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

406
V. I. LENIN
of Viyezdnaya Sloboda, of the 600 boot-maker households,
500 work for masters, from whom they receive the cut-out
leather. The industry is of long standing, being about
200 years old, and is still growing and developing. The
inhabitants hardly engage in agriculture at all; their
whole manner of life is purely urban, and they live “in
grand style.” The same applies to the furrier villages
mentioned above, the inhabitants of which “look down with
disdain upon the peasant and call him a ‘country
bumpkin’.”*
We find exactly the same thing in Vyatka Gubernia.
The Vyatka and Slobodskoi uyezds are centres both of
“factory” and of “handicraft” leather and fur trades. In the
Vyatka Uyezd, the handicraft tanneries are concentrated
on the outskirts of the town and “supplement” the industrial
activities of the big works,** for example, by working
for the big owners; working for the latter also, in the majority
of cases, are the handicraft harness-makers and gluemakers.
The fur factory owners have hundreds working
for them in the home, sewing sheepskins, etc. This is just
a single capitalist manufactory with branches: sheepskindressing
and sheepskin-coat-making, leather and harness,
etc. Still more striking are the relations existing in the Slobodskoi
Uyezd (the centre of the industries is the suburb
of Demyanka); here we see a small number of big factory
owners*** at the head of handicraft tanners (numbering
870), boot- and mitten-makers (855), sheepskin-dressers
(940), and tailors (309 make short sheepskin coats to order
from capitalists). Generally speaking, such organisation
of the production of leather goods is evidently very widespread:
thus, in the town of Sarapul, Vyatka Gubernia, the
List gives 6 tanneries, also making footwear, which employ,
in addition to 214 workers on the premises, 1,080 outside
workers (p. 495). What would become of our “handicraftsmen,”
those representatives of “people’s” industry who are
* Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, III, p. 76.
** Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. XI, p. 3084.
(Cf. Directory for 1890). Included among the handicraftsmen is the
peasant-agriculturist Dolgushin, who owns a works employing 60
workers. There are several handicraftsmen of this type.
*** According to the Directory for 1890, there were some 27
masters employing over 700 workers.