The government and its supporters, publicists of the nobility's orientation (newspapermen defending the interests of the nobility) are naturally attempting to cover up this brazen pillaging with all manner of elevated phrases: they speak of the development of culture in model farms. Here the development of culture is called the transplantation from Russia to Siberia of semi-feudal arrangements, with the hopeless situation of impoverished peasants, compelled in fact to perform barshchina just as in olden times. Model farms are not created by means of chancellery directives and embezzlement, and land allotments lead either to simple brokerage by nobility, who enrich themselves through resale with even greater shamelessness than those kulaks, usurers, and the like, upon whom they look with such contempt. Instead of model farms, there results—in cases where the land is not resold—an economy through the enserfment of peasants, through all manner of usurious transactions (loans of money, grain in exchange for labor, etc.), i.e., genuine kulak economy. They also speak of the political significance of the nobility-estate element: in Siberia, where exiles predominate in the local intelligentsia, it is supposedly necessary to create a reliable bulwark of state power, a zemstvo element. And in these discussions of the political significance of large landowners there is contained far more, and far deeper, truth than those who employ this argument imagine. Such reasoning clearly demonstrates upon what foundation the existence of a police state becomes possible: it needs to create a class of large exploiters who would be obligated to the state in all things, dependent upon it always (for example, the government can, under certain conditions, seize lands from lessees of state lands), who would extract their incomes by the basest of methods (kulak practices, brokerage, usury) and by virtue of this would always appear as faithful supporters of any arbitrariness and oppression. The Asian policy of the government requires its support in Asian large landed property, in the feudal system of "distribution of estates" (if now one cannot distribute estates populated by serfs, as was done in the past century, then instead they distribute lands interspersed with peasant population, which out of necessity will be forced to undertake the same barshchina). We are therefore prepared to agree with the "Moskovskie Vedomosti" and "Grazhdanin" that the implantation of landlords is indeed necessary for the political purposes of the tsar's government: an absolute tsar at the present time cannot maintain himself without feudal means, etc. Bourgeois (moderne[175]) policy with respect to the free lands of the periphery consists in their sale to farmers and peasants, who create a populous, prosperous population (as in America), present enormous demand for bourgeois products, evoke an unprecedented quickening of all industrial life. Feudal policy consists in the restriction of resettlement, in bureaucratic guardianship of all population movement, in distribution (direct or under the guise of sale and lease) of state lands to large landowners, who extract income through enserfment.

And the particularly important significance of the new law consists precisely in the fact that… [176]

Written in August – early September 1901

First published in 1932 in Leninsky Sbornik XIX

Printed from the manuscript