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

294
V. I. LENIN
supports the opinion expressed by Dr. Romanenko at the
Seventh Congress of Doctors of Kharkov Gubernia that ‘in
issuing compulsory regulations, consideration must also be
given to the conditions of the workers on the beet plantations.
These workers lack the most essential things; they live for
months under the open sky and eat from a common bowl.’”
Thus, the growth of beet cultivation has enormously increased
the demand for rural workers, converting the neighbouring
peasantry into a rural proletariat. The increase in
the number of rural workers has been but slightly checked
by the inconsiderable drop in the number of workers engaged
in the beet-sugar industry proper.*
3) P o t a t o - S t a r c h P r o d u c t i o n
From branches of technical production conducted exclusively
on landlord farms let us pass to such as are more or
less within the reach of the peasantry. These include, primarily,
the processing of potatoes (partly also wheat and
other cereals) into starch and treacle. Starch production
has developed with particular rapidity in the post-Reform
period owing to the enormous growth of the textile industry,
which raises a demand for starch. The area covered by
this branch of production is mainly the non-black-earth,
the industrial, and, partly, the northern black-earth gubernias.
The Historico-Statistical Survey (Vol. II) estimates
that in the middle of the 60s, there were about 60 establishments
with an output valued at about 270,000 rubles,
while in 1880 there were 224 establishments with an output
valued at 1,317,000 rubles. In 1890, according to the Directory
of Factories and Works there were 192 establishments
employing 3,418 workers, with an output valued at
1,760,000 rubles.** “In the past 25 years,” we read in the
* In European Russia 80,919 workers were employed in 1867
at beet-sugar factories and refineries (The Ministry of Finance Yearbook,
I. The Military Statistical Abstract overstated the figure here
too, giving it as 92,000, evidently counting the same workers twice).
The figure for 1890 is 77,875 workers (Orlov’s Directory).
** We take the data given in the Historico-Statistical Survey
as being the most uniform and comparable. The Returns and
Material of the Ministry of Finance (1866, No. 4, April), on the basis of