RUSSIA'S BREAK-UP.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1918, Page 7

RUSSIA'S BREAK-UP.

SOCIETY'S FOUNDATIONS CRUMBLE ACUTE CLASS ANTAGONISM. BUT' UNIVERSAL I'EACE HUNGER. Mr. Phillips Price, after an extended tour through the central provinces of Russia, has written interestingly on what, in his opinion, are the causes that have made anarchy. Tht- terrible havoc caused by the war in the natural economy of the country, he says, is reducing the task of the democracy in the provinces to an impossibility. The relations between the social classes that make up the revolutionary democracy arc becoming mors and more strained. The peasants are dissatisfied with the urban proletariat because the latter have got an eighthour day and a rise in wages, and buy their bread at fixed rates, whereas they have to pay speculators' prices for ail manufactured commodities of life. The armj, which, though consisting mainly of peasant youths, has nevertheless a distinct psychology of its own, is discontented with the peasantry in the rear for keeping back food supplies in the villages. The urban proletariat is suffering from a continual Shortage of food, caused by the breakdown of the transport. With the march of famine each social and economic class is forced to struggle harder for its own existence, and this to a great degree weakens the common revolutionary cll'ort. But on one point all sections of the democracy arc united, and that is in the demand for a speedy peace as the only means of saving themselves from economic collapse and famine. STARVING PEASANTS In addition to the increasing antagonism between various sections of the proletariat, there is now also another factor which still further hinders the constructive work of the revolutionary democracy. Under the stress of food shortage there is an inclination for each district to run its own local policy. Thus, I found that in the Upper Volga provinces, in Vladimin, Kostroma, NijniVorgorod, and Yaroslav the peasants are literally starving. Their Produce Committees are making frantic efforts to get corn sent up from the-south before the Volga freezes, but the Produce Committees of Samara, Saratoff, and Kazan, which are controlled by tlio peasants of those provinces, decline to part with their reserves of corn. In early winter the Volga freezes, and then there is nothing left for five million peasantry to do but faco the winter on roots and heibs from the forest, or die of hunger. The Cossacks, also, are everywhere trj'ing to create local communes and federal republics, ili c ultimate aim of which is to preserve their lands from immigration from the west, and to prevent the local food supplies from being exhausted by the demands of the northern manufacturing towns. Even the councils and tiie democratic bodies are coming under the influence of local politics through the sheer necessitv of savin," their own comrades before they attempt to help those in the nevt province. As a result of these disintegrating influences, the anarc-hial spirit has spread at an alarming rate among the massesThe food riots that have broken out in various northern towns were caused by starving workers, vno broke into shop's and looted bazaars. In nearly every ease the local revolutionary councils and the democratic bodies have taken the most stringent measures to deal with disorder and to quiet the hungrv people. In all the towns "where famine is threatening I found the revolutionary militia, under the joint control of th' ( ; councils and local municipal authorities patrolling tile bazaars to prevent pogroms and attacks upon the Jew shops bv the dark forces of the old regime. „Agrfuian disorders also are increasing bill, the impression I have gathered since my journey is that in those provinces where the revolutionary land organisations have drawn up plans for a n equitable distribution of the landlords' lands there has been complete quiet. On the other hand, where this has not been done where the landlords and the local Cadets have succeeded in preventing this work, agrarian disorders have broken out. In some districts, also, I found that looting of landlords' granaries by mobs with pitchforks was due to the knowledge that stores of grain were be-. tion'" ''' "' 5 alK * Wel '° csca P' I'equisiTHREE PRIME FACTORS. The anarchy which reigns in the provinces at the present moment is thus the direct result of three tilings: 1 The incapacity of the towns to suppi} the peasants with manufactures, leading the latter to hide their corn.. 11118 ' s ( lu e to the inability of the Go- 1 vernment to control speculators and fix the prices of manufactures; and this, in turn, is due to the refusal of the bourgeois elements in the Government to agree to State regulation of industry. •2- The suspicion in tho minds of the peasantry that an intrigue is goin>- on i in Petrograd behind their backs to rob ; tlieni of the land for which they made the revolution. 3. The endless prolongation of the war for objects which-to state the plain fact nobody understands or cares about, thus undermining confidence in the Government's foreign relations and creating ■ the impression that a citizen had better get for himself what he can, while he en n. MAXIMALIST GROWTH. During the latter end of the summer the Russian revolution appears t.o have reached its second stage, In which the class struggle became the most prominent features on the political horizon. But. now the situation is complicated by the split in the ranks of the democracy on the question of revolutionary tactics. As time goes on this split seems to be- ; come wider, and in the third stage of , the revolution tiie question of revolu- , tionary tactics may temporarily obi scure the class struggle. It Rppears i that this stage is being entered upon ■ now. The spiit in the revolutionary - ranks is complete. The moderate Minii nwlists. who regard this as a bourgeois 3 revolution, are now in alliance with the 1 new democratic intelligentsia and eoL operators. The Maximalist fanatics, a who still drcain of the social revolution \ throughout all Europe, have, according s to niv observations in the provinces, • recently acquired an immense, if amorphous, following. The majority of their followers, however, have no idea of what the MaximaMst means when he talks of "all power to the Councils " The sol- - dier of the garrisons in the rear hears - tho Maximalist's promise of an immediate seizure of the landlords' land, and

goes with him. The worker liears talkabout State control over the banks, and goes with him. Anarchists and secret agents of the Tsar's regime also flock to the Maximalist banner, and thus create a, large and very dangerous element widely diffused throughout all the proletariat masses in tliC country. All the recent provincial elections have given immense majorities to this wing of the revolutionary democracy. There is 110 sign, of any military enthusiasm like that which inspired the French revolutionaries. Thcra is, on the other hand, a great possibility of a Napoleon—a peace dictator, born out of the three years' sufferings of the pec pic —who will put an end to the war, even at the cost of territorial losses to Russia, and at the price of the political liberties won by the revolution. The war, and the desire to end it, is thi one thing which links the confused social mass together in this third stage of the revolution, and as aoon as there is peace it will break up into its component parts and create new combinations and coalitions for the political struggle in the fourth stage.