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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
293
But the increase in the number of dessiatines under beet is
not enough to give a complete idea of the demand for hired
labour, since some jobs are paid for at so much per berkovets.
Here, for example, is what we read in Reports and Investigations
of Handicraft Industry in Russia (published by Ministry
of State Properties, Vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1894, p. 82).
“The female population both of the town, and of the uyezd”
(the town of Krolevets, Chernigov Gubernia, is referred to)
“think highly of work on the beet fields; in the autumn the
cleaning of beets is paid at 10 kopeks per berkovets, and two
women clean from six to ten berkovets a day, but some contract
to work during the growing season as well, weeding
and hoeing; in that case, for the full job, including digging
and cleaning, they get 25 kopeks per berkovets of cleaned
beets.” The conditions of the workers on the beet plantations
are extremely bad. For instance, the Vrachebnaya Khronika
Kharkovskoi Gubernii* (September 1899, quoted in Russkiye
Vedomosti, 1899, No. 254) cites “a number of exceedingly
deplorable facts about the conditions of those working on
the red-beet plantations. Thus, the Zemstvo physician,
Dr. Podolsky, of the village of Kotelva, Akhtyrka Uyezd,
writes: ‘In the autumn typhus usually breaks out among
young people employed on the red-beet plantations of the
well-to-do peasants. The sheds assigned for the workers’
leisure and sleeping quarters are kept by such planters in
a very filthy condition; by the time the job ends the straw
used for sleeping is literally converted into dung, for it is
never changed: this becomes a breeding ground of infection.
Typhus has had to be diagnosed immediately in the case of
four or five patients brought in from one and the same
plantation.’ In the opinion of this doctor, ‘most of the
syphilis cases come from the red-beet plantations.’ Mr.
Feinberg rightly asserts that ‘work on the plantations,
which is no less injurious to the workers themselves and to
the surrounding population than work in the factories, has
particularly disastrous consequences, because large numbers
of women and juveniles are engaged in it, and because the
workers here are without the most elementary protection from
society and the State’; in view of this, the author wholly
* Medical Chronicle of Kharkov Gubernia.—Ed.