complain that there is a tendency to turn
the eight-hour day into a four-hour day. Attempts are being made to
arrest this tendency by making an additional food allowance conditional
on the actual fulfilment of working days. In the Donetz coal basin, the
monthly output per man was in 1914 750 poods, in 1916 615 poods, in 1919
240 poods (figures taken from Ekaterinoslav Government), and in 1920
the output per man is estimated at being something near 220 poods. In the
shale mines on the Volga, where food conditions are comparatively good,
productivity is comparatively high. Thus in a small mine near Simbirsk
there are 230 workmen, of' whom 50 to 60 are skilled. The output for the
unskilled is 28.9 poods in a shift, for the skilled 68.3. But even there
25 per cent. of the workmen are regular absentees, and actually the mine
works only 17 or 18 days in a month, that is, 70 per cent. of the normal
number of working days. The remaining 30 per cent. of normal working
time is spent by the workmen in getting food. Another small mine in the
same district is worked entirely by unskilled labor, the workers being
peasants from the neighboring villages. In this mine the productivity
per man is less, but all the men work full time. They do not have to
waste time in securing food, because, being local peasants, they are
supplied by their own villages and families. In Moscow and Petrograd
food is far more difficult to secure, more time is wasted on that
hopeless task; even with that waste of time, the workman is not properly
fed, and it cannot be wondered at that his productivity is low.

Something, no doubt, is due to the natural character of the Russians,
which led Trotsky to define man as an animal distinguished 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 regar