The DEVELOPMENT of CAPITALISM in RUSSIA

Chapter II. The Differentiation of the Peasantry

II. Zemstvo Statistics For Samara Gubernia

From the country’s southern outer area let us pass to the eastern
region, to Samara Gubernia. Let us take Novouzensk Uyezd, the last one
investigated; in the statistical report for this uyezd we find the most
detailed classification of the peasants according to economic status. [1]

Here are the general data on the groups of the peasantry (the data that follow
cover 28,276 allotment-holding households, numbering 164,146 persons of
both sexes, i.e., only the Russian population of the uyezd, without
Germans or farmsteaders—householders who farm both on community land
and on separate non-community farmsteads. The inclusion of the Germans and the farmsteaders would considerably heighten the
picture of differentiation).

The concentration of agricultural production turns out to be very
considerable: the “community” capitalists (1/14 of the total households, namely, households with 10 and more draught
animals) possess 36.5% of the area under crops—as much as do 75.3 %,
the poor and middle peasantry put together! Here, too, as always, the
“average” figure (15.9 dess. under crops per household) is
absolutely fictitious and creates the illusion of universal
prosperity. Let us examine other data on the economy of the various
groups.

Thus, in the bottom group there are very few independent peasant farmers;
the poor peasants have no improved implements at all, while the middle
peasantry have them in insignificant numbers. The concentration of animals
is still greater than the concentration of area under crops; the well
to-do peasants evidently combine capitalist livestock raising with their
large-scale capitalist cropping. At the opposite pole we have
“peasants” who ought to be classed as allotment-holding farm
labourers and day labourers, for their main source of livelihood is the
sale of their labour-power (as we shall see in a moment), and the
landowners sometimes give one or two animals to their labourers to tie
them down to their farms and to reduce wages.

It goes without saying that the peasant groups differ not only as to the
size of their farms, but also in their methods of farming: firstly, in the
top group a very large proportion of the peasant farmers (40 to 60%) are
supplied with improved implements (mainly iron ploughs, and also horse and
steam threshers, winnowing machines, reapers, etc.). In the hands of 24.7%
of the households, the top group, are concentrated 82.9% of the total
improved implements; 38.2% of the households, the middle group, possess
17% of the improved implements; 37.1%, the poor, possess 0.1% (7
implements out of

5,724). [2]

Secondly, the peasants with few horses are compelled by necessity to carry on “a different system of farming, a
system of economic activity” entirely different from that of the
peasants with many horses, as the compiler of Returns for Novouzensk Uyezd
says (pp. 44-46). The well-to-do peasants “let their land rest
. . . plough in the autumn

. . . plough it again in the spring and sow after harrowing . . . roll the
ploughed land when the soil has aired . . . plough twice for rye,”
whereas the badly-off peasants “do not let their land rest but sow
Russian wheat year after year . . . for wheat they plough in the spring
once . . . for rye they provide neither fallow nor ploughed land, but
merely break the surface before sowing . . . for wheat they plough in the
late spring, and as a result the corn often does not come up . . . for rye
they plough once, or merely break the surface and not at the proper time
. . . they plough the same plot of land unwisely year after year, without
allowing it to rest.” “And so on and so forth without end,” the compiler concludes this list. “The facts enumerated
concerning the radical difference between the farming systems of the
better- and the badly-off peasants result in grain of poor quality and bad
harvests for the latter and comparatively better harvests for the
former” ( ibid .).

But how could such a big bourgeoisie arise under the agricultural
community system? The answer is supplied by the figures for land possessed
and in use according to groups. The peasants in the section taken by us
(76 households) have a total of 57,128 dess. of purchased land and 304,514
dess. of rented land, of which 177,789 dess. are non-allotment land rented
by 5,602 households; 47,494 dess. of the allotment land rented from other
village communities are held by 3,129 households, and 79,231 dess. of the
allotment land rented in their own village communities are held by 7,092
households. The distribution of this enormous area of land, constituting
more than 2/3 of the peasants’ total area under crops, is as follows
(see Table on p. 89).

