed then only on one side - the blood of the peasants was shed during the execution of punitive actions by the police and troops, during the execution of death sentences to the“instigators”of the protests … The ruthless reprisal against peasant“arbitrariness”became the first and main principle of state policy in the revolutionary village. Here is a typical order of the Minister of Internal Affairs P. Durny to the Governor-General of Kiev. "… to immediately exterminate, by force of arms, the rioters, and in case of resistance - to burn their homes … Arrests now do not achieve their goal: it is impossible to judge hundreds and thousands of people." These instructions were fully consistent with the order of the Tambov vice-governor to the police command: "arrest less, shoot more …" Governor-generals in the Yekaterinoslav and Kursk provinces acted even more decisively, resorting to shelling the rebellious population. The first of them sent out a warning to the volosts: "Those villages and villages, whose inhabitants allow themselves any violence against private economies and lands, will be shelled by artillery fire, which will cause destruction of houses and fires." In the Kursk province, a warning was also sent out that in such cases "all the dwellings of such a society and all its property will be … destroyed."
A certain procedure has been worked out for the implementation of violence from above while suppressing violence from below. In the Tambov province, for example, on arrival in the village, the punishers gathered the adult male population for a gathering and offered to extradite the instigators, leaders and participants in the riots, to return the property of the landowners' economies. Failure to comply with these requirements often entailed a volley into the crowd. The killed and wounded served as proof of the seriousness of the demands put forward. After that, depending on the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the requirements, either the courtyards (residential and outbuildings) of the "guilty" extradited, or the village as a whole, were burned. However, the Tambov landowners were not satisfied with the impromptu reprisals against the rebels and demanded the introduction of martial law throughout the province and the use of military courts.
The widespread use of corporal punishment of the population of the insurgent villages and villages, noted in August 1904, was noted everywhere. The morals and norms of serf slavery were revived in the actions of the punishers.
Sometimes they say: look how little the tsarist counter-revolution killed in 1905-1907. and how much - the revolution after 1917. However, the blood shed by the state machine of violence in 1905-1907. must be compared, first of all, with the bloodlessness of the peasant actions of that time. The absolute condemnation of the executions then perpetrated on the peasants, which sounded with such force in the article of L. Tolstoy "[32]
This is how one of the most qualified specialists in the history of the Russian peasantry, V. P. Danilov, he was an honest scientist, personally hostile to the Bolsheviks, a radical anti-Stalinist.
The new Minister of Internal Affairs in the government of Goremykin, and later - the chairman of the Council of Ministers (head of the Government) - liberal Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin thus explained the position of the tsarist government: “The government has the right to“suspend all norms of law”for the purpose of self-defense. [33] When the "state of necessary defense" sets in, any means and even the subordination of the state to "one will, the arbitrariness of one person" are justified.
The tsarist government, in no way embarrassed, "suspended all norms of law." From August 1906 to April 1907, 1102 rioters were hanged only by the verdicts of the military field courts. Extrajudicial killings were a widespread practice - the peasants were shot, without even finding out who he was, burying, in the case of the case with the inscription "without a name". It was in those years that the Russian proverb appeared, "they will kill and they will not ask the surname." How many such unfortunate people died - no one knows.
The speeches were suppressed, but only temporarily. The brutal suppression of the revolution of 1905-1907 led to the desacralization and delegitimization of power. The long-term consequences of this were the ease with which both revolutions of 1917 took place.
The failed revolution of 1905-1907 did not solve either the land or food problems of Russia. The brutal suppression of the desperate people drove the situation deeper. But the tsarist government could not, and did not want to take advantage of the resulting respite, and the situation was such that urgent measures were required. Which, in the end, had to be carried out by the government of the Bolsheviks.
The analysis leads to an indisputable conclusion: the fact of major food problems, constant malnutrition of most of the peasants and frequent regular famine in tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. no doubt about it. The systematic malnutrition of most of the peasantry and frequent outbreaks of hunger were widely discussed in journalism of those years, and most of the authors emphasized the systemic nature of the food problem in the Russian Empire. This ultimately led to three revolutions in 12 years.
There was no sufficient amount of developed land to provide all the peasants of the Russian Empire in circulation at that time, and only the mechanization of agriculture and the use of modern agricultural technologies could give them. All together this constituted a single interconnected complex of problems, where one problem was insoluble without the other.
What is land scarcity, the peasants perfectly understood on their own skin, and the "question of land" was key, without it talk about all kinds of agricultural technologies lost their meaning:
“It is impossible to remain silent about the fact,” he said, that a lot of the peasant population was accused here by some orators / 79 /, as if these people were incapable of anything, unfit for anything and not suitable for anything at all, that the planting of their culture - work, too, seems to be superfluous, etc. But, gentlemen, think about it; on what the peasants should apply the culture, if they have 1 - 2 dess. There will never be any culture.”[31] Deputy, peasant Gerasimenko (Volyn province), Session of the Duma 1906
By the way, the reaction of the tsarist government to the "wrong" Duma was unpretentious - it was dispersed, but this did not add land to the peasants and the situation in the country remained, in fact, critical.
This was commonplace, the usual publications of those years:
April 27 (14), 1910
TOMSK, 13, IV. There is a famine in the settlements in the Sudzhenskaya volost. Several families became extinct.
For three months now, the settlers have been feeding on a mixture of mountain ash and rotten wood with flour. Food aid is needed.
