Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

246
V. I. LENIN
“don’t know day from night,” as they themselves say. The
colonists who hire mowers get their sons to follow on their
heels (i.e., to speed up the workers!) in shifts, so that the
speeders-up, replacing one another three times a day, come
with renewed energy to drive the workers on: “that is why
it is so easy to recognise those who have worked for the German
colonists by their haggard appearance. Generally speaking,
the farmsteaders and the Germans avoid hiring those
who have formerly worked on landowners’ estates. ‘You’ll
not stand the pace with us,’ they say quite frankly” (ibid.).*
Large-scale machine industry, by concentrating large
masses of workers, transforming the methods of production,
and destroying all the traditional, patriarchal cloaks and
screens that have obscured the relations between classes,
always leads to the directing of public attention towards
these relations, to attempts at public control and regulation.
This phenomenon, which has found particularly striking
expression in factory inspection, is also beginning to
be observed in Russian capitalist agriculture, precisely in
the region where it is most developed. The question of the
workers’ sanitary conditions was raised in Kherson Gubernia
as early as 1875 at the Second Gubernia Congress of
Doctors of the Kherson Zemstvo, and was dealt with again
in 1888; in 1889 there was drawn up a programme for the
study of the workers’ conditions. The investigation of sanitary
conditions that was carried out (on a far from adequate
scale) in 1889-1890 slightly lifted the veil concealing
the conditions of labour in the remote villages. It was seen,
for instance, that in the majority of cases the workers have no
living quarters; where barracks are provided, they are usually
very badly built from a hygienic point of view, and “not
* The same characteristics are displayed by the “Cossacks” of
the Kuban Region: “The Cossack resorts to every possible method to
force down the price of labour, acting either individually or through
the community” (sic! What a pity we lack more detailed information
about this latest function of the “community”!): “cutting down the
food, increasing the work quota, docking the pay, retaining the workers’
passports, adopting public resolutions prohibiting specific
farmers from employing workers, on pain of a fine, at above a definite
rate, etc.” (“Migrant Workers in the Kuban Region” by A. Beloborodov,
in Severny Vestnik, February 1896, p. 5.)