We see here an enormous concentration of purchased and rented land. More
than 9/10 of the total purchased land is in the hands of 1.8% of the
households, the very richest. Of all the rented land, 69.7% is
concentrated in the hands of peasant capitalists, and 86.6% is in the
hands of the top group of the peasantry. A comparison of the figures on
the renting and the leasing-out of allotment land clearly reveals the
passage of the land into the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie. Here, too,
the conversion of the land into a commodity leads to the cheapening of the
wholesale purchase price of land (and, consequently, to profiteering in
land). If we determine the price of one dessiatine of rented non-allotment
land

we get the following figures, counting from the bottom group to the top:
3.94; 3.20; 2.90; 2.75; 2.57; 2.08; 1.78 rubles. To show what mistakes the
Narodniks fall into by thus ignoring the concentration of rented land, let
us quote by way of example the arguments of Mr. Karyshev in the well-known
symposium The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Certain Aspects of the Russian National Economy (St. Petersburg, 1897). When
grain prices fall, with an improvement of the harvest, and renting prices
rise, the entrepreneur renters, concludes Mr. Karyshev, have to reduce
demand and hence the renting prices had been raised by the representatives
of consumers’ economy (I, 288). The conclusion is absolutely
arbitrary: it is quite possible that the peasant bourgeoisie raise renting
prices in spite of a drop in grain prices, for an improvement in the
harvest may compensate for the drop in prices. It is quite possible that
the well-to-do peasants raise renting prices even when there is no such
compensation, reducing the cost of production of grain by introducing
machinery. We know that the employment of machines in agriculture is
growing and that these machines are concentrated in the hands of the
peasant bourgeoisie. Instead of studying the differentiation of the
peasantry, Mr. Karyshev introduces arbitrary and incorrect premises about
an average peasantry. That is why all the conclusions and deductions
similarly arrived at by him in the publication quoted are of no value
whatever.

Having ascertained that diverse elements exist among the peasantry, we can
now easily get clarity on the question of the home market. If the
well-to-do peasants control about 2/3 of the total agricultural
production, it is obvious that they must account for an incomparably
larger share of the grain on sale. They produce grain for sale, whereas
the badly-off peasants have to buy additional grain and sell their
labour-power. Here are the data: [3]

We suggest that the reader compare the arguments of our Narodniks with
these data regarding the process of the formation of the home
market. . . . “If the muzhik is prosperous, the factory flourishes,
and vice versa” (V. V., Progressive Trends ,
p. 9). Mr. V. V. is evidently not in the least interested in the social
form of the wealth which the “factory” needs and which is
created only by the conversion of the product and the means of production,
on the one hand, and of labour-power, on the other, into a
commodity. Mr. N.–on, when speaking of the sale of grain, consoles
himself with the thought that this grain is produced by the “muzhik
farmer” ( Sketches , p. 24), that by transporting this grain
“the railways live at the expense of the muzhik” (p. 16). Really, are not these “community-member” capitalists
“muzhiks”? “Some day we shall have occasion to point out,” wrote Mr. N.–on in 1880, and reprinted it in 1893,
“that in the localities where communal land tenure prevails,
agriculture based on capitalist principles is almost completely absent
( sic !!) and that it is possible only where communal ties have
either been entirely broken or are breaking down” (p. 59). Mr. N.–on has never had this “occasion,” nor could
he have had, for the facts point precisely to the development of
capitalist agriculture among “community members” [4] and to the complete adaptation of the notorious “communal ties” to
the farms of big crop growers that employ labourers.

The relationship between the peasant groups proves to be absolutely
analogous in Nikolayevsk Uyezd (cited statistical returns, p. 826 and
foll.; we leave out those living away from home and the landless). For
example, 7.4%, the rich households (having 10 and more draught animals),
comprising 13.7% of the population, concentrate in their hands 27.6% of
the total livestock and 42.6% of the rented land, whereas 29%, the poor
households (horseless and one-horse), comprising 19.7% of the population,
have only 7.2% of the livestock and 3% of the rented land. Unfortunately,
the tables for Nikolayevsk Uyezd, we repeat, are too scanty. To finish
with Samara Gubernia, let us quote the following highly instructive
description of the position of the peasantry from the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia.

