Date: 1902
Source: ru:PSS/v6

Furthermore, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party demands:

a) In the interest of a democratically organized national economy, the abolition of all indirect taxes and the introduction of a progressive income tax;

b) In the interest of eradicating all vestiges of our old serfdom:

1) The abolition of redemption payments and quitrents, as well as all forms of compulsory labor currently imposed upon the peasantry as a taxable class;

2) The abolition of joint liability and of all laws that restrict the peasant’s free disposition of his land;

3) The return to the people of the monetary sums extorted from them in the form of redemption payments and quitrents. To this end, monastic estates and appanage lands should be confiscated, and large landed estates owned by aristocratic landlords who availed themselves of redemption loans should be subjected to a special tax. The funds thus collected should be allocated to a separate national fund earmarked for cultural and charitable purposes serving rural communities;

4) The establishment of peasant committees

(a) to reclaim for rural communities—through expropriation or, where land has changed hands, via redemption and the like—the lands that were stripped from the peasants upon the abolition of serfdom and that have since been held by landowners as instruments of their exploitation;

(b) to eliminate the remnants of serfdom still lingering in the Urals, the Altai region, the Western Krai, and other parts of the empire;

5) The granting to the courts of the power to reduce excessively high rental rates and to declare void transactions characterized by exploitative terms. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party holds that the full, consistent, and enduring implementation of these political and social reforms can be achieved only through the overthrow of autocracy and the convocation of a constituent assembly freely elected by the entire people.

Written no later than [date]. First published here, based on the manuscript.

January 25 (February 7), 1902