V.I. Lenin

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/rp/index.htm

V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 1. The Struggle of the Urban Workers

Many peasants have probably already heard about the labour unrest in the
towns. Some of them have themselves been in the capitals and in the
factories, and have seen the riots, as the police call them. Others know
workers who were involved in the unrest and were deported to their
villages by the authorities. Others again must have seen the leaflets
issued by the workers, or pamphlets about the workers’ struggle. Still
others have only heard stories about what is going on in the towns from
people with first-hand experience.

Formerly, only students rebelled, but now thousands and tens of thousands
of workers have risen in all the big towns. In most cases they fight
against their employers, against the factory owners, against the
capitalists. The workers declare strikes, all of them stop work at a
factory at the same time and demand higher wages, demand that they should
be made to work not eleven or ten hours a day, but only eight hours. The
workers also demand other things that would make the working man’s life
easier. They want the workshops to be in better condition and the machines
to be protected by special devices so as to prevent them from maiming the
workers; they want their children to be able to go to school and the sick
to be given proper aid in the hospitals; they want the workers’ homes to
be like human dwellings instead of being like pigsties.

The police intervene in the workers’ struggle. The police seize workers,
throw them into prison, deport them without trial to their villages, or
even to Siberia. The government has passed laws banning strikes and
workers’ meetings. But the workers wage their fight against the police and
against the government. The workers say: We, millions of working people, have bent our backs long enough! We have
worked for the rich and remained paupers long enough! We have allowed them
to rob us long enough! We want to unite in unions, to unite all the
workers in one big workers’ union (a workers’ party ) and to
strive jointly for a better life. We want to achieve a new and better
order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither
rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but
all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common
labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all
and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens
of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist
society . The teachings about this society are called socialism . The workers’ unions which fight for this better order
of society are called Social-Democratic parties. Such parties
exist openly in nearly all countries (except Russia and Turkey), and our
workers, together with socialists from among the educated people, have
also formed such a party: the Russian Social-Democratic Labour
Party .

The government persecutes that Party, but it exists in secret, despite all
prohibitions; it publishes its news papers and pamphlets and organises
secret unions. The workers not only meet in secret but come out into the
streets in crowds and unfurl their banners bearing the inscriptions:
“Long live the eight-hour day! Long live freedom! Long live
socialism!” The government savagely persecutes the workers for this. It
even sends troops to shoot down the workers. Russian soldiers have killed
Russian workers in Yaroslavl, St. Petersburg, Riga, Rostov-on-Don, and
Zlatoust.

But the workers do not yield. They continue the fight. They say: neither
persecution, prison, deportation, penal servitude, nor death can frighten
us. Our cause is a just one. We are fighting for the freedom and the
happiness of all who work. We are fighting to free tens and hundreds of
millions of people from abuse of power, oppression and poverty. The
workers are becoming more and more class- conscious. The number of
Social-Democrats is growing fast in all countries. We shall win despite
all persecution.

The rural poor must clearly understand who these Social-Democrats are,
what they want, and what must be done in the countryside to help the
Social-Democrats to win happiness for the people.

## Notes

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 2. What Do the Social-Democrats Want?

The Russian Social-Democrats are first and foremost striving to win political liberty. They need political liberty in order to unite
all the Russian workers extensively and openly in the struggle for a new
and better socialist order of society.

What is political liberty?

To understand this the peasant should first compare his present state of
freedom with serfdom. Under the serf-owning system the peasant could not
marry without the land lord’s permission. Today the peasant is free to
marry without anyone’s permission. Under the serf-owning system the
peasant had unfailingly to work for his landlord on days fixed by the
latter’s bailiff. Today the peasant is free to decide which employer to
work for, on which days, and for what pay. Under the serf-owning system
the peasant could not leave his village without the landlord’s per
mission. Today the peasant is free to go wherever he pleases—if the mir allows him to go, if he is not in arrears with his taxes, if
he can get a passport, and if the governor or the police chief does not
forbid his changing residence. Thus, even today the peasant is not quite
free to go where he pleases; he does not enjoy complete freedom of
movement; the peasant is still a semi-serf. Later on we shall explain in
detail why the Russian peasant is still a semi-serf and what he must do to
escape from this condition.

Under the serf-owning system the peasant had no right to acquire property
without the landlord’s permission; he could not buy land. Today the
peasant is free to acquire any kind of property (but even today he is not
quite free to leave the mir ; he is not quite free to dispose of
his land as he pleases). Under the serf-owning system the peasant could be
flogged by order of the landlord. Today the peas ant cannot be flogged by
order of the landlord, although he is still liable to corporal punishment.

This freedom is called civil liberty—freedom in family matters, in private matters, in matters concerning property. The peasant
and the worker are free (although not quite) to arrange their family life
and their private affairs, to dispose of their labour (choose their
employer) and their property.

But neither the Russian workers nor the Russian people as. a whole are yet
free to arrange their public affairs. The people as a whole are
the serfs of the government officials, just as the peasants were the serfs
of the landlords. The Russian people have no right to choose their
officials, no right to elect representatives to legislate for the whole
country. The Russian people have not even the right to arrange meetings
for the discussion of state affairs. We dare not even print
newspapers or books, and dare not even speak to all and for all on matters
concerning the whole state without permission from officials who have been
put in authority over us without our consent, just as the landlord used to
appoint his bailiff without the consent of the peasants!

Just as the peasants were the slaves of the landlords, so the Russian
people are still the slaves of the officials. Just as the peasants lacked
civil freedom under the serf-owning system, so the Russian people still
lack political liberty. Political liberty means the freedom of
the people to arrange their public, state affairs. Political liberty means
the right of the people to elect their representatives (deputies) to a
State Duma (parliament). All laws should be discussed and passed, all
taxes should be fixed only by such a State Duma (parliament) elected by
the people them selves. Political liberty means the right of the people
themselves to choose all their officials, arrange all kinds of meetings
for the discussion of all state affairs, and publish whatever papers and
books they please, without having to ask for permission.

All the other European peoples won political liberty for themselves long
ago. Only in Turkey and in Russia are the people still politically
enslaved by the sultan’s government and by the tsarist autocratic
government. Tsarist autocracy means the unlimited power of the tsar. The
people have no voice in determining the structure of the state or in
running it. All laws are made and all officials are appointed by the tsar alone, by his personal, unlimited, autocratic authority. But,
of course, the tsar cannot even know all Russian laws and all
Russian officials. The tsar cannot even know all that goes on in the
country. The tsar simply endorses the will of a few score of the richest
and most high-born officials. However much he may desire to, one man
cannot govern a vast country like Russia. It is not the tsar who governs
Russia—it is only a manner of speech to talk about autocratic,
one-man rule! Russia is governed by a handful of the richest and most
high-born officials. The tsar learns only what this handful are pleased to
tell him. The tsar cannot in any way go against the will of this handful
of high-ranking nobles: the tsar himself is a landlord and a member of the
nobility; since his earliest childhood he has lived only among these
high-born people; it was they who brought him up and educated him; he
knows about the Russian people as a whole only that which is known to
these noble gentry, these rich landlords, and the few very rich merchants
who are received at the tsar’s Court.

In every volost administration office you will find the same picture
hanging on the wall; it depicts the tsar (Alexander III, the father of the
present tsar) speaking to the volost headmen who have come to his
coronation. “Obey your Marshals of the Nobility!” the tsar
is ordering them. And the present tsar, Nicholas II, has repeated those
words. Thus, the tsars themselves admit that they can govern the country
only with the aid of the nobility and through the nobility. We must well
remember those words of the tsar’s about the peasants having to obey the
nobility. We must clearly understand what a lie is being told the people
by those who try to make out that tsarist government is the best form of
government. In other countries—those people say—the government
is elected; but it is the rich who are elected, and they govern unjustly
and oppress the poor. In Russia the government is not elected; an
autocratic tsar governs the whole country. The tsar stands above everyone,
rich and poor. The tsar, they tell us, is just to everyone, to the poor
and to the rich alike.

Such talk is sheer hypocrisy. Every Russian knows the kind of justice that
is dispensed by our government. Everybody knows whether a plain worker or
a farm labourer in our country can become a member of the State Council. In all other
European countries, however, factory workers and farm-hands have been
elected to the State Duma (parliament); they have been able to speak
freely to all the people about the miserable condition of the workers, and
call upon the workers to unite and fight for a better life. And no one has
dared to stop these speeches of the people’s representatives; no policeman
has dared to lay a finger on them.

In Russia there is no elective government, and she is governed not merely
by the rich and the high-born, but by the worst of these. She is governed
by the most skilful intriguers at the tsar’s Court, by the most artful
tricksters, by those who carry lies and slanders to the tsar, and flatter
and toady to him. They govern in secret; the people do not and cannot know
what new laws are being drafted, what wars are being hatched, what new
taxes are being introduced, which officials are being rewarded and for
what services, and which are being dismissed. In no country is there such
a multitude of officials as in Russia. These officials tower above the
voiceless people like a dark forest—a mere worker can never make his
way through this forest, can never obtain justice. Not a single complaint
against bribery, robbery or abuse of power on the part of the officials is
ever brought to light; every complaint is smothered in official red
tape. The voice of the individual never reaches the whole people, but is
lost in this dark jungle, stifled in the police torture chamber. An army
of officials, who were never elected by the people and who are not
responsible to the people, has woven a thick web, and men and women are
struggling in this web like flies.

Tsarist autocracy is an autocracy of officials. Tsarist autocracy means
the feudal dependence of the people upon the officials and especially upon
the police. Tsarist autocracy is police autocracy.

