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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
247
infrequently” dug-outs are met with—they are inhabited,
for example, by shepherds, who suffer severely from dampness,
overcrowding, cold, darkness and the stifling atmosphere.
The food provided is very often unsatisfactory. The
working day, as a rule, is from 122 to 15 hours, which is
much longer than the usual working day in large-scale
industry (11 to 12 hours). An interval during the hottest part
of the day is met with only “as an exception”—and cases
of brain diseases are no rarity. Work at machines gives rise
to occupational division of labour and occupational diseases.
For example, working at threshing machines are “drummers”
(they put the sheaves into the drum; the work is very
dangerous and most laborious: thick corn-dust beats into
their faces), and “pitchers” (they pitch up the sheaves; the
work is so heavy that the shifts have to be changed every
hour or two). Women sweep up the straw, which boys carry
aside, while from 3 to 5 labourers stack it in ricks. The number
employed on threshing in the whole gubernia must
exceed 200,000 (Tezyakov, 94).* Mr. Tezyakov’s conclusions
regarding the sanitary conditions of agricultural work, are as
follows: “Generally speaking, the opinion of the ancients
that the labour of the husbandman is “the pleasantest and
healthiest of occupations’ is hardly sound at the present time,
when the capitalist spirit reigns in agriculture. With the
introduction of machinery into agriculture, the sanitary conditions
of agricultural labour have not improved, but have
changed for the worse. Machinery has brought into the field
of agriculture a specialisation of labour so little known here
before that it has had the effect of developing among the
rural population occupational diseases and a host of serious
injuries” (94).
A result of the investigations into sanitary conditions
(after the famine year and the cholera) was the attempt to
organise medical and food depots, at which the labourers
were to be registered, placed under sanitary supervision
and provided with cheap dinners. However modest the scale
and the results of this organisation may be and however
* Let us observe, in passing, that this operation, threshing, is
most frequently done by hired labourers. One can judge, therefore
how large must be the number employed on threshing all over Russia!