V. I.

Lenin

To the Rural Poor

An Explanation for the Peasants of What the Social-Democrats Want

3. Riches and Poverty, Property-Owners and Workers in the Countryside

Weknow now what the Social-Democrats want. They want to fight the whole
of the rich class to free the people from poverty. In our countryside
there is no less and, perhaps, even more poverty than there is in the
towns. We shall not speak here about how great the poverty in the
countryside is. Every worker who has been in the country and every
peasant are well acquainted with want, hunger, and ruin in the
countryside.

Butthe peasant does not know the cause of his distress, hunger
and destitution, or how to rid himself of this want. To know
this one must first find out what causes all want and poverty in both
town and countryside. We have already dealt with this briefly, and we
have seen that the poor peas ants and rural workers must unite with the
urban workers. But that is not enough. We must also find out what sort
of people in the countryside will follow the rich, the property-owners,
and what sort of people will follow the workers, the
Social-Democrats. We must find out whether there are many peasants who,
no less than the landlords, are able to acquire capital and live on the
labour of others. Unless we get to the bottom of this matter, no amount
of talking about poverty will be of any use, and the rural poor will not
know who in the countryside must unite among themselves and
with the urban Workers, or what must be done to make it a
dependable union and to prevent the peasant from being hoodwinked by his own kind, the rich peasant, as well as by the
landlord.

Toget to the bottom of this let us now see how strong the landlords are
and how strong the rich peasants are in the countryside.

Letus begin with the landlords. We can judge of their strength in the
first place by the amount of land they own as private property. The
total amount of land in European Russia, including peasant allotment
land and privately owned land, has been calculated at about 240,000,000 dessiatines [1] (except the state lands, of which we shall speak separately). Out of this
total of 240,000,000 dessiatines, 131,000,000 dessiatines of allotment
land are held by the peasants, that is to say, by over ten million households; whereas 109,000,000 dessiatines are held by private
owners, i.e., by less than half a million families. Thus, even if
we take the average, every peasant family holds 13 dessiatines, while
every family of private owners owns 218 dessiatines! But the distribution
of the land is much more unequal, as we shall presently see.

Ofthe 109,000,000 dessiatines owned by private owners seven
million are royal demesnes , in other words, the private property
of the members of the imperial family. The tsar, with his family, is the
first landlord, the biggest landowner in Russia. One family
possesses more land than half a million peasant families! Further, the churches and monasteries own about six
million dessiatines of land. Our priests preach frugality and abstinence
to the peasants, but they themselves have, by fair means and foul,
accumulated an enormous amount of land.

Further,about two million dessiatines are owned by the cities and towns,
and an equal amount by various commercial and industrial companies and
corporations. Ninety-two million dessiatines (the exact figure is
91,605,845, but to simplify matters we will quote round figures) belong to
less than half a million (481,358) families of private owners. Half these families are quite small owners, owning less than ten
dessiatines of land each, and all of them together own less than one
million dessiatines. On the other hand, sixteen thousand families
own over one thousand dessiatines each; and the total land owned
by them amounts to sixty-five million dessiatines. What vast
areas of land are concentrated in the hands of the big land owners is also
to be seen in the fact that just under one thousand families (924) own more than ten thousand dessiatines each, and all together they own twenty-seven million dessiatines! One thousand families own as much land as is
owned by two million peasant families.

Obviously,millions and tens of millions of people are bound to
live in poverty and starvation and will go on living in poverty
and starvation as long as such vast areas of land are owned by a few
thousand of the rich. Obviously, the state authorities, the government
itself (even the tsar’s government) will always dance to the tune of these
big land owners. Obviously, the rural poor can expect no help from anyone,
or from any quarter, until they unite, combine in a single class to wage a
stubborn, desperate struggle against the landlord class.

Atthis point we must observe that very many people in this country
(including even many people of education) have a totally wrong idea about
the strength of the landlord class; they say that the “state”
owns much more land. These bad counsellors of the peasant say: “A
large portion of the territory [i. e., of all the land] of Russia already
belongs to the state.” (These words are taken from the news paper
Revolutsionnaya Rossiya , No. 8, p. 8.) The mistake these people
make arises from the following. They have heard that the state
owns 150,000,000 dessiatines of land in European Russia. That is true. But
they forget that these 150,000,000 dessiatines consist almost entirely of
uncultivable land and forests in the Far North , in the Archangel,
Vologda, Olonets, Vyatka, and Perm gubernias. Thus, the state has retained
only that land which up to the present has been quite unfit for
cultivation. The cultivable land owned by the state amounts to less than four million dessiatines. And these cultivable state lands (for
example, in Samara Gubernia, where they are particularly extensive), are
leased for very low rents, for next to nothing, to the rich. The rich
lease thousands and tens of thous ands of dessiatines of these lands and
then sublet them to the, peasants at exorbitant rents.