“... The natural increase in the population, augmented by the
Immigration of land-poor peasants from the western gubernias, in
connection with the appearance in the sphere of agricultural production of
money-grubbing speculators in land, has with every passing year
complicated the forms of the renting of land, raised its worth and
converted the land into a commodity which has so quickly and immensely
enriched some and ruined many others. To illustrate the latter point, let
us indicate the area cultivated by some of the southern merchant- and
peasant-owned farms, where the tillage of 3,000 to 6,000 dessiatines is no
rarity, while some practise the cultivation of 8-10-15 thousand
dessiatines of land, renting several tens of thousands of state-owned
land.

“The existence and the growth of the agricultural (rural)
proletariat in Samara Gubernia are to a considerable extent the product of
recent times, with their increasing production of grain for sale, rise in
renting prices, ploughing up of virgin and pasture land, clearing of
forests, and so forth. The landless households throughout the gubernia
number 21,624 in all, whereas the non-farming ones number 33,772 (of those
households that have allotments), while the horseless and one-horse
households together number 110,60 families, with a total of 600,000
persons of both sexes, counting five and a fraction persons per family. We
take the liberty of counting these, too, as proletarians, although legally
they

have a share of communal land; actually, these are day labourers,
ploughmen, shepherds, reapers and similar workers on big farms who
cultivate 1/2 to 1 dessiatine of their own allotments so as to feed their
families who remain at home” (pp. 57-58).

Thus, the investigators regard as proletarians not only the horseless
peasants, but also those who have one horse. We note this important
conclusion, which fully coincides with that of Mr. Postnikov (and with the
data in the classified tables) and points to the real social-economic
significance of the bottom group of the peasantry.

---
Notes:
[1]
Statistical Returns for Samara Gubernia , Vol. VII, Nolvousensk Uyezd , Samara, 1890. An analogous classification is
also given for Nikolayevsk Uyezd (Vol. VI, Samara, 1889), but the data are
much less detailed. The Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia
(Vol. VIII, Pt. 1, Samara, 1892) contains only a classification according
to size of allotment, the unsatisfactory nature of which we shall deal
with later on.— Lenin

[2]
It is interesting to note that from these very data
Mr. V. V. ( Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming , St. Petersburg,
1892, p. 225) concluded that there was a movement by the “peasant
masses” to replace obsolete implements by improved ones
(p. 254). The method by which this absolutely false conclusion was reached
is very simple: Mr. V. V. took the total figures from the Zemstvo returns,
without troubling to look at the tables showing how the implements were
distributed! The progress of the capitalist farmers (community members),
who employ machines to cheapen the cost of producing commodity grain, is
transformed by a stroke of the pen into the progress of the “peasant
masses.” And Mr. V.V. did not hesitate to write “Although the
machines are acquired by the well-to-do peasants; they are used by all
( sic !!) the peasants” (221). Comment is superfluous.— Lenin

[3]
We identify with the sale of labour-power what the statisticians call
“agricultural industries” (local and away from the village). That by these “industries is meant employment as regular and day labourers is clear from the table of
industries ( Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia , Vol. VIII): of
14,063 males engaged in “agricultural industries,” 13,297 are
farm labourers and day labourers (including shepherds and ploughmen).— Lenin

[4]
Novouzensk Uyezd, which we have taken as an illustration, reveals a
particular “tenacity of the village community” (to use the
terminology of Messrs. V. V. & Co.): from the table in the
Combined Returns (p. 26) we find that in this uyezd 60% of the
communities have redivided the land, whereas in the other uyezds only 11
to 23% have done so (for the gubernia 13.8% of the communities).— Lenin