That is why the workers come out into the streets with banners bearing the
inscriptions: “Down with the autocracy!”, “Long live political
liberty!” That is why the tens of millions of the rural poor must also
support and take up this battle-cry of the urban workers. Like them,
undaunted by persecution, fearless of the enemy’s threats and violence, and undeterred by the first reverses, the agricultural labourers
and the poor peasants must come forward for a decisive struggle for the
freedom of the whole of the Russian people and demand first of all the convocation of the representatives of the people . Let the people
themselves all over Russia elect their representatives (deputies). Let
those representatives form a supreme assembly, which will introduce
elective government in Russia, free the people from feudal dependence upon
the officials and the police, and secure for the people the right to meet
freely, speak freely, and have a free press!

That is what the Social-Democrats want first and fore most. That is the
meaning of their first demand: the demand for political liberty .

We know that political liberty, free elections to the State Duma
(parliament), freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, will not at once
deliver the working people from poverty and oppression. There is no means
of immediately delivering the poor of town and country from the burden of
working for the rich. The working people have no one to place their hopes
in and no one to rely upon but themselves . Nobody will free the
working man from poverty if he does not free himself . And to free
themselves the workers of the whole country, the whole of Russia, must
unite in one union, in one party. But millions of workers cannot unite if
the autocratic police government bans all meetings, all workers’
newspapers, and the election of workers’ deputies. To unite they must have
the right to form unions of every kind, must have freedom to unite; they
must enjoy political liberty.

Political liberty will not at once deliver the working people from
poverty, but it will give the workers a weapon with which to fight
poverty .  There is no other means and there can be no other means of
fighting poverty except the unity of the workers themselves . But
millions of people cannot unite unless there is political
liberty .

In all European countries where the people have won political liberty, the
workers began to unite long ago. Throughout the whole of Europe, workers
who own no land and no workshops, and work for other people for wages all
their lives are called proletarians . Over fifty years ago the call was sounded for the working people to unite. “Workers of
all countries, unite!"—during the past fifty years these words
have circled the whole globe, are repeated at tens and hundreds of
thousands of workers’ meetings, and can be read in millions of
Social-Democratic pamphlets and newspapers in every language.

Of course, to unite millions of workers in one union, in one party, is an
extremely difficult task; it requires time, persistence, perseverance, and
courage. The workers are ground down by poverty and want, benumbed by
cease less toil for the capitalists and landlords; often they have not
even the time to think of why they remain perpetual paupers, or how to be
delivered from this. Everything is done to prevent the workers from
uniting: either by means of direct and brutal violence, as in countries
like Russia where there is no political liberty, or by refusing to employ
workers who preach the doctrines of socialism, or, lastly, by means of
deceit and bribery. But no violence or persecution can stop the
proletarian workers from fighting for the great cause of the emancipation
of all working people from poverty and oppression. The number of
Social-Democratic workers is constantly growing. Take our neighbouring
country, Germany; there they have elective government. Formerly, in
Germany, too, there was an unlimited, autocratic, monarchist
government. But long ago, over fifty years ago, the German people
destroyed the, autocracy and won political liberty by force. In Germany
laws are not made by a handful of officials, as in Russia, but by an assembly of people’s representatives , by a parliament, by the Reichstag , as the Germans call it. All adult males take part in
electing deputies to this assembly. This makes it possible to count how
many votes were cast for the Social-Democrats. In 1887 one-tenth of all votes were cast for the Social-Democrats. In 1898 (when the most
recent elections to the Reichstag took place) the Social-Democratic vote increased nearly threefold. This time more than
one-fourth of all the votes were cast for the
Social-Democrats. Over two million adult males voted for Social-Democratic candidates to parliament. Among the farm
labourers of Germany socialism is not yet widespread but it is now making
very rapid progress among them. And when the masses of farm-hands, day laborers and poor, pauperised peasants unite with their
brothers in the towns, the German workers will win and establish an order
under which the working people will suffer neither poverty nor oppression.

By what means do the Social-Democratic workers want to deliver the people
from poverty?

To know this, one must clearly understand the cause of the poverty of the
vast masses of the people under the present social order. Rich cities are
growing, magnificent shops and houses are being built, railways are being
constructed, all kinds of machines and improvements are being introduced
in industry and agriculture, but millions of people remain iii poverty,
and continue to work all their lives to provide a bare subsistence for
their families. That is not all: more and more people are becoming
unemployed. Both in town and country there are more and more people who
can find no work at all. In the villages they starve, while in the towns
they swell the ranks of the “tramps” and “down-and-outs,” find refuge like beasts in dug-outs on the
outskirts of towns, or in dreadful slums and cellars, such as those in the
Khitrov Market in Moscow.

Why is this? Wealth and luxury are increasing, and yet the millions and
millions who by their labour create all this wealth remain in poverty and
want! Peasants are dying of starvation, workers wander about without
employment, and yet merchants export millions of poods of grain from
Russia to foreign countries, factories are standing idle because the goods
cannot be sold, for there is no market for them!

The cause of all this is, first of all, that most of the land, and also
the factories, workshops, machines, buildings, ships, etc., belong to a
small number of rich people. Tens of millions of people work on this land
and at these factories and workshops, but they are all owned by a few
thousand or tens of thousands of rich people, landlords, merchants, and
factory owners. The people work for those rich men for hire, for wages,
for a crust of bread. All that is produced over and above what is required
to provide a bare subsistence for the workers goes to the rich; this is
their profit, their “income.” All the benefits arising from the use
of machines and from improvements in methods of production go to the landowners and capitalists: they accumulate wealth
untold, while the workers get only a miserable pittance. The workers are
brought together for work; on large estates and at big factories several
hundred and sometimes even several thousand workers are employed. When
labour is united in this way, and when the most diverse kinds of machines
are employed, work becomes more productive: one worker produces much more
than scores of workers did working separately and without the aid of
machines. But the benefits of this more productive labour go not to all
the working people, but to an insignificant number of big landowners,
merchants, and factory owners.

One often hears it said that the landlords and merchants “provide work” for the people, that they
“provide” the poor with earnings. It is said, for instance,
that a neighbouring factory or a neighbouring landlord “maintains” the local peasants. Actually, however,
the workers by their labour maintain themselves and also all
those who do not work themselves. But for permission to work on
the landlord’s land, at a factory, or on a railway, the worker gives the owner gratis all he produces, while the worker
himself gets only enough for a bare subsistence. Actually, therefore, it
is not the landlords and the merchants who give the workers employment,
but the workers who by their labour maintain everybody, surrendering gratis the greater part of their labour.

Further. In all present-day states the people’s poverty is due to the fact
that the workers produce all sorts of articles for sale, for the
market. The factory owner and the artisan, the landlord and the well-to-do
peasant produce various goods, raise cattle, sow and harvest grain for
sale , in order to obtain money . Money has everywhere become
the ruling power. All the goods produced by human labour are exchanged for
money. With money you can buy anything. With money you can even buy a man,
that is to say, force a man who owns nothing to work for another who has
money. Formerly, land used to be the ruling power—that was the case
under the serf-owning system: whoever possessed land possessed power and
authority. Today, however, money, capital, has become the ruling
power. With money you can buy as much land as you like. Without money you
will not be able to do much even if you have land: you must have money to buy a
plough or other implements, to buy livestock, to buy clothes and other
town-made goods, not to speak of paying taxes. For the sake of money
nearly all the landlords have mortgaged their estates to the banks. To get
money the government borrows from rich people and bankers all over the
world, and pays hundreds of millions of rubles yearly in interest on these
loans.

For the sake of money everyone today is waging a fierce war against
everyone else. Each tries to buy cheap and to sell dear, each tries to get
ahead of the other, to sell as many goods as possible, to undercut the
other, to conceal from him a profitable market or a profitable
contract. In this general scramble for money the little man, the petty
artisan or the small peasant, fares worse than all: he is always left
behind by the rich merchant or the rich peasant. The little man never has
any reserves; he lives from hand to mouth; each difficulty or accident
compels him to pawn his last belongings or to sell his livestock at a
trifling price. Once he has fallen into the clutches of a kulak or of a
usurer he very rarely succeeds in escaping from the net, and in most cases
he is utterly ruined. Every year tens and hundreds of thousands of small
peasants and artisans lock up their cottages, surrender their holdings to
the commune gratis and become wageworkers, farm-hands, unskilled
workers, proletarians. But the rich grow richer and richer in this
struggle for money. They pile up millions and hundreds of millions of
rubles in the banks and make profit not only with their own money, but
also with the money deposited in the banks by others. The little man who
deposits a few score or a few hundred rubles in a bank or a savings-bank
receives interest at the rate of three or four kopeks to the ruble; but
the rich make millions out of these scores and use these millions to
increase their turnover and make ten and twenty kopeks to the ruble.

That is why the Social-Democratic workers say that the only way to put an
end to the poverty of the people is to change the existing order from top
to bottom, throughout the country, and to establish a socialist
order , in other words, to take the estates from the big landowners,
the factories from the factory owners, and money capital from the bankers, to
abolish their private property and turn it over to the whole
working people throughout the country. When that is done the workers’
labour will be made use of not by rich people living on the labour of
others, but by the workers themselves and by those elected by them. The
fruits of common labour and the advantages from all improvements and
machinery will then benefit all the working people, all the
workers. Wealth will then grow at a still faster rate because the workers
will work better for them selves than they did for the capitalists; the
working day will be shorter; the workers’ standard of living will be
higher; all their conditions of life will be completely changed.

