"Stew and potato pancakes again today. Life was nowhere near as good as eating and drinking lavishly in the city."
In the blink of an eye, it was mealtime. The sun had already hung in the sky for quite a while, yet the grain requisition squad had only just crawled out of bed.
This group kept highly irregular hours. They clearly lacked the discipline of a proper army and were utterly lax. Some were still bleary-eyed, yawning as they fumbled into clothes they had not even put on properly.
Naturally, the reason they had become so slack was that they had lived too comfortably and peacefully for too long. With the support of the Polish government and Germany, they could scarcely find any organization capable of intimidating them enough, aside from the Labor Party.
However, the Labor Party had entered the Belarusian region relatively late. This was unlike eastern Ukraine, where industry was comparatively developed, and Labor Party organizations had already been quite active during the Imperial Russian era.
The Belarusian region, on the other hand, had always been a backward agricultural area, with scarcely any industry on a meaningful scale. As a result, the Labor Party's infiltration there had been relatively slow.
Generally speaking, the Russian Labor Party preferred to seize industrially developed cities first, then use those cities, where the main resources were concentrated, as a foundation to control and occupy other areas.
This was also why, during the Russian Civil War, armed members of the Russian Labor Party brought weapons into the countryside to requisition grain, implementing the highly controversial "surplus grain collection system."
No wonder Soviet agriculture later remained plagued by problems. Neglecting agriculture too severely was bound to bring about such consequences.
And in a place like Belarus, where industry was weak and society still