V. I.

Lenin

The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry [2]

Fortyyears have passed since the peasants were emancipated. It is quite
natural that the public should celebrate with particular enthusiasm
February 19, the anniversary of the fall of old feudal Russia and the
beginning of an epoch which promised the people liberty and
prosperity. But we must not forget that besides genuine loathing of
serfdom and all its manifestations, there is also much unctuousness in the
laudatory orations delivered on the occasion. The now fashionable
estimation of the “great” Reform as “the emancipation of
the peasantry accompanied by a grant of land with the aid of
state compensation” is utterly hypocritical and false. Actually, the
peasants were emancipated from the land, inasmuch as the plots
they had tilled for centuries were ruthlessly cut down and hundreds of
thousands of peasants were deprived of all their land and settled on a
quarter or beggar’s allotment. [3]
In point of fact, the peasants were doubly robbed: not only were their plots of land cut down, but they had to
pay “redemption money” for the land left to them, and which
had always been in their possession; the redemption price, moreover, was
far above the actual value of the land. Ten years after the emancipation
of the peasantry the landlords themselves admitted to government officials
investigating the state of agriculture that the peasants had been made to
pay, not only for their land, but for their personal liberty. Yet,
although the peasants had to pay redemption money for their liberation,
they were not granted real freedom; for twenty years they remained
“temporarily bound” [4] ; they were left—and have remained to
this day—the lowest social-estate, subject to flogging; liable to special taxes; bereft of the right freely to leave the
semi-feudal commune, freely to dispose of their own land, or freely to
settle in any part of the country. Our peasant Reform, far from
manifesting magnanimity of the government, on the contrary, serves as a
great historical example of the extent to which the autocratic government
befouls everything it touches. Under pressure of military defeat,
appalling financial difficulties, and menacing discontent among the
peasantry, the government was actually compelled to liberate the
peasants. The tsar himself admitted that the peasants had to be
emancipated from above, lest they emancipate themselves from below. But in
embarking on emancipation, the government did everything possible and
impossible to satisfy the greed of the “injured” serf-owners;
it did not even stop at the base device of reshuffling the men who were to
carry out the Reform, although the men selected had come from among the
nobility itself! The first body of mediators was dissolved and replaced
by men incapable of refusing to help the serf-owners cheat the peasantry
in the very process of demarcating the land. Nor could the great Reform be
carried out with out resort to military punitive action and the
shooting-down of peasants who refused to accept the title-deeds to the land. [5]
It is not surprising, therefore, that the best men of the time,
muzzled by the censors, met this great Reform with the silence of
condemnation.

Thepeasant, “emancipated” from corvée service, emerged from the hands of the reformers crushed, plundered, degraded, tied to his
allotment, so much so that he had no alternative but “voluntarily” to accept corvée services. And so he
began to cultivate the land of his former master, “renting” from him
the very land that had been cut off from his own allotment, hiring himself
out in the winter for summer work in return for the corn he had to borrow
from the landlord to feed his hungry family. The “free labour,” for
which the manifesto drawn up by a jesuitical priest called upon the
peasantry to ask the “blessing of God,” turned out to be nothing
more nor less than labour-service and bondage.

Tooppression by the landlords, which was preserved thanks to the
magnanimity of the officials who introduced and carried out the Reform, was added oppression by capital. The power of
money, which crushed even the French peasant, emancipated from the power
of the feudal landlords, not by a miserable, half-hearted reform, but by a
mighty popular revolution—this power of money bore down with all its
weight upon our semi-serf muzhik. He had to obtain money at all
costs—in order to pay the taxes which had increased as a result of
the beneficent Reform, to rent land, to buy the few miserable articles of
factory-made goods which began to squeeze out the home manufactures of the
peasant, to buy corn, etc. The power of money not only crushed the
peasantry, but split it up. An enormous number of peasants were steadily
ruined and turned into proletarians; from the minority arose a small group of
grasping kulaks and enterprising muzhiks who laid hands upon the peasant
farms and the peasants’ lands, and who formed the kernel of the rising
rural bourgeoisie. The forty years since the Reform have been marked by
this constant process of “de-peasantising” the peasants, a
process of slow and painful extinction. The peasant was reduced to
beggary. He lived together with his cattle, was clothed in rags, and fared
on weeds; he fled from his allotment, if he had anywhere to go, and even
paid to be relieved of it, if he could induce anyone to take over
a plot of land, the payments on which exceeded the income it yielded. The
peasants were in a state of chronic starvation, and they died by the tens
of thousands from famine and epidemics in bad harvest years, which
recurred with increasing frequency.

