Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/83

 slavery, is the least productive kind of labour. It would completely seal the economic downfall of Soviet Russia.

One permanent result of all these experiments, if they are continued longer, or perchance multiplied, would be an increasing bitterness of the peasants towards the town proletariat. They would immediately transform the peasants into a reactionary anti-Socialist mass as soon as the Entente abandoned its foolish policy of trying to establish a new landlord regime in Russia. Once this danger to the Russian peasants disappeared, the reaction would have full scope. It is possible that the parallel to old France might extend to the emerging of a new peasant emperor from the ranks of the revolutionaries. In the short period of its existence, the men of the Dictatorship have: undergone so many changes that the last-named rôle would not be difficult for many of them to assume.

Even this would find enthusiastic support among those who admire only the success of the moment.

Quite different from Russia have been the lines of development in Georgia.

Instead of Dictatorship, that country was ruled by democracy, and the Government could not simply dictate what it liked, and shoot at its pleasure those who did not obey its instructions. The menace to the food supply of the industrial population, caused by the liberation of the peasants, exists there as well as in Russia; the problem is common to all Eastern States which have passed through an agrarian revolution as a result of the war.

The use of force against the peasants cannot be thought of in Georgia. How, then, can the peasant be induced to produce a surplus and supply it to the towns?

In considering this question, we should not forget that more than one hundred years have elapsed since the French Revolution. This has modified to some extent the problem which arose at that time. Then the village produced almost everything needed by