Thepeople who say that the state owns a great deal of land are very bad
counsellors of the peasant. The actual case is that the big private
landowners (including the tsar personally) own a lot of good land, and the
state itself is in the hands of these big landowners. As long as the rural poor fail to
unite, and by uniting become a formidable force, the “state”
will always remain the obedient servant of the landlord class. There is
another thing that must not be forgotten: formerly almost all the
landlords were nobles. The nobility still owns a vast amount of land (in
1877-78, 115,000 nobles owned 73,000,000 dessiatines). But today money,
capital, has become the ruling power. Merchants and well-to-do peasants
have bought very large amounts of land. It is estimated that in the course
of thirty years (from 1863 to 1892) the nobility lost (i. e., sold more
than they bought) land to the value of over six hundred million
rubles. And merchants and honorary citizens have acquired land to the
value of 250,000,000 rubles. Peasants, Cossacks, and “other rural
inhabitants” (as our government calls the common folk, to
distinguish them from the “gentry,” the “clean public”) have
acquired land to the value of 300,000,000 rubles. Thus, on the average,
every year, the peasants in the whole of Russia acquire land as private
property to the value of 10,000,000 rubles.

Andso, there are different sorts of peasants: some live in poverty and
starvation; others grow rich. Consequently, the number of rich peasants
who incline towards the landlords and will take the side of the rich
against the workers is increasing. The rural poor who want to unite with
the urban workers must carefully ponder over this and find out whether
there are many rich peasants of this kind, how strong they are, and what
kind of a union we need to fight this force. We have just mentioned the
bad counsellors of the peasant. Those bad counsellors are fond of saying
that the peasants already have such a union. That union is the
mir , the village commune. The mir , they say, is a great
force. The mir unites the peasants very closely; the organisation
(i.e., the association, unity) of the peasants in the mir is
colossal (i.e., enormous, boundless).

Thatis wrong. It is a tale. A tale invented by kind hearted people, but a
tale nevertheless. If we listen to tales we shall only wreck our cause,
the cause of uniting the rural poor with the urban workers. Let every
rural inhabitant look round carefully: is the unity of the mir ,
is the peasant commune, at all like a union of the poor to fight
all

the rich, all those who live on the labour of others? No, it is
not, and it cannot be. In every village, in every commune, there are many
farm labourers, many impoverished peasants, and there are rich peasants
who employ farm labourers and buy land “in perpetuity.” These rich
peasants are also members of the commune, and it is they who lord it in
the commune because they are a force. But do we need a union to which the
rich belong, and which is lorded over by the rich? Of course not. We need
a union to fight the rich. And so, the unity of the mir
is no good to us at all.

Whatwe need is a voluntary union, a union only of people who have
realised that they must unite with the urban workers. The village commune,
however, is not a voluntary union; it is enforced by the state. The
village commune does not consist of people who work for the rich and who
want to unite to fight the rich. The village commune consists of all sorts
of people, not because they want to be in it, but because their parents
lived on the same land and worked for the same landlord, because the
authorities have registered them as members of that commune. The poor
peasant are not free to leave the commune; they are not free to accept in
the commune a man whom the police have registered in another volost, but
whom we may need for our union in a particular village. No, we need a very
different kind of union, a voluntary union consisting only of labourers
and poor peasants to fight all those who live on the labour of others.

Thetimes when the mir was a force have long passed, never to
return. The mir was a force when hardly any of the peasants were
farm labourers, or workers wandering over the length and breadth of Russia
in search of a job, when there were hardly any rich peasants, when all
were equally ground down by the feudal landlords. But now money has become
the principal power. Members of the same commune will now fight one
another for money like wild beasts. The moneyed peasants sometimes oppress
and fleece their fellow peasants more than the landlords do. What we need
today is not .the unity of the mir , but a union against the
power of money , against the rule of capital, a union of all the
rural labourers and of all the poor peasants of different communes, a
union of all the rural poor with the urban workers to fight both the
landlords and the rich peasants.