Thisis the state of our countryside even at the present time. One might
ask: What is the way out, by what means can the lot of the peasantry be
improved? The small peasantry can free itself from the yoke of capital
only by associating itself with the working-class movement, by helping the
workers in their struggle for the socialist system, for transforming the
land, as well as the other means of production (factories, works,
machines, etc.), into social property. Trying to save the peasantry by
protecting small-scale farming and small holdings from the onslaught of
capitalism would be a useless retarding of social development; it would
mean deceiving the peasantry with illusions of the possibility of
prosperity even under capitalism, it would mean disuniting the labouring classes and creating a privileged
position for the minority at the expense of the majority. That is why
Social-Democrats will always struggle against senseless and vicious
institutions such as that which forbids the peasant to dispose of his
land, such as collective liability, or the system of prohibiting the
peasants from freely leaving the village commune or freely accepting into
it persons belonging to any social-estate. But, as we have seen, our
peasants are suffering not only and not so much from oppression by capital
as from oppression by the land lords and the survivals of
serfdom. Ruthless struggle against these shackles, which immeasurably
worsen the condition of the peasantry and tie it hand and foot, is not
only possible but even necessary in the interest of the country’s social
development in general; for the hopeless poverty, ignorance, lack of
rights, and degradation, from which the peasants suffer, lay an imprint of
Asiatic backwardness upon the entire social system of our
country. Social-Democracy would not be doing its duty if it did not render
every assistance to this struggle. This assistance should take the form,
briefly put, of carrying the class struggle into the countryside .

Wehave seen that in the modern Russian village two kinds of class
antagonism exist side by side: first, the antagonism between the
agricultural workers and the proprietors, and, secondly, the antagonism
between the peasantry as a whole and the landlord class as a whole. The
first antagonism is developing and becoming more acute; the second is
gradually diminishing. The first is still wholly in the future; the second
to a considerable degree already belongs to the past. And yet, despite
this, it is the second antagonism that has the most vital and most
practical significance for Russian Social-Democrats at the present
time. It goes without saying, it is an axiom for every Social-Democrat,
that we must utilise all the opportunities presenting themselves to us to
develop the class-consciousness of the agricultural wage-workers, that we
must pay attention to the migration of urban workers to the countryside
(e.g., mechanics employed on steam threshing machines, etc.) and to the
markets where agricultural labourers are hired.

Butour rural labourers are still too closely connected with the
peasantry, they are still too heavily burdened with the misfortunes of the
peasantry as a whole to enable the movement of the rural workers to assume
national significance, either now or in the immediate future. On the other
hand, the question of sweeping away the survivals of serfdom, of driving
the spirit of social-estate inequality and degradation of tens of millions
of the “common people” out of the whole of the Russian state
system is already a matter of national significance, and the Party which
claims to be the vanguard in the fight for freedom cannot ignore it.