But it is not an easy matter to change the existing order throughout the
country. That requires a great deal of effort, a long and stubborn
struggle. All the rich, all the property-owners, all the bourgeoisie [1] will defend their riches with all their might. The officials and the army
will rise to defend all the rich class , because the government it
self is in the hands of the rich class. The workers must rally as one man
for the struggle against all those who live on the labour of others; the
workers themselves must unite and help to unite all the poor in a single working class , in a single proletarian class. The
struggle will not be easy for the working class, but it will certainly end
in the workers’ victory because the bourgeoisie, or those who live on the
labour of others, are an insignificant minority of the population, while
the working class is the vast majority. The workers against the
property-owners means millions against thousands.

The workers in Russia are already beginning to unite for this great
struggle in a single workers’ Social-Democratic Party. Difficult as it is
to unite in secret, hiding from the police, nevertheless, the organisation
is growing and gaining strength. When the Russian people have won political liberty, the work of uniting the working class, the cause of
socialism, will advance much more rapidly, more rapidly than it is
advancing among the German workers.

## Notes

[1] Bourgeois means a property-owner. The bourgeoisie are all the
property-owners taken together. A big bourgeois is the owner of big
property. A petty bourgeois is the owner of small property. The words
bourgeoisie and proletariat mean the same as property-owners and workers,
the rich and the poor, or those who live on the labour of others end those
who work for others for wages.
— Lenin

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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

We know 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.

But the 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.

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

Let us 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.

Of the 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.

At this 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.

The people 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.

And so, 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).

That is 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.

What we 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.

The times 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.

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

We estimate 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.

Well then, 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.

Now that 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.

The rich 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.

Just as 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.

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

We have 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.

Where is 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.

There is 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 .

It remains 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.

Wherever a 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.

Let every 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

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 4. What Path Should the Middle Peasant Take?  Should He Take the Side of the Property-Owners and the Rich or the Side of the Workers and the Poor?

All property-owners, the entire bourgeoisie, try to win over the middle
peasant by promising him all sorts of ways to improve his farm (cheap
ploughs, agricultural banks, the introduction of grass sowing, cheap
livestock and fertilisers, and so on) and also by inducing the peasant to
join all sorts of agricultural societies (co-operatives, as they are
called in books) which unite all kinds of farmers with the object of
improving farming methods. In this way the bourgeoisie try to keep the
middle and even the small peasant, even the semi-proletarian, from uniting
with the workers, and try to induce them to side with the rich, with the
bourgeoisie, in their fight against the workers, the proletariat.

To this the Social-Democratic workers reply: improved farming is an
excellent thing. There is no harm in buying cheaper ploughs; nowadays even
a merchant, if he is not a fool, tries to sell more cheaply to attract
customers. But when a poor or a middle peasant is told that improved
farming and cheaper ploughs will help all of them to escape from poverty
and to get on their feet, without touching the rich, this is
deception. All these improvements, lower prices, and co-operatives
(societies for the sale and purchase of goods) benefit the rich far
more than anybody else. The rich grow stronger and oppress the poor
and middle peasants more and more. As long as the rich remain rich, as
long as they own most of the land, livestock, implements, and
money—as long as all this lasts, not only the poor but even the
middle peasants will never be able to escape from want. One or
two middle peasants may be able to climb into the ranks of the rich with
the aid of all these improvements and co-operatives, but the people as a
whole, and all the middle peasants, will sink deeper and deeper into
poverty. For all middle peasants to become rich, the rich
themselves must be turned out, and they can be turned out only if the
urban workers and the rural poor are united.

The bourgeoisie say to the middle (and even to the small) peasant: we will sell
you land at a low price, and ploughs at a low price, but in return you must sell yourselves to us and give up
fighting all the rich.

The Social-Democratic worker says: if you are really offered goods at a
low price, why not buy them, if you have the money; that is sound
business. But you should never sell yourselves. To give up the fight in
alliance with the urban workers against the entire bourgeoisie would mean
remaining in poverty and want for ever. If goods become cheaper, the rich
will gain still more and become richer. But those who never have money to
spare will gain nothing from cheaper goods until they take that money from
the bourgeoisie.

Let us take an example. Those who support the bourgeoisie make much ado
about all sorts of co-operatives (societies for buying cheap and selling
profitably). There are even people who call themselves “Socialist-Revolutionaries,” who, echoing the bourgeoisie, also talk
loudly about the peasant needing nothing so much as co-operatives. All
sorts of co-operatives are beginning to spring up in Russia, too, although
there are still very few of them here, and there will not be many until we
enjoy political liberty. Take Germany: there the peasants have many
co-operatives of all kinds. But see who gains most from these
co-operatives. In all Germany, 140,000 farmers belong to societies for the
sale of milk and dairy products, and these 140,000 farmers (we again take
round figures for the sake of simplicity) own 1400,000 cows. It is
calculated that there are four million poor peasants in
Germany. Of these, only 40,000 belong to co-operatives: thus, only
one out of every hundred poor peasants enjoys the benefits of these
co-operatives. These 40,000 poor peasants own only 100,000 cows in
all. Further, the middle farmers, the middle peasants, number one
million; of these, 50,000 belong to co-operatives (that is to say,
five out of every hundred) and they own a total of 200,000 cows. Finally,
the rich farmers (i.e., both land lords and rich peasants) number one-third of a million; of these, 50,000 belong to co-operatives
(that is to say, seven teen out of every hundred!) and they own
800,000 cows!

That is whom the co-operatives help first and foremost. That is how the
peasant is deceived by those people who talk loudly about saving the
middle peasant by means such societies for buying cheap and selling profitably. It is, indeed, at
a very low price that the bourgeoisie want to “buy off” the
peasant from the Social-Democrats, who call upon both the poor and the
middle peasant to join them.

In our country, too, co-operative cheese dairies and amalgamated dairies
are beginning to be formed. In our country, too, there are plenty of
people who shout: artels, the mir , and co-operatives—that
is what the peasant needs. But see who gains by these artels,
co-operatives, and renting by the mir. Out of every hundred
households in our country, at least twenty own no cows at all; thirty own
only one cow each: these sell milk from dire need, their own children have
to go without milk, starve, and die off like flies. The rich peasants,
however, own three, four and more cows each, and these rich peasants own
half the total number of cows owned by peasants. Who, then, gains from
co-operative cheese dairies? Obviously, the landlords and the peasant
bourgeoisie gain first of all. Obviously, it is to their
advantage that the middle peasants and the poor should follow in
their wake and that they should believe that the means of escaping from
want is not the struggle of all the workers against the entire
bourgeoisie, but the striving of individual small farmers to climb out of
their present position and get into the ranks of the rich.

This striving is fostered and encouraged in every way by all the champions
of the bourgeoisie, who pretend to be the champions and friends of the
small peasant. And many simple-minded people fail to see the wolf in
sheep’s clothing, and repeat this bourgeois deception in the belief that
they are helping the poor and middle peasants. For instance, they argue in
books and in speeches that small-scale farming is the most profitable,
most remunerative form of farming, that small-scale farming is
flourishing, and that Is why, they say, there are so many small producers
in agriculture everywhere, and why they cling to their land (and not
because all the best lands are owned by the bourgeoisie, and all the
money, too, while the poor have to live in drudgery all their lives
crowded on tiny patches of land!). The small peasant does not need much
money, these smooth tongued people say; the small and the middle peasants
are more thrifty and more industrious than the big farmers, and know how to live a simpler life; instead of buying hay for their cattle,
they are content to feed them on straw. Instead of buying an expensive
machine, they get up earlier and toil longer and do as much as a machine
does; instead of paying money to strangers for doing repairs, the peasant
himself takes his hatchet on a Sunday and does a bit of
carpentry—and that is much cheaper than the way a big farmer goes
about it; instead of feeding an expensive horse or an ox, he uses his cow
for ploughing. In Germany all the poor peasants use cows to haul their
ploughs, and in our country, too, the people have become so impoverished
that they are beginning to use not only cows, but men and women to pull
ploughs! How profitable, how cheap all this is! How praiseworthy of the
middle and small peasants to be so industrious, so diligent, to live such
simple lives, and not to waste their time on nonsense, not to think of
socialism, but only of their farms, not to strive towards the workers who
organise strikes against the bourgeoisie, but towards the rich and try to
join the ranks of respectable folk! If only all were so industrious and so
diligent, and lived frugally, and did not drink, and saved more money, and
spent less on calico, and had fewer children—all would be happy and
there would be no poverty and no want!

Such are the sweet songs the bourgeoisie sings to the middle peasant, and
there are simpletons who believe these songs and repeat them! [1] Actually, all these honeyed words are nothing but deceit and mockery of
the peasant. What these smooth-tongued people call cheap and profitable
farming is the want, the dire need, which forces the middle and small
peasant to work from morning till night, to begrudge himself a crust of
bread, to grudge every penny he spends. Of course, what can be
“cheaper” and “more profitable” than to wear the same pair of trousers for three years, go about barefoot in summer,
repair one’s wooden plough with a piece of rope, and feed one’s cow on
rotten straw from the roof! Put a bourgeois or a rich peasant on such a
“cheap” and “profitable” farm, and he will soon forget all this honeyed talk!