Wehave seen how strong the landlords are. We must now see whether there
are many rich peasants and how strong they are.

Weestimate the strength of the landlords by the size of their estates, by
the amount of land they own. The landlords are free to dispose of their
land, free to buy land and to sell it. That is why it is possible to judge
their strength very accurately by the amount of land they own.

The peas ants, however, still lack the right freely to dispose of their land; they are
still semi-serfs, tied to their village commune. Hence, the strength of
the rich peasants cannot be judged by the amount of allotment land they
hold. The rich peasants do not grow rich on their allotments; they
buy a considerable amount of land, buying both “in perpetuity” (i.e., as their private property) and “for a
number of years” (i.e., on lease); they buy both from the landlords
and from their fellow peasants, from those peasants who leave the land, or
are compelled by want to let their holdings. It will therefore be more
correct to divide the rich, middle, and poor peasants according to the
number of horses they own. A peasant who owns many horses will nearly
always be a rich peasant; if he keeps many draught animals it shows that
he cultivates a lot of land, owns land besides his communal allotment, and
has money saved up. Moreover, we are in a position to calculate the number
of peasants owning many horses in the whole of Russia (European Russia,
exclusive of Siberia and the Caucasus). Of course, it must not be
forgotten that we can speak of the whole of Russia only in averages: the
different uyezds and gubernias vary to a considerable degree. For
instance, in the neighbourhood of cities we often find rich peasant
farmers who keep very few horses. Some of them engage in
market-gardening—a profitable business; others keep few horses but
many cows and sell milk. In all parts of Russia there are also peasants
who do not make money out of the land, but engage in trade: they run
creameries, hulling-mills, and other enterprises. Everybody who lives in
the country very well knows of rich peasants in his own village or
district. But we want to know how many there are in the whole of Russia
and how strong they are, so that the poor peasant shall not have to guess
and go about blind fold, as it were, but know exactly his friends and his
foes.

Wellthen, let us see whether there are many peasants who are rich or poor
in horses. We have already said that the total number of peasant
households in Russia is estimated at about ten million. Between
them they now own, probably, about fifteen million horses (about
fourteen years ago the number was seventeen million, but it is smaller
now). Thus, on the average, every ten households have fifteen horses. But the whole point is that some of them—a
few— own many horses, while others—very many—own no horses, or very few. There are at least three million peasants,
who own no horses, and about three and a half million own one horse each. All these are either utterly ruined or very poor peasants. We
call these the rural poor. They number six and a half million out
of a total of ten million, that is to say, almost two-thirds!
Next come the middle peasants who own a pair of draught animals
each. These peasants number about two million households, owning
about four million horses. Then come the rich peasants each of
whom owns more than one pair of draught animals. Such comprise one and a half million households, but they own seven and a half million horses. [2]

Thus, about one-sixth of the total house holds own half the total number
of horses.

Nowthat we know this we are in a position to judge fairly accurately the
strength of the rich peasants. In number they are very few: in the
different communes and volosts they will comprise ten to twenty households
in every hundred. But these few households are the richest. Taking

Russia as a whole, they own almost as many horses as all the other
peasants taken together. That means that their land under crops must also
amount to nearly half the total area sown to crops by the peasants. Such
peasants harvest much more grain than they require for their
families. They sell large quantities of grain. They grow grain not merely
to feed themselves, but grow it chiefly for sale, to make money. Peasants
like these can save money. They deposit it in savings-banks and
banks. They buy land as property. We have already said how much land the
peasants all over Russia buy every year; nearly all this land goes to
these few rich peasants. The rural poor have to think not of buying land,
but of getting enough to eat. Often they have not enough money to buy
grain, let alone land. Therefore, the banks in general and the Peasants’
Bank in particular do not help all peasants to buy land (as is sometimes
asserted by people who try to deceive the muzhik or by the very
simple-minded), but only an insignificant number of peasants, only the
rich peasants. Therefore, the peasant’s evil counsellors whom we have
mentioned tell an untruth when they say that the land is being bought by
the peasants, that it is passing from capital to labour. The land can
never pass to labour, that is, to the poor working man, because land has
to be paid for with money. But the poor never have any money to spare. The
land can go only to the rich, moneyed peasants, to capital, to those
people against whom the rural poor must fight in alliance with
the urban workers.