Thedeplorable condition of the peasantry has now be come (in a more or
less general form) almost universally recognised. The phrase about
“the defects” of the Reform of 1861 and the need for state aid
has become a current truism. It is our duty to point out that peasant
distress arises precisely from the class oppression of the peasantry; that
the government is the loyal champion of the oppressing classes; and that
those who sincerely and seriously desire a radical improvement in the
condition of the peasantry must seek, not aid from the government, but
deliverance from its oppression and the achievement of political
liberty. There is talk of the redemption payments being excessively high,
and of benevolent measures on the part of the government to reduce them
and extend the dates of payment. Our reply to this is: all payment of
redemption money is nothing more nor less than robbery of the peasantry by
the landlords and the government, screened by legal forms and bureaucratic
phrases; it is nothing more nor less than tribute paid to the serf-owners
for emancipating their slaves. We will put forward the demand for the
immediate and complete abolition of redemption payments and quit-rents,
and the demand for the return to the people of the hundreds of millions
which the tsarist government has extorted from them in the course of the
years to satisfy the greed of the slaveowners. There is talk of the
peasants not having sufficient land, of the need for state aid to provide
them with more land. Our reply to this is: it is precisely because of state aid (aid to the landlords, of course) that the peasants in
such an enormous number of cases were deprived of land they vitally
needed. We put forward the demand for restitution to the peasants of the land of which they have been deprived, a condition that
still binds them to forced labour, to the rendering of corvée
service, i.e., that virtually keeps them in a state of serfdom. We will
put forward the demand for the establishment of peasant committees to
remove the crying injustices perpetrated against the emancipated slaves by
the Committees of Nobles set up by the tsarist government. We will demand
the establishment of courts empowered to reduce the excessively high
payment for land extorted from the peasants by the landlords who take
advantage of their hopeless position, courts in which the peasants could
prosecute for usury all who take advantage of their extreme need to impose
shackling agreements upon them. We will utilise every opportunity to
explain to the peasants that the people who talk to them about the
tutelage or aid of the present state are either fools or charlatans, and
are their worst enemies; that what the peasants stand most in need of is
relief from the monstrous oppression of the bureaucratic power,
recognition of their complete and absolute equality in all respects with
all other social-estates, complete freedom of movement from place to
place, freedom to dispose of their lands, and freedom to manage their own
communal affairs and dispose of the communal revenues. The most common
facts in the life of any Russian village provide a thousand issues for
agitation in behalf of the above demands. This agitation must be based
upon the local, concrete, and most pressing needs of the peasantry; yet it
must not be confined to these needs, but must be steadily directed towards
widening the outlook of the peasants, towards developing their political
consciousness. The peasants must be brought to understand the special
positions occupied in the state by the landlords and the peasants
respectively, and they must be taught that the only way to free the
countryside from tyrannical oppression is to convene an assembly of
representatives of the people and to overthrow the arbitrary rule of the
officials. It is absurd to assert that the demand for political liberty
would not be understood by the workers; not only the workers who have
engaged the factory owners and the police in direct battle for years and
who constantly see their best fighters subjected to arbitrary arrests and
persecution—not only these workers, who are already imbued with socialism, but every
sensible peasant who thinks at all about the things he sees going on
around him will understand what the workers are fighting for, will
understand the significance of a Zemsky Sobor which will emancipate the
whole country from the unlimited power of the hated officials. Agitation
on the basis of the direct and most urgent needs of the peasants will
fulfil its purpose—i.e., carry the class struggle into the
countryside—only when it succeeds in combining every exposure of
some “economic” evil with definite political demands.

Butthe question arises whether the Social-Democratic Labour Party can
include in its programme demands like those referred to above. Can it
undertake to carry on agitation among the peasantry? Will it not lead to
the scattering and diversion of our revolutionary forces, not very
numerous as it is, from the principal and only reliable channel of the
movement?

Suchobjections are based on a misunderstanding. We must definitely
include in our programme demands for the emancipation of our countryside
from all the survivals of slavery, demands capable of rousing the best
section of the peasantry, if not to engage in independent political
action, then at all events consciously to support the working-class
struggle for emancipation. We should be making a mistake if we defended
measures that would have the effect of retarding social development or of
artificially shielding the small peasantry against the growth of
capitalism, against the development of large-scale production; but we
should be committing a much more disastrous mistake if we failed to
utilise the working-class movement for the purpose of spreading among the
peasantry the democratic demands of which the Reform of February 19, 1861,
fell short because of its distortion by the landlords and the
officials. Our Party must include such demands in its programme if it is to
take the lead of the whole people in the struggle against the autocracy. [1]

