and barley was further curtailed in the Steppe Ukraine, in the Middle and 
Lower Volga regions and in the Northern Caucasus’. 
In estimating the sowing area the Soviet statisticians make some rather 
arbitrary allowances to the statistical figures on hand, or, to be more 
exact, an addition of 25 per cent, and for the regions where the amount of 
ax is determined by the sowing area, up to 4o per cent. Yet the same 
statisticians, when dealing with the period before the war and the revolution, 
make an allowance of 10 per cent only. 
With those qualifications, the Soviet statisticians give the following 
figures for the sowing area of the whole “Union”: 
Percentage to 1914 Percentage to 1922 
(00 
93 
34 
75 
3b 
37 
Ju 
35.3 
The above mentioned allowances lead to an arbitrary increase of the 
sowing areas in the Bolshevist period as compared with the pre-revolutionary 
rimes*). 
The conditions of agricultural production now observed in Russia remind 
one in a striking way of the phenomena of war economics. The economic 
regime which the Bolshevics have established in Russia is a perpetuation 
of the conditions of war economics as they existed in Russia between 1914 
and 1917, the revolution having only rendered them more acute. During 
the war, the industry which had to satisfy war demand and was deprived 
through the war of its man-power, was not In a position to supply commod- 
ities to the agricultural producer, and the latter began to produce and to 
market less of his goods. This situation was aggravated by the paper money 
inflation of the war time. Now, under peace-time conditions, and with 
the currency being seemingly stabilised, the cleavage between the towns and 
the villages, created by the Soviet economic system, has reproduced and 
consolidated the abnormal conditions of the war economics. 
It will not be possible to improve Russian agriculture and to create 
conditions enabling the rural population of Russia to prosper, until the 
deadening influence of the Socialist regulation on the economic life of the 
country has been done away with. Peter Struve. 
*) (See Vishnevsky: “Agriculture of the U.S.S.R. during the 10 years of 
revolution” in the review “On the agrarian front”, No. 11—12 for 1927, p. 127.) 
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