Therich peasants not only buy land in perpetuity; most often they take
land for a number of years, on lease. By renting large plots they prevent
the rural poor from getting land. For example, it has been calculated how
much land rich peasants have rented in a single uyezd (Konstantinograd) in
Poltava Gubernia. And what do we find? The number who rented thirty
dessiatines or more per house hold is very small, only two out of every
fifteen households. But these rich peasants have gained possession of
one half of all the rented land, and each of them has on the
average seventy-five dessiatines of the rented land! Or take
Taurida Gubernia, where a calculation has been made of how much of the
land rented by the peasants from the state through the mir ,
through the village commune, has been grabbed by the rich. It has been found that the rich, who account for only
one-fifth of the total number of households, have grabbed
three-fourths of the rented land. Everywhere land goes to those
who have money, and only the few rich have money.

Further,much land is now let by the peasants themselves. The peasants
abandon their holdings because they have no livestock, no seed, nothing
with which to run their farms. Today even land is of no use unless you
have money. For instance, in Novouzensk Uyezd in Samara Gubernia, one,
sometimes even two, out of every three rich peasant house holds rent allotment land in their own or in another commune. The allotments are
let by those who have no horses, or only one horse. In Taurida Gubernia as
much as one-third of all peasant households let their allotments. One-fourth of the peasant allotments, a quarter of a
million dessiatines, are let. Of this quarter of a million dessiatines,
one hundred and fifty thousand dessiatines (three-fifths) are rented by
rich peasants! This, too, shows whether the unity of the mir , the
commune, is of any use to the poor. In the village commune, he who has
money has power. What we need is the unity of the poor of all communes.

Justas with land purchase, the peasants are deceived by talk about buying
cheap ploughs, harvesters, and all sorts of improved implements. Zemstvo
stores and artels are set up and it is said: improved implements will
better the conditions of the peasantry. That is mere deception. All these
improved implements always go to the rich; the poor get next to
nothing. They cannot think of buying ploughs and harvesters; they have
enough to do to keep body and soul together! All this sort of
“helping the peasants” is nothing but helping the rich. As for
the mass of the poor, who have neither land, livestock, nor reserves, they
will not benefit by the fact that the better implements will be
cheaper. Here is an example. In an uyezd in Samara Gubernia all the
improved implements belonging to the poor and to the rich peasants have
been taken stock of. It was found that one-fifth of all
households, i.e., the most well-to-do, owned almost three-fourths
of the improved implements, while the poor—half the households—had only one-thirtieth. Out of a total of 28,000
households, 10,000 possessed one horse each, or none; these 10,000 had only seven improved implements
out of a total of 5,724 improved implements owned by all the peasant
households in the uyezd. Seven out of 5,724—that is the share of the
rural poor in all these farm improvements, in all this increase in the
number of ploughs and harvesters which are supposed to help “all the
peasantry”! That is what the rural poor must expect from those who talk
about “improving peasant farming”!

Finally,one of the main features of the rich peasants is that they
hire farm-hands and day labourers. Like the landlords, the rich
peasants also live on the labour of others. Like the landlords, they
grow rich because the mass of the peasants are ruined and
pauperised. Like the landlords, they try to squeeze as much work as they
can out of their farm-hands and to pay them as little as possible. If
millions of peasants were not utterly ruined and compelled to go to work
for others, become hired labourers, sell their labour-power—the
rich peasants could not exist, could not carry on their farms. There
would be no “abandoned” allotments for them to pick up and
no labourers for them to hire. The million and a half rich peasants
throughout Russia certainly hire no less than a million
farm-hands and day labourers. Obviously, in the great struggle between
the propertied class and the class of the propertyless, between masters
and workers, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the rich
peasants will take the side of the property-owners against the working
class.

Wenow know the position and the strength of the rich peasantry. Let us
examine the conditions of the rural poor.