The people who extol small-scale farming sometimes want to help the
peasant, but actually they only do him harm. With their honeyed words they
deceive the peasant in the same way as people are deceived by a lottery. I shall tell you what a lottery is. Let us suppose I
have a cow, worth 50 rubles. I want to sell the cow by means of a lottery,
so I offer everyone tickets at a ruble each. Everyone has a chance of
getting the cow for one ruble! People are tempted and the rubles pour
in. When I have collected a hundred rubles I proceed to draw the lottery:
the one whose ticket is drawn gets the cow for a ruble, the others get
nothing. Was the cow “cheap” for the people? No, it was very
dear, because the total money they paid was double the value of the cow,
because two persons (the one who ran the lottery and the one who won the
cow) gained without doing any work, and gained at the expense of the
ninety-nine who lost their money. Thus, those who say that lotteries are
advantageous to the people are simply practising deceit on the
people. Those who promise to deliver the peasants from poverty and want by
means of co-operatives of every kind (societies for buying cheap and
selling profitably), improved farming, banks, and all that sort of thing,
are deceiving them in exactly the same way. Just as in a lottery where
there is one winner and all the rest are losers, so it is with these
things: one middle peasant may manage to get rich, but ninety-nine of his
fellow peasants bend their backs all their lives, never escape from want,
and even sink more deeply into poverty. Let every villager examine his
commune and the whole district a little more closely: are there many
middle peasants who become rich and forget want? And how many are there
who can never rid themselves of want? How many are ruined and leave their
villages? As we have seen, it has been calculated that in the whole of
Russia there are not more than two million middle peasant farms. Suppose
there were ten times as many societies of all kinds for buying cheap and
selling profitably as there are now. What would the result be? It would be a big figure if a hundred
thousand middle peasants succeeded in raising themselves to the level of
the rich. What would that mean? It would mean that out of every hundred
middle peasants, five would become rich. But what about the other
ninety-five?  They would be in the same straits as ever, and many of them
would be in even greater difficulties I And the poor would only be
Impoverished all the more!

Of course, the bourgeoisie want nothing more than that the largest
possible number of middle and small peasants should strive to get rich, believe in the possibility of escaping from poverty without
fighting the bourgeoisie, place their hopes in diligence and
frugality and in becoming rich, and not in uniting with the rural and
urban workers. The bourgeoisie do all they can to foster this deceptive
faith and hope in the peasant, and try to lull him with honeyed words.

To expose the deception practised by these smooth-tongued people it is
sufficient to ask them three questions.

Question one: can the working people rid themselves of want and poverty
when, in Russia, a hundred million dessiatines out of two hundred and
forty million dessiatines of arable land belong to private landowners?
When sixteen thousand very big landowners possess sixty-five million
dessiatines?

Question two: can the working people rid themselves of want and poverty
when one and a half million rich peasant households (out of a total of ten
million) have concentrated in their hands half of all peasants’ land under
crops, half the total number of horses and livestock owned by peasants,
and much more than half the total peasant stocks and savings? When this
peasant bourgeoisie is growing richer and richer, oppressing the poor and
middle peasants, making money out of the labour of others, of the
farm-hands and day labourers? When six and a half million households
consist of poor peasants, destitute, always starving, and reduced to
winning a miserable crust of bread by all kinds of wage-labour?

Question three: can the working people rid themselves of want and poverty
when money has become the ruling power, when everything can be bought for
money—factories and land, and even men and women can be bought to
serve as wage-workers, wage-slaves? When no one can live or run a farm without money? When the small farmer, the poor peasant, has
to wage a struggle against the big farmer to get money? When a few
thousand landlords, merchants, factory owners, and bankers have
concentrated in their hands hundreds of millions of rubles, and, moreover,
control all the banks, where thousands of millions of rubles are
deposited?

No honeyed words about the advantages of small-scale farming or of
co-operatives will enable you to evade these questions. To these questions
there can be only one answer: the real “co-operation” that can
save the working people is the union of the rural poor with the
Social-Democratic workers in the towns to fight the entire
bourgeoisie. The faster this union grows and becomes strong, the
sooner will the middle peasant realise that the promises of the
bourgeoisie are all lies, and the sooner will the middle peasant come over
to our side.

The bourgeoisie know this, and that is why, in addition to honeyed words,
they spread all sorts of lies about the Social-Democrats. They say that
the Social-Democrats want to deprive the middle and small peasants of
their property. That is a lie. The Social-Democrats want to
deprive of their property only the big proprietors, only those who
live on the labour of others. The Social-Democrats will never
take away the property of the small and middle farmers who do not hire
labourers. The Social-Democrats defend and champion the interests of
all the working people, not only the interests of the urban workers, who
are more class-conscious and more united than the others, but also of the
agricultural workers, and of those small artisans and peasants who do not
hire workers, do not strive towards the rich, and do not go over to the
side of the bourgeoisie. The Social-Democrats are fighting for all
improvements in the conditions of the workers and peasants which can
be introduced immediately, when we have not yet destroyed the rule of the
bourgeoisie, and which will help them in the struggle against the
bourgeoisie. But the Social-Democrats do not deceive the peasant; they
tell him the whole truth , plainly tell him in advance that no
improvements will rid the people of want and poverty as long as the
bourgeoisie is in power. To enable all the people to know what
the Social-Democrats are and what they want, the Social-Democrats have drawn up a programme. A
programme is a brief, clear, and precise statement of all the things a
party is striving and fighting for. The Social-Democratic Party is
the only party that advances a clear and precise programme for all the
people to know and see, and for the party to consist only of people who
really want to fight for the emancipation of all the working people from
the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and who properly understand who must unite
for this fight and how the fight must be conducted. Furthermore, the
Social-Democrats believe that they must explain in their
programme, in a direct, frank, and precise way, the causes of the
poverty and want among the working people , and why the unity of the
workers is becoming wider and stronger. It is not enough to say that life
is hard and to call for revolt; every tub-thumper can do that, but it is
of little use. The working people must clearly under stand why they are living in such poverty and with whom they must unite in
order to fight to liberate themselves from want.

We have already stated what the Social-Democrats want; we have explained
the causes of the working people’s want and poverty; we have indicated
whom the rural poor must fight and with whom they must unite for this
fight.

We shall now explain what improvements we can win at once by fighting for them, improvements in the lives of the workers
and in the lives of the peasants.

## Notes

[1] In Russia these simpletons who wish the peasant well, but who every now
and then start this sort of honeyed talk, are called “Narodniks” or the “advocates of small-scale farming.”
The “Socialist-Revolutionaries”, for lack of understanding,
follow in their footsteps. In Germany also there are many smooth-tongued
people. One of them, Eduard David, has recently written a big book, in
which he says that small farms are infinitely more profitable than large
ones, because the small peasant does not spend money needlessly, keeps no
horses for ploughing, and is content to use his cow instead, from which be
also gets milk.
— Lenin

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 5. What Improvements are the Social-Democrats Striving to Obtain for the Whole People and for the Workers?

The Social-Democrats are fighting for the liberation of all the working
people from all robbery, oppression, and in justice. To become free the
working class must first of all become united. And to become united it
must have freedom to unite, have the right to unite, have political
liberty. We have already said that autocratic government means
enslavement of the people by the officials and the police. Political
liberty is therefore needed by the whole people, except a handful of
courtiers and a few money-bags and high dignitaries who are received at Court. But most of all, political liberty
is needed by the workers and the peasants. The rich can escape the
self-will and the tyranny of officials and the police by buying them
off. The rich can make their complaints heard in the highest places. That
is why the police and the officials take much fewer liberties with the
rich than with the poor. The workers and the peasants have no money to buy
off the police or the officials; they have no one to complain to and are
not in a position to sue them in court. The workers and the peasants will
never rid themselves of the extortions, tyranny, and insults of the police
and the officials as long as there is no elective government , as
long as there is no national assembly of deputies. Only such a
national assembly of deputies can free the people from enslavement by the
officials. Every intelligent peasant must support the Social-Democrats,
who first and foremost demand of the tsarist government the
convocation of a national assembly of deputies. The deputies must be
elected by all, irrespective of social-estate, irrespective of wealth or
poverty. The elections must be free, without any interference on the part
of the officials; they must be carried out under the supervision of such
that enjoy the people’s confidence, and not of police officers or the
rural superintendents. Under such conditions, deputies representing the
entire people will be able to discuss all the needs of the people, and
introduce a better state of affairs in Russia.

The Social-Democrats demand that the police be deprived of the power to
imprison anyone without trial. Officials must be severely punished for
arbitrarily arresting anyone. To put an end to their self-assumed power,
they must be chosen by the people, and everyone must have the right to
lodge a complaint against any official directly in a court. What is the
use of complaining to the rural superintendent about a police officer, or
to the governor about the rural superintendent? The rural superintendent
will, of course, always protect the police officer and the governor will
always protect the rural superintendent, while the complainant will get
into trouble. He runs a fair chance of being put into prison or deported
to Siberia. The officials will be curbed only. when everyone in Russia (as
in all other countries) has the right to complain both to the national
assembly and to the elected courts, and to speak freely of his needs, to write about them in
the newspapers.

The Russian people are still in feudal dependence upon the
officials. Without permission from the officials the people cannot call
meetings, or get books and newspapers printed. Is that not feudal
dependence? If meetings cannot be freely called, or books freely printed,
how can one obtain redress against the officials, or against the rich? Of
course, the officials suppress every book, every utterance that tells the
truth about the people’s poverty. The present pamphlet, too, has to be
printed by the Social-Democratic Party secretly and circulated secretly:
anyone who is found in possession of this pamphlet will make the
acquaintance of courts and prisons. But the Social-Democratic workers are
not afraid of this: they print more and more, and give the people more and
more truthful books to read. And no prisons, no persecution can halt the
fight for the people’s freedom!

