10 May 1917. Maurice Paleologue

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

Maurice Paleologue

10, Kutuzova embankment, Petrograd, Russian Empire

Countess Adam Lamoyska, who arrived here from Kiev yesterday, tells me that she dare not return to her family place at Petchara, in Podolia, which has been her refuge since the invasion of Poland; a dangerous agitation is on foot among the peasants.

"Hitherto," she told me, "they have all been faithful and attached to my mother, who has certainly done everything she could for them. But since the revolution everything has changed. We see them standing about at the castle gate or in the park, pretending to divide up our lands in dumb show. One of them will affect to want the wood by the river; another puts in for the gardens and proposes to turn them into folds. They go on talking like that for hours and do not stop even when my mother, one of my. sisters or myself go up to them."

The same attitude is observable in all the provinces, so it is clear that Lenin's propaganda among the peasants is beginning to bear fruit.

In the eyes of the moujiks that great reform of 1861, the emancipation of the serfs, has always been regarded as a prelude to the general expropriation they have been obstinately expecting for centuries; their idea is that the partition of all land, the tcherny peredel, or "black partition," as they call it, is due to them by virtue of a natural, imprescriptible and primordial right. Lenin's apostles have an easy task in persuading them that the hour for this last act of justice is at length about to strike.

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