But the inclusion of these points does not mean that we would call active
revolutionary forces from the towns to the villages. Such a thing is out
of the question. There can be no doubt that all the militant elements of
the Party must concentrate on work in the towns and industrial centres;
that only the industrial proletariat is capable of conducting a steadfast
and mass struggle against the autocracy, of employing such methods of
struggle as organising public demonstrations, or of issuing a
popular political newspaper regularly and circulating it
widely. We must include peasant demands in our programme, not in order to
call convinced Social-Democrats from the towns to the countryside, not in
order to chain them to the village, but to guide the activities of those
forces that cannot find an outlet anywhere except in the rural
localities and to utilise for the cause of democracy, for the political
struggle for freedom, the ties which, owing to the force of circumstances,
a good many faithful Social-Democratic intellectuals and workers have with
the countryside—ties that are necessarily increasing and growing
stronger with the growth of the movement. We have long passed the stage
when we were a small detachment of volunteers, when the reserves of
Social-Democratic forces were limited to circles of young people who all
“went to the workers.” Our movement now has a whole army at its
command, an army of workers, engaged in the struggle for socialism and
freedom—an army of intellectuals who have been taking part in the
movement and who can now be found over the whole length and breadth of
Russia—an army of sympathisers whose eyes are turned with faith and
hope towards the working-class movement and who are prepared to render it
a thousand services. We are confronted with the great task of organising
all these armies in such a manner as will enable us, not only to organise
transient outbreaks, not only to strike casual and sporadic (and therefore
not dangerous) blows at the enemy, but to pursue the enemy steadily
and persistently, in a determined struggle all along the line, to harass
the autocratic government wherever it sows oppression and gathers a
harvest of hatred. Can this aim be achieved without sowing the seeds of
the class struggle and political consciousness among the many millions of
the peasantry? Let no one say it is impossible to sow these seeds! It is not only possible, it is already being done in a
thousand ways that escape our attention and influence. This process will
evolve much more widely and rapidly when we issue a slogan that will bring
our influence to bear and when we unfurl the banner of the emancipation of
the Russian peasantry from all the survivals of shameful serfdom. Country
people coming to the towns even today regard with curiosity and interest
the workers’ struggle, incomprehensible to them, and carry news of it to
the remotest parts of the land. We can and must bring about a situation in
which the curiosity of the bystanders is replaced, if not by full
understanding, then at least by a vague consciousness that the workers are
struggling for the interests of the whole people, by a growing sympathy
for their struggle. And when that has been done, the day of the victory of
the revolutionary workers’ party over the police government will come with
a rapidity exceeding our own anticipation.

---
Notes:
[1]
We have drafted a Social-Democratic programme which includes the
above-mentioned demands. We hope—after this draft has been discussed and
amended with the participation of the Emancipation of Labour group—to
publish it as the draft programme of our Party in one of our forthcoming
issues.
— Lenin

[2]
The article, “ The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry ,” was
written in connection with the elaboration of the agrarian programme of
the R.S.D.L.P., published in the name of the Editorial Board of
Iskra and Zarya in the summer of 1902 and adopted by the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in 1903.

[3]
A quarter or beggar’s allotment —a quarter of the so-called
“maximum” or “decree” allotment, the amount established by law for a given district at the time of the Reform of
1861. Some of the peasants received these tiny parcels of land from the
landlords wit out payment of redemption money. Such allotments were,
therefore, also called “gift allotments” and the peasants who
received them were called “gift peasants.”

[4]
Temporarily bound peasants —peasants who were still compelled to carry out certain duties (payment of quit-rent or performance
of corvée service) for the use of their land even after the Reform and
until they started paying redemption money to the landlord for their
allotment.

Fromthe moment the redemption contract was concluded, the peasants ceased
to be “temporarily bound” and joined the category of “peasant property-owners.”

[5]
These title-deeds were documents defining the land-owning
relations of temporarily bound peasants and landlords upon the abolition
of serfdom in 1861. The title-deed indicated the amount of land used by
the peasant before the Reform and the land and other properties that
remained in his hands after “emancipation”; the deed also listed the
duties the peasant had to perform for the land lord. The amount of
redemption money to be paid by the peasant was determined on the basis of
this title-deed.