The Social-Democrats demand that the social-estates be abolished, and that
all the citizens of the state enjoy exactly the same rights. Today the
social-estates are divided into tax-paying and non-tax-paying, into
privileged and non-privileged; we have blue blood and common blood; even
the birch has been retained for the common people. In no other country are
the workers and peasants in such a position of inferiority. In no country
except Russia are there different laws for different social-estates. It is
time the Russian people, too, demanded that every muzhik should possess all the rights possessed by the nobility. Is it not a disgrace
that the birch should still be used and that a tax paying social-estate
should be in existence more than forty years after the abolition of
serfdom?

The Social-Democrats demand that the people shall have complete freedom of
movement and occupation. What does freedom of movement mean? It
means that the peasant should be free to go wherever he pleases, to move
to whatever place he wants to, to live in any village or town he chooses
with out having to ask for permission from anyone. It means that passports
should be abolished in Russia too (in other countries passports were
abolished long ago), that no local police officer or rural superintendent
should dare to hinder any peasant from settling or working wherever he pleases. The Russian peasant
is still so much the serf of the officials that he is not free to move to
a town, or to settle in a new district. The minister issues orders that
the governors should not allow unauthorised settlement! A
governor knows better than the peasant what place is good for the peasant!
The peas ant is a little child and must not move without permission of the
authorities! Is that not feudal dependence? Is it not an insult to the
people when any profligate nobleman is allowed to lord it over grown-up
farmers?

There is a book called Crop Failure and the Distress of the
People (famine), written by the present “Minister of
Agriculture” Mr. Yermolov. This book says in so many words: the
peasant must not change residence as long as their worships the landlords
need hands. The minister says this quite openly, without the least
embarrassment: he thinks the peas ant will not hear what he is saying and
will not understand. Why allow people to go away when the landlords need
cheap labour? The more crowded the people are on the land the more that is
to the landlords’ advantage; the poorer the peasants are, the more cheaply
can they be hired and the more meekly will they submit to oppression of
every kind. Formerly, the bailiffs looked after the landlord’s interests,
now the rural superintendents and governors do that. Formerly, the
bailiffs ordered the flogging of peasants in the stables; now the rural
superintendent in the volost administration office orders the flogging.

The Social-Democrats demand that the standing army be abolished and that a
militia be established in its stead, that all the people be armed. A
standing army is an army that is divorced from the people and trained to
shoot down the people. If the soldier were not locked up for years in
barracks and inhumanly drilled there, would he ever agree to shoot down
his brothers, the workers and the peasants? Would he go against the
starving peasants? A standing army is not needed in the least to protect
the country from attack by an enemy; a people’s militia is sufficient. If
every citizen is armed, Russia need fear no enemy. And the people would be
relieved of the yoke of the military clique. The upkeep of this clique
costs hundreds of millions of rubles a year , and all this money
is collected from the people; that is why the taxes are so heavy and why it becomes increasingly difficult to live. The
military clique still further increases the power of the officials and
police over the people. This clique is needed to plunder foreign peoples,
for instance, to take the land from the Chinese. This does not ease but,
on the contrary, increases the people’s burden because of greater
taxation. The substitution of the armed nation for the standing army would
enormously ease the burden of all the workers and all the peasants.

Similarly, the abolition of indirect taxation , which the
Social-Democrats demand, would be an enormous relief. Indirect taxes are
such taxes that are not imposed directly on land or on a house but are
paid by the people indirectly , in the form of higher prices for
what they buy. The state imposes taxes on sugar, vodka, kerosene, matches,
and all sorts of articles of consumption; these taxes are paid to the
Treasury by the merchant or by the manufacturer, but, of course, he does
not pay it out of his own pocket, but out of the money his customers pay
him. The price of vodka, sugar, kerosene, and matches goes up, and every
purchaser of a bottle of vodka or of a pound of sugar has to pay the tax
in addition to the price of the goods. For instance, if, say, you pay
fourteen kopeks for a pound of sugar, four kopeks (approximately)
constitute the tax: the sugar-manufacturer has already paid the tax to the
Treasury and is now exacting from every customer the sum he has
paid. Thus, indirect taxes are taxes on articles of consumption, taxes
which are paid by the purchaser in the form of higher prices for the
articles he buys. It is sometimes said that indirect taxation is the
fairest form of taxation: you pay according to the amount you buy. But
this is not true. Indirect taxation is the most unfair form of taxation,
because it is harder for the poor to pay indirect taxes than it is for the
rich. The rich many s income is ten times or even a hundred times as large
as that of the peasant or worker. But does the rich man need a hundred
times as much sugar? Or ten times as much vodka, or matches, or kerosene?
Of course not! A rich family will buy twice, at most, three times as much
kerosene, vodka, or sugar as a poor family. But that means that the rich
man will pay a smaller part of his income in taxes than the poor
man. Let us suppose that the poor peasant’s income is two hundred rubles a year; let us suppose he buys sixty rubles’ worth of such
goods as are taxed and which are consequently dearer (the tax on sugar,
matches, kerosene, is an excise duty , i.e., the manufacturer pays
the duty before placing the goods on the market; in the case of vodka, a
state monopoly, the State simply raises the price; cotton goods, iron and
other goods have risen in price because cheap foreign goods are not
admitted into Russia unless a heavy duty is paid on them). Of these sixty
rubles twenty rubles will constitute the tax. Thus, out of every
ruble of his income the poor peas ant will pay ten kopeks in
indirect taxes (exclusive of direct taxes, land redemption payments,
quit-rent, land tax, Zemstvo, volost and mir taxes). The rich
peasant has an income of one thousand rubles; he will buy one hundred and
fifty rubles’ worth of taxed goods and pay fifty rubles in taxes
(included in the one hundred and fifty rubles). Thus, out of every ruble
of his income the rich peasant will pay only five kopeks in
indirect taxes. The richer the man, the smaller Is the share of
his income that he pays in indirect taxes. That is why indirect taxation
is the most unfair form of taxation. Indirect taxes are taxes on
the poor. The peas ants and workers together form nine-tenths of the
population and pay nine-tenths or eight-tenths of the total indirect
taxation. And, in all probability, the income of the peasants and workers
amounts to no more than four-tenths of the whole national income! And so,
the Social-Democrats demand the abolition of indirect taxation and the
introduction of a progressive tax on incomes and inheritances. That means that the higher the income the higher the
tax. Those who have an income of a thousand rubles must pay one kopek in
the ruble; if the income is two thousand, two kopeks in the ruble must be
paid, and so on. The smallest incomes (let us say incomes of under four
hundred rubles) do not pay anything at all. The richest pay the highest
taxes. Such a tax, an income-tax , or more exactly, a progressive income-tax , would be much fairer than indirect
taxes. And that is why the Social-Democrats are striving to secure the
abolition of indirect taxation and the introduction of a progressive
income-tax. Of course, all the property-owners, all the bourgeoisie,
object to this measure and resist it. Only through a firm alliance between
the rural poor and the urban workers can this improvement be won from the
bourgeoisie.

Finally, the free education of children, which the
Social-Democrats demand, would be a very important improvement for the
whole of the people, and for the rural poor in particular. Today there are
far fewer schools in the country side than in the towns, and everywhere it
is only the rich classes, only the bourgeoisie, who are in a position to
give their children a good education. Only free and compulsory education
for all children can get the people, at least to some extent, out
of their present state of ignorance. The rural poor suffer most from this
ignorance and stand in particular need of education. But, of course, we
need real, free education, and not the sort the officials and the priests
want to give.

The Social-Democrats further demand that everybody shall have full and
unrestricted right to profess any religion he pleases. Of the European
countries Russia and Turkey are the only ones which have retained shameful
laws against persons belonging to any other faith than the Orthodox, laws
against schismatics, sectarians, and Jews. These laws either totally ban a
certain religion, or prohibit its propagation, or deprive those who belong
to it of certain rights. All these laws are as unjust, as arbitrary and as
disgraceful as can be. Everybody must be perfectly free, not only to
profess whatever religion he pleases, but also to spread or change his
religion. No official should have the right even to ask anyone about
his religion: that is a matter for each person’s conscience and no one has
any right to interfere. There should be no “established” religion or church. All religions and
all churches should have equal status in law. The clergy of the various
religions should be paid salaries by those who belong to their religions,
but the state should not use state money to support any religion whatever,
should not grant money to maintain any clergy, Orthodox, schismatic,
sectarian, or any other. That is what the Social-Democrats are fighting
for, and until these measures are carried out without any reservation and
without any subterfuge, the people will not be freed from the disgraceful
police persecution of religion, or from the no less disgraceful police
hand-outs to any one of those religions.

We have seen what improvements the Social-Democrats are out to achieve for
all the people, and especially for the poor. Now let us see what
improvements they strive to achieve for the workers; not only for factory
and urban workers, but for agricultural workers too. The factory workers
live in more cramped conditions; they work in large workshops, so it is
easier for them to avail themselves of the assistance of educated
Social-Democrats. For all these reasons the urban workers started the
struggle against the employers much earlier than the others and have
achieved more considerable improvements; they have also obtained the
passing of factory laws. But the Social-Democrats are fighting for the
extension of these improvements to all the workers: to handicraftsmen both in town and country, who work for employers at home;
to the wage-workers employed by petty masters and artisans; to workers in
the building trades (carpenters, bricklayers, etc.); to lumbermen and
unskilled labourers, and also the agricultural labourers. All
over Russia, all these workers are now beginning to unite, following the
example of, and aided by, the factory workers, to unite for the struggle
for better conditions of life, for a shorter working day, for higher
wages. And the Social-Democratic Party has set itself the task of
supporting all workers in their struggle for a better life, of
helping them to organise (to unite) the most resolute and reliable workers
in strong unions, of helping them by circulating pamphlets and leaflets,
by sending experienced workers to those new to the movement, and in
general helping all the workers in every possible way. When we have won
political liberty, we shall have our people in a national assembly of
deputies, worker deputies, Social-Democrats, and, like their comrades in
other countries, they will demand laws for the benefit of the workers.

