Something, no doubt, is due to the natural character of the Russians, which led Trotsky to define man as an animaldistinguished by laziness.Russians are certainly lazy, and probably owe to their climate their remarkable incapacity for prolonged effort.The Russian climate is such that over large areas of Russia the Russian peasant is accustomed, and has been accustomed for hundreds of years, to perform prodigies of labor during two short periods of sowing and harvest, and to spend the immensely long and monotonous winter in a hibernation like that of the snake or the dormouse.There is a much greater difference between a Russian workman's normal output and that of which he is capable for a short time if he sets himself to it, than there is between the normal and exceptional output of an Englishman, whose temperate climate has not taught him to regard a great part of the year as a period of mere waiting for and resting from the extraordinary effort of a few weeks.(*) [(*)Given any particular motive, any particula enthusiasm, or visible, desirable object, even the hungry Russian workmen of to-day are capable of sudden and temporary increase of output.The "Saturdayings" (see p.119) provide endless illustrations of this.They had something in the character of a picnic, they were novel, they were out of the routine, and the productivity of labor during a "Saturdaying" was invariably higher than on a weekday.For example, there is a shortage of paper forcigarettes.People roll cigarettes in old newspapers.It occurred to the Central Committee of the Papermakers' Union to organize a "Sundaying" with the object of sending cigarette paper to the soldiers in the Red Army.Six factories took part.Here is a table showing the output of these factories during the "Sundaying" and the average weekday output.The figures are in poods.
But this uneven working temperament was characteristic of the Russian before the war as well as now.It has been said that the revolution removed the stimulus to labor, and left the Russian laziness to have its way.In the first period of the revolution that may have been true.It is becoming day by day less true.The fundamental reasons of low productivity will not be found in any sudden or unusual efflorescence of idleness, but in economic conditions which cannot but reduce the productivity of idle and industrious alike.Insufficient feeding is one such reason.The proportion of working time consumed in foraging is another.But the whole of my first chapter may be taken as a compact mass of reasons why the Russians at the present time should not work with anything like a normal productivity.It is said that bad workmen complain of their tools, but even good ones become disheartened if compelled to work with makeshifts, mended tools, on a stock of materials that runs out from one day to the next, in factories where the machinery may come at any moment to a standstill from lack of fuel.There would thus be a shortage of labor in Russia, even if the numbers of workmen were the same today as they were before the war.Unfortunately that is not so.Turning from the question of low productivity per man to that of absolute shortage of men: the example given at the beginning of thischapter, showing that in the most important group of factories the number of workmen has fallen 50 per cent.is by no means exceptional.Walking through the passages of what used to be the Club of the Nobles, and is now the house of the Trades Unions during the recent Trades Union Congress in Moscow, I observed among a number of pictorial diagrams on the walls, one in particular illustrating the rise and fall of the working population of Moscow during a number of years.Each year was represented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which rose and fell with the population.From that diagram I took the figures for 1913, 1918 and 1919.These figures should be constantly borne in mind by any one who wishes to realize how catastrophic the shortage oflabor in Russia actually is, and to judge how sweeping may be the changes in the social configuration of the country if that shortage continues to increase.Here are the figures.
