THE RUSSIAN PEASANT.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 March 1921, Page 5

THE RUSSIAN PEASANT.

TO PUT DOWN LENIN. KERENSKY’S ONE HOPE FOR RUSSIA. He has the people of the town tied to his regime by their stomachs. He is the only one who can feed them at present. He feels them badly, but, after all, he feeds them. The problem that confronts every Russian is how to get even a plate of insipid soup to eat. Thus, in four trenchant sentences, does M. Alexander Kerensky, the exiled Russian patriot, graphically portray the position of Russia to-day and the stranglehold that Lenin has over the people of that unfortunate country These s&itences occur in the remarkable interview with Vincente Blaseoe Ibanez, the well-known Spanish novelist, published in a recent issue of the New York World. “Friends, of mine in Russia (added M. Kerensky) write to me: ‘You ask us why *ve don’t start something. The fact is, we are too busy keeping body and soul together to think of revolution. Weeks go by without our getting any food that is really nourishing.* This for the inhabitants of towns and cities. BACK TO THE SIMPLE LIFE. “Then there are the 1 people in the country, nine-tenths of the whole population. The Russian peasant has enough to eat. He is the only one who is getting enough to eat. He has gone back perforce te the simple life that Tolstoi preached as the ideal one. He is doing Without all the products of modern industry. Hefhas stopped using gasoline and kerosene. He is wearing homespun clothes. The village blacksmith is making whatever tools he needs. The small towns have gone back to the home industries - of a century peasants have even stopped visiting the cities. Why go into the town? Nothing there but starvation and a brutal police! Oh the other hand, thousands and thousands of shiop-workers have gone back to the lands their grandfathers and fathers worked, and become farmers again. The peasants hang on to the produce they grow. To get grain, and meat the Soviets have to send troops out on what amounts to foraging expeditions. They seize the food they find; but it often happens they do not get back wjth their booty. The farmers attack them, and veritable battles are staged over a load of potatoes. PEASANTS HATE BOLSHEVISM. “The Bolshevist regime is an object of hatred” to' thdjmsant. He owes it no prosperity. He would not know it existed; if a plundering expedition did not come along every now’ and then and pillage his farm...and the neighboring village. But the cleavage goes even deeper than that. The. “Reds’ are Communists, while the Russian peasant is an individualist, fond of property. He has a religious reverence for the little piece of ground he tills, the ground where perhaps generations of his, ancestors are buried. His political sympathies incline toward us of the democratic revolution 1917. It was we who put him in possession of the land 'he is cultivating—land which the “Reds” would take away from him, if they could, to’ inaugurate agrarian communism, just as they have inaugurated industrial communism. The moment the -Russian peasant loses his fear of another Czar through foreign intervention, he will rise and put down the despotism of Lenin.” NOTHING FOR HIMSELF. Kerensky looked forward to this prospect with so much assurance and such evident enthusiasm (says M. Ibanez), that I could not help asking whether he saw anything for himself after the restoration of the republic. “No,” he said, decisively. “A given individual is of use only once in any revolution. That was the way in the old French d'ays, you remember. A man eame up, played his part, and stepped off the stage. Sometimes he lasted days, sometimes weeks; but he 1 never came back.” “Yes” I observed, “but that was because they all lost their heads. Yours ia still on your and, so far > AfflS w,u ”