We shall not enumerate here all the improvements the
Social-Democratic Party is striving to obtain for the workers: they have
been set out in our programme and explained in detail in the pamphlet, The Workers’ Cause in Russia. Here it will be sufficient to
mention the most important of those improvements. The, working day must
not be longer than eight hours. One day a week must always be a day of rest. Overtime
must be absolutely banned, and so must night-work. Children up to the age
of sixteen must he given free education and, consequently, must not be
allowed to work for hire until that age. Women must not work in trades
injurious to their health. The employer must compensate the workers for
all injury caused during work, for example, for injury caused when working
on threshing-machines, winnowing-machines, and so forth. All wage-workers
must always be paid weekly , and not once in two months or once in
a quarter as is often the case with agricultural labourers. It is very
important for the workers to be paid regularly every week and, moreover,
to be paid in cash, and not in goods. Employers are very fond of making
the workers accept all sorts of worthless goods at exorbitant prices in
payment of wages; to put an end to this disgraceful practice. the payment
of wages in goods must be absolutely prohibited by law. Further, aged
workers must receive state pensions. By their labour the workers maintain
all the rich classes, and the whole state, and that gives them as much
right to pensions as government officials, who get pensions. To prevent
employers from taking advantage of their position to disregard regulations
introduced to protect the workers, inspectors must be appointed to
supervise, not only the factories, but also the big landlord farms and, in
general, all enterprises where wage-labour is employed. But those
inspectors must not be government officials, or be appoint ed by ministers
or governors, or be in the service of the police. The inspectors must be elected by the workers; the state must pay salaries to persons
who enjoy the confidence of the workers and whom they have freely
elected. These elected deputies of the workers must also see to it that
the workers’ dwellings are kept in proper condition, that the employers
dare not compel the workers to live in what is like pigsties or in mud
huts (as is often the case with agricultural labourers), that the rules
concerning the workers’ rest are observed, and so on. It must not be
forgotten, however, that no elected workers’ deputies will be of any use
as long as there is no political liberty, as long as the police are
all-powerful, and are not responsible to the people. Everyone knows that
at present the police will arrest without trial, not only workers’ deputies but any worker who will dare
speak in the name of all his fellow workers, expose breaches of the law,
or call on the workers to unite. But when we have political liberty, the
workers’ deputies will be of very great use.

All employers (factory owners, landlords, contractors, and rich peasants)
should be absolutely forbidden to make any arbitrary deductions
from the wages of their workers, for example, deductions for defective
goods, deductions in the form of fines, etc. It is unlawful and tyrannical
for employers arbitrarily to make deductions from workers’
wages. The employer must not reduce a worker’s wage by means of any
deductions, or in any way whatsoever. The employer should not be allowed
to pass and execute judgement (a fine sort of judge, who pockets the
deductions from the worker’s wages!); he should appeal to a proper
court , and this court must consist of deputies elected by the workers
and the employers in equal numbers. Only such a court will be able to
judge fairly all the grievances of the employers against the workers and
of the workers against the employers.

Such are the improvements the Social-Democrats are striving to obtain for
the whole of the working class. The workers on every landed estate, on
every farm, in the employ of every contractor, must meet and discuss with
trustworthy persons what improvements they must strive to obtain and what
demands they should advance (for the demands of the workers will, of
course, be different at different factories, on different estates, and
with different con tractors).

All over Russia Social-Democratic committees are helping the
workers to formulate their demands in a clear and precise way, and are
helping them to issue printed leaflets where these demands are set out, so
that they may be known to all workers, and to the employers and the
authorities. When the workers unite as one man in support of their
demands, the employers always have to give way and agree to them. In the
towns the workers have already obtained many improvements in this way, and
now handicraftsmen, artisans, and agricultural labourers are also
beginning to unite (to organise) and fight for their demands. As long as
we have no political liberty, we carry on the fight in secret, hiding from the police, who prohibit the publication of all
leaflets and associations of workers. But when we have won political
liberty, we shall carry on the fight on a wider scale and openly, so that
working people all over Russia may unite and defend themselves more
vigorously from oppression. The larger the number of workers who unite in the workers’ Social-Democratic Party , the stronger will they
be, the sooner will they be able to achieve the complete emancipation of
the working class from all oppression, from all wage-labour, from all toil
for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

We have already said that the Social-Democratic Labour Party is striving
to obtain improvements, not only for the workers, but also for all the
peasants. Now let us see what improvements it is striving to obtain
for all the peasants.

## Notes

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 6. What Improvements are the Social-Democrats Striving to Obtain for all the Peasants?

To secure the complete emancipation of all working people, the rural poor
must, in alliance with the urban workers, wage a fight against the whole
of the bourgeoisie, including the rich peasants. The rich peasants will
strive to pay their farm labourers as little as possible and make them
work as long and as hard as possible; but the workers in town and
countryside will try to secure better wages, better conditions, and
regular rest periods for farm labourers working for the rich
peasants. That means that the rural poor must form their own unions apart
from the rich peasants. We have already said this, and we shall always
repeat it.

But in Russia, all peasants, rich and poor, are still serfs in many
respects; they are an inferior, “black,” tax-paying social-estate; they are all serfs of the police officers and rural
superintendents; very often they have to work for the land lord in payment for the use of the cut-off lands, watering places, pastures or
meadows, just as they worked for the feudal lord under the serf-owning
system. All the peasants want to be free of this new serfdom; all of them want to have full rights; all of them hate the landlords, who still compel
them to perform serf labour , to pay “labour rent” for the use of the gentry’s land and pastures, watering places and meadows, to
work also “for damage” done by straying cattle and to send
their womenfolk to reap the landlord’s field merely “for the honour
of it.” All this labour rent for the landlord is a heavier burden for the
poor peasants than for the rich peasants. The rich peasant is sometimes
able to pay the landlord money in lieu of this work, but as a rule even
the rich peasant is badly squeezed by the landlord. Hence, the rural poor
must fight side by side with the rich peasants against their lack of
rights, against every kind of serf labour, against every kind of labour
rent. We shall be able to abolish all bondage, all poverty only when we defeat the bourgeoisie as a whole (including
the rich peasants). But there are forms of bondage which we can abolish before that time , because even the rich peasant suffers badly
from them. There are many localities and many districts in Russia where
very often all the peasants are still quite like serfs. That is why all
Russian workers and all the rural poor must fight with both hands and
on two sides: with one hand—fight against all the bourgeois , in alliance with all the workers; and with the other hand—fight against the rural officials, against the feudal
landlords , in alliance with all the peasants. If the rural poor do
not form their own union separately from the rich peasants they will be
deceived by the rich peasants, who will become landlords themselves, while
the landless poor will not only remain poor and without land but will not
even be granted freedom to unite. If the rural poor do not fight side by
side with the rich peasants against feudal bondage, they will remain
fettered and tied down to one place, neither will they gain full freedom
to unite with the urban workers.

The rural poor must first strike at the landlords and throw off at least
the most vicious and most pernicious forms of feudal bondage; in this
fight many of the rich peasants and adherents of the bourgeoisie will also
take the side of the poor, because everybody is disgusted with the
arrogance of the landlords. But as soon as we have curtailed the power of
the landlords, the rich peasant will at once reveal his true character and
stretch out greedy hands to grab everything; these are rapacious hands and they have already grabbed a
great deal. Hence, we must be on our guard and form a strong,
indestructible alliance with the urban workers. The urban workers will
help to knock the old aristocratic habits out of the landlords and also
tame the rich peasants a bit (as they have already somewhat tamed their
own bosses, the factory owners). Without an alliance with the urban
workers the rural poor will never rid them selves of all forms of
bondage, want, and poverty; except for the urban workers, there is no
one to help the rural poor, and they can count on no one but
themselves. But there are improvements which we can obtain earlier, which
we can obtain immediately, at the very outset of this great
struggle. There are many forms of bondage in Russia which have long ceased
to exist in other countries, and it is from this bondage imposed by the
officials and landlords, this feudal bondage, that the Russian
peasantry as a whole can free itself immediately.

Let us now see what improvements the workers’ Social-Democratic Party is
striving first of all to obtain so as to free the Russian peasantry as a
whole from at least the most vicious forms of feudal bondage, and so as to
untie the hands of the rural poor for their struggle against the Russian
bourgeoisie as a whole.

