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The Kazan Peasant is Wise After the Event
Our soldiers say that in some villages of Kazan province the peasants are receiving them in an unfriendly way, and in certain places with absolute hostility. Why is this? It is understandable where the kulaks are concerned. They know that now the revolution is bringing their doom. But, likewise, the middle peasantry, sometimes under the influence of these same kulaks, is showing enmity to the workers’ army. This is because the Kazan peasant lives in the backwoods, in ignorance, cut off, not knowing what is going to happen to him tomorrow. It was the same in the Ukraine. When the bourgeois troops of the Rada, together with the German bands, moved against the Ukrainian towns and villages, the Soviet forces fought against this invasion. But in many places the peasants held aloof, saying: ‘This is not our business. It’s no concern of ours.’ There were not a few cases when the peasants acted against the Ukrainian Soviet troops and supported the Ukrainian bourgeois troops. The German troops occupied the Ukraine. The land was given back to the landlords. The old police authorities had their powers restored. The old taxes were reintroduced. The peasants set up a howl. All over the Ukraine, the peasantry now rose in rebellion. With rifles and machine-guns, and sometimes with knives and pitchforks, the Ukrainian peasant rose against the German violators of the Ukraine. Rivers of blood flow. The Ukrainian peasant scratches his head and says to himself: ‘There now, I’m wise after the event, I ought to have supported the Soviet troops at the right time. If I had, fewer sacrifices would have been needed now.’
The Kazan peasant ought now to look at the Ukrainian peasant and learn his lesson: tomorrow they will set the land lords and policemen on your back once more and you will have to take up your pitchfork, your scythe, your knife... Would it not be better to unite now with the Soviet forces and support them in their struggle? That is the only way to safeguard land and liberty for the peasants.
September 1918