TOMSK, 13, IV. Embezzlement was found in resettlement warehouses in the Anuchinsky and Imansky regions. According to local reports, something terrible is happening in the areas indicated. The settlers are starving. They live in the mud. No earnings.
July 20 (07) 1910
TOMSK, 6, VII. As a result of chronic hunger, in 36 villages of the Yenisei district, among the settlers, epidemic typhus and scurvy are rampant. The mortality rate is high. The settlers eat surrogates and drink swamp water. From the epidemic squad, two paramedics were infected.
18 (05) September 1910
KRASNOYARSK, 4, IX. Throughout the Minusinsk district, at present, due to a poor harvest this year, there is famine. The settlers ate all their livestock. By order of the Yenisei governor, a batch of bread was sent to the district. However, this bread is not enough, and half of the hungry. Emergency help is needed.
February 10 (January 28) 1911
SARATOV, 27, I. News of hungry typhus has been received in Aleksandrov-Gai, Novouzensky district, where the population is in dire need. This year, the peasants have collected only £ 10 per tithe. After three months of correspondence, a nutrition center is established.
April 01 (March 19) 1911
RYBINSK, 18, III. The village headman Karagin, 70 years old, despite the prohibition of the foreman, gave the peasants of the Spasskaya volost a little extra grain from the bakery store. This "crime" brought him to the dock. At the trial, Karagin with tears explained that he did it out of pity for the starving men. The court fined him three rubles.
There were no grain reserves in case of a crop failure - all the surplus grain was swept out and sold abroad by greedy grain monopolists. Therefore, in case of crop failure, hunger immediately arose. The harvested crop on a small plot was not enough even for a middle peasant for two years, so if a crop failure was two years in a row or an overlap of events happened, the illness of the worker, draft cattle, fire, etc. and the peasant went bankrupt or fell into hopeless bondage to the kulak - the rural capitalist and speculator. The risks in the climatic conditions of Russia with backward agricultural technologies were extremely high. Thus, there was a massive ruin of the peasants, whose land was bought by speculators and rich rural residents who used hired labor or leased draft cattle to the kulaks. Only they had enough land and resources to create the necessary reserve in case of famine. For them crop failure and hunger were heavenly manna - the whole village owed them, and soon they had the necessary number of completely ruined farm laborers - their neighbors.
A peasant ruined by a poor harvest, left without everything, with only one plow. (v. Slavyanka, Nikol. u.) 1911
“Along with low yields, one of the economic prerequisites for our hunger strikes is the insufficient provision of the peasants with land. According to the well-known calculations of Mares in black earth Russia, 68% of the population does not receive enough bread from allotted land for food even in harvest years and are forced to obtain food by renting land and outside earnings. " [34]
As we can see, by the year of publication of the encyclopedic dictionary - the last peaceful year of the Russian Empire, the situation had not changed and had no tendency to change in a positive direction. This is clearly seen also from the statements of the Minister of Agriculture, cited above and subsequent studies.
The food crisis in the Russian Empire was precisely a systemic one, insoluble under the existing socio-political system. The peasants could not feed themselves, let alone the cities that had grown up, where, according to Stolypin's idea, masses of ruined, robbed and destitute people should have poured, willing to any job. The massive devastation of the peasants and the destruction of the community led to death and terrible mass deprivation, followed by popular uprisings. A significant proportion of the workers led a semi-peasant existence in order to somehow survive. This did not contribute to the growth of their qualifications, or the quality of the products produced, or the mobility of the labor force.
The reason for the constant hunger was in the socio-economic structure of tsarist Russia, without a change in the socio-economic structure and method of management, the task of getting rid of hunger was insoluble. The greedy pack at the head of the country continued its "hungry export", stuffing their pockets with gold at the expense of Russian children who died of hunger and blocked any attempts to change the situation. The highest elite of the country and the most powerful landlord lobby of hereditary nobles, who had completely degenerated by the beginning of the 20th century, were interested in exporting grain. They were of little interest in industrial development and technological progress. Personally, they had enough gold from grain exports and the sale of the country's resources for a luxurious life.
The sheer inadequacy, helplessness, venality and open stupidity of the country's top leaders left no hope of resolving the crisis.
Moreover, there were not even any plans to solve this problem. In fact, since the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire was constantly on the verge of a terrible social explosion, resembling a building with spilled gasoline, where the slightest spark was enough for a disaster, but the owners of the house practically did not care.
An indicative moment in the police report on Petrograd on January 25, 1917 warned that "The spontaneous actions of the hungry masses will be the first and last stage on the way to the beginning of the senseless and merciless excesses of the most terrible of all - the anarchist revolution" [10]. By the way, the anarchists really participated in the Military Revolutionary Committee, which arrested the Provisional Government in October 1917.
At the same time, the tsar and his family led a relaxed Sybaritic life, it is very significant that in the diary of Empress Alexandra in early February 1917 she talks about children who “rush around the city and shout that they have no bread, and this is just for to cause excitement”[10].
It's just amazing. Even in the face of catastrophe, when there were only a few days left before the February Revolution, the country's elite did not understand anything and basically did not want to understand. In such cases, either the country dies or the society finds the strength to replace the elite with a more adequate one. It happens that it changes more than once. This happened in Russia as well.
The systemic crisis in the Russian Empire led to what it should have led - the February Revolution, and then another, when it became clear that the Provisional Government was unable to solve the problem, then another - October Revolution, held under the slogan "Land to the peasants!" when, as a result, the new leadership of the country had to solve critical management issues that the previous leadership was not able to solve.