The first demand of the workers’ Social-Democratic Party is the immediate
abolition of all land redemption payments, all quit-rent, and all the dues
imposed upon the “tax-paying” peasantry. When the committees
of nobles and the Russian tsar’s government, consisting of nobles,
“emancipated” the peasants from serfdom, the peasants were
compelled to buy out their own land, to buy out the land which
they had tilled for generations! That was robbery. The committees
of nobles, assisted by the tsarist government, simply robbed the
peasants. The tsarist government sent troops to many places to impose the title-deeds [1] upon the peasants by force , to take military punitive measures
against the peasants, who were unwilling to accept the curtailed
“pauper” allotments. Without the help of the troops, without
brutality and shootings, the committees of nobles would never have been
able to rob the peasants in the brazen way they did at the time of the
emancipation from serfdom. The peasants must always remember how they were cheated and
robbed by those committees of land-owning nobles, because even today the
tsarist government always appoints committees of nobles or officials
whenever it is a question of passing new laws concerning the peasants. The
tsar recently issued a manifesto (February 26, i903), in which he promises
to revise and improve the laws concerning the peasants. Who will do the
revising? Who will do the improving? Again the nobility, again the
officials! The peasants will always be defrauded until they secure the
setting up of peasant committees for the purpose of improving
their conditions of life. It is time to put a stop to the landlords, rural
superintendents, and all kinds of officials lording it over the peasants!
It is time to put a stop to this feudal dependence of the peasant upon
every police officer, upon every drink-sodden scion of the nobility who is
called a rural superintendent, a police chief, or a governor! The peasants
must demand freedom to manage their affairs themselves , freedom
to consider, propose, and carry out new laws themselves. The
peasants must demand the setting up of free, elected peasant
committees , and until they obtain this they will always be defrauded
and robbed by the nobility and the officials. No one will free the
peasants from the official leeches, if they do not free themselves, if
they do not unite and take their fate into their own hands.

The Social-Democrats not only demand the complete and immediate abolition
of land redemption payments, quit-rent, and imposts of all kinds; they
also demand that money taken from the people in the form of land
redemption payments should be restituted to the people. Hundreds
of millions of rubles have been paid up by peasants all over Russia since
they were emancipated from serfdom by the committees of nobles. The
peasants must demand that this money be returned to them. Let the
government impose a special tax on the big landed nobility; let the land
be taken from the monasteries and from the Department of Demesnes (i.e.,
from the tsar’s family); let the national assembly of deputies use this
money for the benefit of the peasants. Nowhere in the world is the peasant
so downtrodden or so impoverished as is in Russia. Nowhere do millions of
peasants die so horribly of starvation as they do in Russia. The peasants in Russia have been reduced to dying of starvation because they
were robbed long ago by the committees of nobles, and are being robbed to
this day by being forced to pay tribute to the heirs of the feudal
landlords every year in the form of redemption payments and quit-rent. The
robbers must be made to answer for their crimes! Let money be taken away
from the big landed nobility so as to provide effective relief for the
famine-stricken. The starving peasant does not need charity, he does not
need paltry doles; he must demand the return of the money he has paid for
years and years to the landlords and to the state. The national assembly
of deputies and the peasant committees will then be able to give real and
effective assistance to the starving.

Further. The Social-Democratic Labour Party demands the immediate
abolition of collective liability and of all laws restricting the
peasant in the free disposal of his land. The tsar’s Manifesto of
February 26, 1903, promises the abolition of collective liability. A law
to this effect has already been passed. But this is not enough. All
laws that prevent the peasant from freely disposing of his land must
be abolished immediately; otherwise, even without collective liability the
peasant will not be quite free and will remain a semi-serf. The peasant
must be quite free to dispose of his land: to let or sell it to
whomsoever he pleases, without having to ask for permission from
anyone. That is what the tsar’s ukase does not permit: the gentry, the
merchants, and the townspeople are free to dispose of their land, but the
peasant is not. The peasant is a little child, who must have a rural
superintendent to look after him like a nurse. The peasant must not be
allowed to sell his allotment, for he will squander the money! That is how
the feudal die-hards argue, and there are simpletons who believe them and,
wishing the peasant well, say that he must not he allowed to sell his
land. Even the Narodniks (of whom we have already spoken) and the people
who call themselves “Socialist-Revolutionaries” also yield to
this argument and agree that it is better for the peasant to remain
somewhat of a serf rather than be allowed to sell his land.

The Social-Democrats say: that is sheer hypocrisy, aristocratic talk,
merely honeyed words! When we have attained socialism, and the working
class has defeated the bourgeoisie, the land will be owned in common and nobody will
have the right to sell land. But what in the meantime? Are the nobleman
and the merchant to be allowed to sell their land, while the peasant is
not!? Are the nobleman and the merchant to be free while the peasant
remains a semi-serf!? Is the peasant to continue to have to beg permission
from the authorities!?

All this is mere deceit, though covered up with honeyed words, but it is
deceit for all that.

As long as the nobleman and the merchant are allowed to sell land, the
peasant must also have full right to sell his land and to dispose
of it with complete freedom , in exactly the same way as the
nobleman and the merchant.

When the working class has defeated the entire bourgeoisie, it will take
the land away from the big proprietors and introduce co-operative
farming on the big estates, so that the workers will farm the land
together, in common, and freely elect delegates to manage the farms. They
will have all kinds of labour-saving machines, and work in shifts for not
more than eight (or even six) hours a day. The small peasant who prefers
to carry on his farm in the old way on individual lines will not then
produce for the market, to sell to the first comer, but for the workers’
co-operatives; the small peasant will supply the workers’ co-operatives
with grain, meat, vegetables, and the workers in return will provide him
free of charge with machines, livestock, fertilisers, clothes, and
whatever else he needs. There will then be no struggle for money between
the big and the small farmer; there will then be no working for hire for
others; all workers will work for themselves, all improvements in methods
of production and all machines will benefit the workers themselves and
help to make their work easier, improve their standard of living.

But every sensible man understands that socialism can not be attained at
once: to attain it a fierce struggle must be waged against the entire
bourgeoisie and all governments; all urban workers all over Russia must
unite in a firm and unbreakable alliance with all the rural poor. That is
a great cause, and to that cause it is worth devoting one s whole
life. But until we have attained socialism, the big owner will always
fight the small owner for money. Is the big landowner to be free to sell his land, while the small peasant is not?
We repeat: the peasants are not little children and will not allow anyone
to lord it over them; the peasants must receive, without any restriction, all the rights enjoyed by the nobility and the merchants.

It is also said: the peasant’s land is not his own, but communal
land. Everyone cannot be allowed to sell communal land. This, too, is a
deception. Have not the nobles and the merchants their associations too?
Do not the nobles and the merchants combine to float companies for the
joint purchase of land, factories, or any other thing? Why then are no
restrictions invented for the associations of the nobility, while the
police scoundrels zealously think up restrictions and prohibitions for the
peasantry? The peasants have never received anything good from the
officials, except beatings, extortions, and bullying. The peasants will
never receive anything good until they take their affairs into their own
hands, until they obtain complete equality of rights and complete
liberty. If the peasants want their land to be communal, no one will dare
to interfere with them; and they will voluntarily form an association
which will include whomsoever they like, and on whatever terms they like;
they will quite freely draw up a communal contract in what ever form they
like. And let no official dare poke his nose into the communal affairs of
the peasants. Let no one dare exercise his wits on the peasants and invent
restrictions and prohibitions for them.

Lastly, there is another important Improvement which the Social-Democrats
are striving to obtain for the peasants. They want immediately to impose
limits on the peasants’ bondage to the nobility, their serf bondage. Of
course bondage cannot be completely abolished as long as poverty exists,
and poverty cannot be abolished as long as the land and the factories are
in the hands of the bourgeoisie, as long as money is the principal power
in the world, and until a socialist society has been established. But in the Russian countryside there is still much bondage of
a particularly vicious sort which does not exist in other countries,
although socialism has not yet been established there. There is still much serf
bondage in Russia which is profitable to all the landlords, weighs
heavily on all the peasants, and can and must be abolished immediately,
in the first place.

Let us explain the sort of bondage we call serf bondage.

Everyone who lives in the country knows cases like the following. The
landlord’s land adjoins the peasant’s land. At the time of the
emancipation the peasants were deprived of land that was indispensable to
them: pasture, woodland, and watering places were cut off. The peasants
cannot do without this cut-off land, without pastures and watering
places. Whether they like it or not the peasants are forced to go to the
landlord to ask him to let their cattle to go to the water, to graze on
the paatures, and so forth. The land lord does not farm any land himself
and, perhaps, has no money; he lives only by keeping the peasants in
thrall. In return for the use of the cut-off lands the peasants work for
him for nothing; they plough his land with their horses, harvest his grain
and mow his hay, thresh his grain, and in some places even have to cart
their manure to the landlord’s fields, or bring him homespun cloth, and
eggs and poultry. Just as under serfdom! Under serfdom the peasants had to
work for nothing for the landlord on whose estate they lived, and today
they very often have to work for nothing for the landlord in return for
the very same land which the com mittees of nobles filched from them at
the time of the eman cipation. It is just the same as the corvbe
system. In some gubernias the peasants themselves call this system barshehina , or panshchina. Well, that is what we call
serf bond age. At the time of the emancipation from serfdom the committees
of landowning nobles deliberately arranged matters in such a way as to
keep the peasants in bondage in the old way. They would deliberately dock
the peasants’ allot ments; they would drive a wedge of the landlord’s land
in between peasants’ holdings so as to make it impossible for the peasant
even to let his poultry out without trespass ing; they would deliberately
transfer the peasants to inferior land, deliberately block the way to the
watering place by a strip of landlord’s land—in short, they arranged
matters in such a way that the peasants should find them selves in a trap,
and, just as before, could easily be taken captive. There are still countless numbers of villages where the peasants
are in captivity to nearby landlords, just as much as they were under
serfdom. In villages like these, both the rich peasant and the poor
peasant are bound hand and foot and at the mercy of the landlords. The
poor peasant fares even worse than the rich peasant from this state of
affairs. The rich peasant sometimes owns some land and sends his labourer
to work for the landlord instead of going himself, but the poor peasant
has no way out, and the land lord does what he likes to him. Under this
bondage the poor peasant often has not even a moment’s breathing-space; he
cannot go to look for work elsewhere because of the work he has to do for
his landlord; he cannot even think of freely uniting in one union, in one
party, with all the rural poor and the urban workers.

