Page:Lenin - The Land Revolution in Russia - ed. Philip Snowden (1919).pdf/9

 and Socialist doctrines—a necessity which tells us all, in a voice of authority, that we cannot go on living in the old way.

When the country has suffered such colossal ruin and collapse; when we see that this collapse is spreading all over the world, that all the culture, arts and sciences which man acquired during many centuries have been swept away in four years of this criminal, destructive war of Capitalist greed; when we see that not only Russia, but all Europe, is returning to a state of barbarism—then among the large masses of the people, and among the peasants in particular, who perhaps have suffered most in this war, there plainly arises the consciousness that extraordinary efforts are necessary, that our capacities must be strained to the utmost, if we wish to be freed from this legacy of the accursed war, which left us only ruin and misery. We cannot live as we lived before the war; and such a waste of human power and labour, as is involved in small peasant economy, cannot go on any longer. The productivity of labour and the economy of effort would be doubled and trebled in agriculture if from the present disjointed individual system we could pass to one of collective tillage.

The ruin we have inherited from the war simply does not allow us to restore the old small peasant system. Not only have the peasant masses been awakened by the war; not only has the war shown them the technical marvels that exist nowadays, and their application to the destruction of mankind; but it has prompted in them the idea that these marvels ought to be devoted, first and foremost, to the reconstruction of the most universal as well as the most backward of all industries—agriculture. Not only has there been an awakening of consciousness as to this; but people have become aware, by the monstrous horrors of the present war, of the powers which have been created by modern technical developments, how they are wasted in this most terrible, most senseless war, and how the only escape from those horrors lies through these very forces of applied science. Our bounden duty is to direct them to the end that the most