ASSISTANCE TO FARMING 155 
instance, in a majority of the volosts of the district of Krasnoslo- 
bodsk in the province of Penza, in the entire district of Menzelisk 
in the province of Ufa, and at many other places. The refusals are 
to be explained by the difficulties in obtaining prisoners of war. 
Thus, the prisoners would be assigned to parties of not less than 
thirty men, and this only within a short distance from the officially 
established base, not to mention other vexatious restrictions. In 
actual practice matters would be settled, as a rule, with the help of 
the zemstvos, but nevertheless the obligations imposed upon the 
farmers by the military authorities in regard to prisoners very often 
discouraged the peasants from using labor of this class. The big 
landowners, on the other hand, were quite willing to meet all terms 
and conditions, since wages for farm labor in many places had risen 
to fantastic heights. Thus, in the province of Taurida wages of a 
laborer had risen to 4 rubles a day, whereas prisoners of war could 
be obtained for an average wage of 8 rubles a month, of which 
amount the prisoner himself received 4.42 rubles, while the zemstva 
board retained the balance, to defray the cost of maintenance. 
A few months before the outbreak of the Revolution the Govern- 
ment estimated the number of prisoners of war employed in 1916 on 
farm labor at about 496.000. 
Other Sources of Labor. 
The labor of the refugees from the war zone on the farms of cen- 
tral and southern Russia played a negligible part. Among the 
3,000,000 men and women who had either voluntarily or compul- 
sorily departed from the war zone, only about 250,000 were farm 
laborers, not to mention the fact that these refugees were often in a 
state of physical exhaustion. To form them into labor squads and 
furnish them with expert agricultural direction, tools, and ma- 
chinery were likewise matters that caused anxiety to the zemstvos. 
Some of the zemstvos even made attempts to make use of the 
inmates of prisons, but the information on this subject is inadequate. 
Finally, there were requests from zemstvos for permission to import 
Chinese and Korean labor. How difficult and complicated all such 
measures proved in practice appears clearly from the outcome of 
the latter attempt. In this instance the applicant was the district 
zemstvo board of Konstantinograd. The application was first ad-