Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/61

 Rh supplies grew worse and worse. The dearth was increasing on all sides. Short of introducing the system of State control, the only method of relieving distress and meeting popular discontent was to increase wages. And the bourgeoisie, which feared the State regulation of prices and profits more than fire, took the line of least resistance. The programme of reconstruction as elaborated by the Soviet was set aside, and in place of genuine economic reconstruction there was an increase of wages.

At first the workers were happy with their increase in wages. To understand their psychology it is necessary to remember what was their condition before the Revolution, and in what mood they entered it. There is manifold evidence to show that the exploitation and repression of labour in Russia during those three years of war had far exceeded anything that has been heard of in other countries. I need only quote one article from a Liberal paper, the Petrograd "Den" of March 30, 1917. "Few people have any imagination of the condition to which three years of war-work have reduced the working classes of Russia…

"The terror of the military autocracy was augmented by the tyranny of the workshop régime. … Into the unorganised masses of the workers, broken down by years of the most barbaric exploitation, the war-industrial régime entered with its autocratic demands, aggravated by executions, exiles, arrests, and a whole series of other repressive measures. It was augmented by a hellish intensification of labour, combined with an absolute neglect of the physical and moral needs and civic interests of the workers. These were years of a mad race, when, in addition to the most excessive overwork, the workers were perpetually underfed, almost to the extent of starvation. They were years of the most merciless terrorisation of the workers' life in all imaginable and unimaginable directions. Categorically they were required to work, and to work unceasingly, night and day, week-days and