Wehave already said that the rural poor comprise the vast majority,
almost two-thirds, of the peasant households throughout Russia. To begin
with, the number of households without horses cannot be less than
three million—probably more than that today, perhaps three
and a half million. Every famine year, every crop failure, ruins tens of
thou sands of farms. The population grows, life on the land becomes more
crowded, but all the best land has been grabbed by the landlords and the
rich peasants. And so, every year more and more people are ruined, go to
the towns and the factories, take work as farm-hands, or become unskilled
labourers. A peasant who has no horse is one who has become quite poor. He is a proletarian. He gains a living (if you can call it
living; it would be truer to say that he just contrives to keep body and
soul together) not from the land, not from his farm, but by working for hire. He is brother to the town worker. Even land is of no use to
the peasant without a horse: half the households without horses let their allotments , while some even surrender them to the commune for
nothing (and sometimes even pay the difference between the taxes and the
expected income from the land!) because they are not in a position to till
their land. A peasant who has no horse sows one dessiatine, or two at the
most. He always has to buy additional grain (if he has the money to buy it
with)— his own crop will never suffice to feed him. Peasants who own
one horse each, and there are about three and a half million such
households throughout Russia, are not very much better off. Of course,
there are exceptions, and we have already said that, here and there, there
are peasants with one horse each who are doing middling well, or are even
rich. But we are not speaking of exceptions, of individual localities, but
of Russia as a whole. If we take the entire mass of peasants who have one
horse each, there can be no doubt that they are a mass of paupers. Even in
the agricultural gubernias the peasant who has one horse sows only three
or four dessiatines, rarely five; his crop does not suffice either. Even
in a good year his food is no better than that of a peasant without a
horse—which means that he is always underfed, always starves. His
farm is in decay, his livestock is poor and short of fodder, and he is not
in a position to look after his land properly. The peasant who owns one
horse—in Voronezh Gubernia, for instance—can afford to spend
(not counting expenditure on fodder) not more than twenty rubles a year on the whole of his farm! (A rich peasant spends ten times as much. ) Twenty rubles a year for rent, to buy livestock, repair his
wooden plough and other implements, pay the shepherd, and for everything
else! Do you call that farming? It is sheer misery, hard labour, endless
drudgery. It is natural that some of the peasants with one horse each, and
not a few, should also let their allotments. Even land is of
little use to a pauper. He has no money and his land does not even provide
him with enough to eat, let alone with money. But money is needed for
everything: for food, for clothing, for the farm, and to pay taxes. In Voronezh Gubernia, a
peasant who owns one horse usually has to pay about eighteen rubles a year in taxes alone, while he cannot make more than
seventy-five rubles a year to meet all his expenses. Under these
circumstances it is sheer mockery to talk about buying land, about
improved implements, about agricultural banks: those things were not
invented for the poor.

Whereis the peasant to get the money from? He has to look for
“earnings” on the side. A peasant who owns one horse, like the
peasant who owns none, ekes out a living only with the help of
“earnings.” But what does “earnings” mean? It means working for others, working for hire. It means that the peasant who owns
one horse has half ceased to be an independent farmer and has become a
hireling, a proletarian. That is why such peasants are called semi proletarians. They, too, are brothers to the town workers because
they, too, are fleeced in every way by all sorts of employers. They, too,
have no way out, no salvation, except by uniting with the Social-Democrats
to fight all the rich, all the property-owners. Who works on the building
of railways? Who is fleeced by the contractors? Who goes out lumbering and
timber-floating? Who works as farm-hand? Or as day labourer? Who does the
unskilled work in the towns and ports? It is always the rural poor, the
peasants who have no horses or only one each. It is always the rural
proletarians and semi-proletarians. And what vast numbers of these there
are in Russia! It has been calculated that throughout Russia (exclusive of
the Caucasus and Siberia) eight and sometimes even nine million
passports are taken out yearly. Those are all for migratory workers. They
are peasants only in name; actually, they are hirelings,
wage-labourers. They must all unite in one union with the town
workers—and every ray of light and knowledge that reaches the
countryside will strengthen and consolidate this unity.

Thereis one more point about “earnings” that must not be
forgotten. All kinds of officials and people who think as the officials do
are fond of saying that the peasant, the muzhik, “needs” two
things: land (but not very much of it— besides, he cannot get much,
because the rich have grabbed it all!) and “earnings.” Therefore, they say, in order to help the
people, it is necessary to introduce more trades in the rural districts,
to “provide” more “earnings.” Such talk is sheer hypocrisy. For the poor, “earnings” mean wage-labour. To
“provide earnings” for the peasant means transforming him into
a wage-labourer. Fine sort of assistance this! For the rich peasants there
are other kinds of “earnings,” which require capital, for instance,
the building of a flour-mill or some other plant, the purchase of
threshing-machines, trade, and so on. To confuse the earnings of moneyed
people with the wage-labour of the poor means deceiving the
poor. Of course, this deception is to the advantage of the rich; it is to
their advantage to make it appear that all kinds of “earnings”
are open to and within the reach of all the peasants. But he who
really cares for the welfare of the poor will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth .

