Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/82

 The Red Armies can only extend in the direction of the south, towards the Caspian Sea, Baku, North Persia, and Turkestan. They appear in these Mohammedan countries as allies of Pan-Islamism, as liberators from the yoke of European Imperialism, and as such are welcomed. But performance assumes a different shape, from the promises. The peasantry of every district are plundered to the utmost. Latterly, Bolshevist sympathies have greatly cooled in the Mohammedan world.

The peasant in Russia proper cannot be dealt with so recklessly as in these "liberated" territories. The requisitions made on him are less heavy, although more than he wants to give, and often more than he can. The Dictatorship is acquainted with only one method of solving every problem—brute force. The tribute required is forcibly collected from the recalcitrant peasant.

With the exception of peasant revolts and the devastation of villages, this method has only achieved one thing—the complete suspension of all efforts on the part of the peasant to make their industry yield a surplus. The cultivation of the land deteriorates. Lack of bread and hunger grow.

Once more an appeal was made to force. A demand was being put forward in Soviet Russia that the peasant should be compelled to raise more crops. Such compulsory tillage was doomed, just as all previous forcible measures of Bolshevism have failed which have not been aimed at the destruction of what is existing but at the construction of a new economy.

The protagonists of compulsory tillage; have not properly considered what a gigantic apparatus is necessary to compel four-fifths of the population to do work.

The present population of the towns is not sufficient to supply the necessary controlling and police force.

But even if the measure could be successful, which is out of the question, it would be nothing more than an immense revival of the old serf labour, which, next to