Here is an example. According to the last census returns, those for the year 1916, there were in Russia 71,430,800 desyatinas of cultivable land. If we assume that this area is tilled once every year (every agriculturist knows that this is far too liberal an estimate), the peasants will have to use all the available labour power (that of 20,000,000 men) and all the available farm beasts. But to plough the same area with the aid of tractors (a tractor can plough from 8 to 10 desyatinas in one day, or considerably more if it works continuously), the labour of 1,000,000 workers would suffice. One man does the work of twenty.1
If in place of preparing 100 meals in separate kitchens, we prepare one dinner for the same number of persons in the kitchen of the village commune, 90 cooks out of the 100 will no longer be needed. Their services can be devoted to some other useful purpose, whereby the labour of yet others will be lightened.
Thus the task of the Communist Party is to do its utmost to establish a more perfect system of agriculture, a communist system, which will be competent to deliver our rural population from the barbaric waste of energy which occurs in the extant system of dwarf agriculture; to save Russia from the barbaric exhaustion of the soil which is now going on; from the barbaric and Asiatic methods of cattle keeping; from the barbaric methods of individual cookery.
How will the Communist Party achieve this great aim? There are various lines of advance. Let us consider the speediest first.
106. Soviet Agriculture.
When the landlords’ estates were seized by the peasants at the end of the year 1917, there were among these estates many on which model farms