154 THE ZEMSTVOS DURING THE WAR 
was gratuitous, and even in those instances where remuneration was 
received the money went to the purchase of clothing for the stu- 
dents. Before going out to stations assigned to them, they were often 
given a course of lectures and sometimes provided with the oppor- 
tunity of gaining practice in mowing or in the handling of the more 
complicated agricultural machines. Reports on the organization and 
the work done by student farm-labor squads are available for 
twenty-three provinces, although it is probable that the number of 
provinces in which they operated was considerably larger.® 
Prisoners of War. 
The prisoners of war were under the jurisdiction of the general 
staff. Their status was regulated by numerous rules and regulations 
which provided that they might also be employed as laborers. In 
order, however, to obtain prisoners of war for farm work, a great 
deal of red tape had to be gone through. The peasant in need of 
prisoners of war had to file his application with the zemstvo board. 
Then the board, if it consented to allocate a number of prisoners of 
war for such work and to look after them, would inform the gover- 
nor of the province of its decision. The governor would then for- 
ward the application of the board to the general staff. Upon the ar- 
cival of the prisoners of war at the place designated, the zemstvo 
board would distribute them over the district. Sometimes complaints 
were heard that the zemstvo distributed the prisoners chiefly among 
the owners of large estates, and indeed the census of 1916 showed 
that only 38 per cent of all prisoners had been employed on peasant 
farms and the balance on the estates of the landlords. There is, 
however, no reason to attribute this necessarily to bias on the part 
of the zemstvo board in favor of the landlords. In the first place, we 
must remember that the large landowners undoubtedly required all 
the help they could possibly get, much more urgently than the peas- 
ants and that practically the entire reduction in the area sown which 
at one time so greatly alarmed the Government and the public oc- 
curred on large estates rather than on the peasant farms. On the 
other hand, we frequently find in the documents dealing with this 
subject instances of emphatic refusal by the peasants to take ad- 
vantage of the labor of prisoners of war. This was the case, for 
8 Iswestia (Bulletin), Nos. 37-88, pp. 106-108; No. 39, pp. 95-100.