Itremains for us to consider the middle peasants. We have already seen
that, on the average, taking Russia as a whole, we must regard as a middle
peasant one who has a pair of draught animals, and that out of a total of
ten million households there are about two million middle peas ant
households in the country. The middle peasant stands between the rich
peasant and the proletarian, and that is why he is called a middle
peasant. His standard of living, too, is middling: in a good year he makes
ends meet on his farm, but poverty is always knocking at the door. He has
either very few savings or none at all. That is why his farm is in a
precarious position. He finds it hard to get money: only very seldom can
he make as much money out of his farm as he needs, and if he does, it is
just barely enough. To go out for earnings would mean neglecting the farm
and everything would go to rack and ruin. Nevertheless, many of the middle
peasants cannot get along with out earnings: they, too, have to hire
themselves to others; want compels them to go into bondage to the
landlord, to fall into debt. And once in debt the middle peasant is hardly
ever able to get out of it, for unlike the rich peasant he has no steady
income. Therefore, once he falls into debt it is as if he had put his neck
in a halter. He remains a debtor until he is utterly ruined. It is chiefly
the middle peasant who falls into bondage to the landlord, because for work paid on a job
basis the landlord needs a peasant who is not ruined, one who owns a pair
of horses and all implements required in farming. It is not easy for the
middle peas ant to go elsewhere in search of earnings, so he goes into
bondage to the landlord in return for grain, permission to use pasture
land, the lease of the cut-off lands, and money advances during the
winter. The middle peasant is hard pressed, not only by the landlord and
the kulak, but also by his rich neighbour, who is always one jump ahead
when he wants to acquire more land and never misses an opportunity to
squeeze him in some way or other. Such is the life of the middle peasant;
he is neither fish nor fowl. He can be neither a real master nor a
worker. All the middle peasants strive to become masters: they want to be
property-owners, but very few succeed. There are a few, a very few, who
even hire farm-hands or day labourers, try to become rich on the labour of
others, to rise to wealth on the backs of others. But most middle peasants
have no money to hire labourers— in fact, they have to hire
themselves out.

Wherevera struggle begins between the rich and the poor, between the
property-owners and the workers, the middle peasant remains in between,
not knowing which side to take. The rich call him to their side: you, too,
are a master, a man of property, they say to him, you have nothing to do
with the penniless workers. But the workers say: the rich will cheat and
fleece you, and there is no other salvation for you but to help us in our
fight against all the rich. This struggle for the middle peasant is going
on everywhere, in all countries, wherever the Social-Democratic workers
are fighting to emancipate the working people. In Russia the struggle is
just beginning. That is why we must most care fully study the matter and
understand clearly the deceits the rich resort to in order to win over the
middle peasant; we must learn how to expose these deceits and help the
middle peasant to find his real friends. If the Russian Social-Democratic
workers at once take the right road, we shall establish a firm alliance
between the rural workers and the urban workers more quickly than our
comrades, the German workers, and we shall speedily achieve victory over
all the enemies of the working people.

---
Notes:
[1]
These and all subsequent figures concerning the amount of land are very
much out of date. They refer to the years 1877-78. But we have no more
up-to-date figures. The Russian Government can only survive by keeping
things in the dark, and that is why complete and truthful information
about the life of the people throughout our country is so rarely
collected. (A dessiatine=2.7 acres,— Ed .)
— Lenin

[2]
We repeat that the figures quoted are average, approximate figures. The
number of rich peasants may not be exactly a million and a half, but a
million and a quarter, or a million and three-quarters, or even two
million. That is not a big difference. The important thing here is not to
count them up to the last thousand or last hundred thousand, but clearly
to realise the strength and the position of the rich peasants so that we
may be able to recognise our enemies and our friends, that we shall not
allow ourselves to be deceived by tales or empty talk, but get to know
accurately the position of the poor and especially the position of the
rich.

Letevery rural worker carefully study his own volost and the neighbouring
volosts. He will see that we have counted correctly, and that, on the
average, this will be the position everywhere: out of every hundred
households there will be ten, at the most twenty, rich families, some
twenty middle peasants, and all the rest are poor.
— Lenin