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
regard a great part of the year as a period of mere waiting
for and resting from the extraordinary effort of a few
weeks.(*) [(*)Given any particular motive, any particula
enthusiasm, or visible, desirable object, even the hungry