Well then, are there no means by which it would be possible to abolish
this sort of bondage at once, forthwith, immediately? The
Social-Democratic Labour Party proposes to the peasants two means
to this end. But we must repeat that only socialism can deliver all the
poor from bondage of every kind, for as long as the rich have power they
will always oppress the poor in one way or another. It is impossible to
abolish all bondage at once, but it is possible greatly to restrict the
most vicious, the most revolting form of bond age, serf bondage, which weighs heavily on the poor, on the middle and even on
the rich peasants; it is possible to obtain immediate relief for the
peasants.

There are two means to this end.

First means: freely elected courts consisting of delegates of the farm
labourers and poor peasants, as well as of the rich peasants and
landlords.

Second means: freely elected peasant committees. These peasant
committees must have the right, not only to discuss and adopt all kinds of
measures for abolishing the corvée, for abolishing the remnants of
serfdom, but they must also have the right to expropriate the cut-off
lands and restore them to the peasants .

Let us consider these two means a little more closely. The freely elected
delegate courts will consider all cases arising out of complaints of
peasants against bondage. Such courts will have the right to reduce rents
for land if the landlord, taking advantage of the peasants’ poverty, has fixed them too
high. Such courts will have the right to free the peasants from exorbitant
payments; when a landlord engages a peasant in the winter for summer work
at an excessively low wage, the court will judge the case and fix a fair
wage. Of course, such courts must not consist of officials, but of freely
elected delegates, and the agricultural labourers and the rural poor must
also without fail elect their delegates, whose number must not in any case
be less than those elected by the rich peasants and the landlords. Such
courts will also try disputes between labourers and employers. When such
courts exist it will be easier for the labourers and all the rural poor to
defend their rights, to unite and to find out exactly what people can be
trusted to stand up faithfully for the poor and for the labourers.

The other means is still more important: the establishment of free peasant committees consisting of elected delegates of the farm
labourers and poor, middle and rich peas ants in every uyezd (or, if the
peasants think fit, they may elect several committees in each uyezd;
perhaps they will even prefer to establish peasant committees in every
volost and in every large village). No one knows better than the peasants
themselves what bondage oppresses them. No one will be able to expose the
landlords, who to this day live by keeping the peasants in thrall, better
than the peas ants themselves. The peasant committees will decide what
cut-off lands, what meadows, pastures, and so forth, were taken from the
peasants unfairly; they will decide whether those lands shall be
expropriated without compensation, or whether those who bought such lands
should be paid compensation at the expense of the high nobility. The
peasant committees will at least release the peasants from the traps into
which they were driven by very many committees of the land-owning
nobles. The peasant committees will rid the peasants of interference by
officials; they will show that the peasants themselves want to, and can,
manage their own affairs; they will help the peasants to reach agreement
among themselves about their needs and to recognise those who are really
able to stand up for the rural poor and for an alliance with the urban
workers. The peasant committees will be the first step towards
enabling the peasants even in remote villages to get on to their feet and to take their fate into their
own hands.

That is why the Social-Democratic workers warn the peasants:

Place no faith in any committees of nobles, or in any commissions
consisting of officials .

Demand a national assembly of deputies .

Demand the establishment of peasant committees .

Demand complete freedom to publish pamphlets and news papers of every
kind .

When all have the right freely and fearlessly to express their opinions
and their wishes in the national assembly of deputies, in the peasant
committees, and in the newspapers, it will very soon be seen who is on the
side of the working class and who is on the side of the
bourgeoisie. Today, the great majority of the people do not think about
these things at all; some conceal their real views, some do not yet know
their own minds, and some lie deliberately. But when this right has been
won, everyone will begin to think about these things; there will be no
reason for concealing anything, and everything will soon become clear. We
have already said that the bourgeoisie will draw the rich peasants to its
side. The sooner and the more completely we succeed in abolishing serf
bondage, and the more real freedom the peasants obtain for themselves, the
sooner will the rural poor unite among themselves, and the sooner will the
rich peasants unite with all the bourgeoisie. Let them unite: we are not
afraid of that, although we know perfectly well that this will strengthen
the rich peasants. But we, too, will unite, and our union , the
union between the rural poor and the urban workers, will embrace far more
people. It will be a union of tens of millions against a union of hundreds
of thousands. We also know that the bourgeoisie will try (it is already
trying!) to attract the middle and even the small peasants to its side; it
will try to deceive them, entice them, sow dissension among them, and
promise to raise each of them into the ranks of the rich. We have already
seen the means and the deceit the bourgeoisie resort to in order to lure
the middle peasant. We must therefore open the eyes of the rural poor
beforehand, and consolidate in advance their separate union with the urban
workers against the entire bourgeoisie.

Let every villager look around carefully. How often we hear the rich
peasants talking against the nobility, against the landlords! How they
complain of the oppression the people suffer from! Or of the landlords’
land lying idle! How they love to talk (in private conversation) about
what a good thing it would be if the peasants took possession of the land!

Can we believe what the rich peasants say? No. They do not want the land
for the people; they want it for them selves. They have already got hold
of a great deal of land, bought outright or rented, and still they are not
satisfied. Hence, the rural poor will not long have to march side by
side with the rich peasants against the landlords. Only the first
step will have to be taken in their company, and after that their ways
will part.

That is why we must draw a clear distinction between this first step
and subsequent steps, and our final and most important step. The
first step in the countryside will be the complete emancipation of the
peasant, full rights for the peasant, and the establishment of peasant
committees for the purpose of restoring the cut-off lands. But our final
step will be the same in both town and country: we shall take all
the land and all the factories from the landlords and the bourgeoisie
and set up a socialist society. We shall have to go through a big
struggle in the period between our first step and the final, and
whoever confuses the first step with the final weakens that struggle and
unwittingly helps to hood wink the rural poor .

The rural poor will take the first step together with all the peasants: a
few kulaks may fall out, perhaps one peasant in a hundred is willing to
put up with any kind of bondage. But the overwhelming mass of the peasants
will, as yet, advance as one whole: all the peasants want equal
rights. Bondage to the landlords ties everyone hand and foot. But the
final step will never be taken by all the peasants together: then, all the
rich peasants will turn against the farm labourers. Then, it is a strong
union of the rural poor and the urban Social-Democratic workers that we need. Whoever tells the peasants that they can take the first and
the final step simultaneously is deceiving them. He forgets about the
great struggle that is going on among the peasants them- selves, the great struggle between the rural poor and the rich
peasants.

That is why the Social-Democrats do not promise the peasants immediately a land flowing with milk and honey. That is why the
Social-Democrats first of all demand complete freedom for the struggle,
for the great, nation-wide struggle of the entire working class against
the entire bourgeoisie. That is why the Social-Democrats advise a small but sure first step .

Some people think that our demand for the establishment of peasant
committees for the purpose of restricting bondage and of restoring the
cut-off lands is a sort of fence or barrier, as if we meant to say: stop,
not a step farther! These people have given insufficient thought to what
the Social-Democrats want. The demand for peasant committees to be set up
for the purpose of restricting bondage and of restoring the cut off lands
is not a barrier. It is a door. We must first pass through this
door in order to go farther , to march along the wide and open
road to the very end , to the complete emancipation of all working
people in Russia. Until the peasants pass through this door they will
remain in ignorance and bondage, without full rights, without complete and
real liberty; they will not even be able to decide definitely among
themselves who is the friend of the working man and who his enemy. That is
why the Social-Democrats point to this door and say that the entire people
must all together first force this door and smash it in. But there are
people who call them selves Narodniks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who
also wish the peasant well, shout and make a noise, wave their arms about
and want to help him, but they do not see that door! Those people
are so blind that they even say: there is no need at all to give the
peasant the right freely to dispose of his land! They wish the peasant
well, but some times they argue exactly like the feudal die-hards! Such
friends can be of little help. What is the use of wishing the peasant all
the best if you don’t clearly see the very first door that must be
smashed? What is the use of wanting socialism if you don’t see how to
enter on the road of a free, people’s struggle for socialism, not only in
the towns, but also in the countryside, not only against the landlords,
but also against the rich peasants in the village commune, the
“mir ”?

That is why the Social-Democrats point so insistently to this first and
nearest door. The difficult thing at this stage is not to express a lot of
good wishes, but to point to the right road, to understand clearly how
the very first step should be taken. All friends of the peasant have
been talking and writing for the past forty years about the Russian
peasant being crushed by bondage and about his remaining a semi-serf. Long
before there were any Social-Democrats in Rus sia, the friends of the
peasant wrote many books describing how shamefully the landlords robbed
and enslaved the peas ant by means of the various cut-off lands. All
honest people now realise that the peasant must be given assistance at
once, immediately, that he must get at least some relief from this
bondage; even officials in our police government are be ginning to talk
about this. The whole question is: how to set about it, how totake the first step , which door must be forced first?

To this question different people (among those who wish the peasant well)
give two different answers. Every rural proletarian must try to understand
these two answers as clearly as possible and form a definite and firm
opinion about them. One answer is given by the Narodniks and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. The first thing to be done, they say, is to
develop all sorts of societies (co-operatives) among the peasants. The
unity of the mir must be strengthened. Every peasant should not
be given the right to dispose of his land freely. Let the rights of the
commune, the mir , be extended, and let all the land in Russia
gradually become communal land. The peasants must be granted every
assistance to purchase land, so that the land may more easily pass from
capi tal to labour.

The other answer is given by the Social-Democrats. The peasant must first
of all obtain for himself all the rights possessed by the nobility and the
merchants, all without exception. The peasant must have full right to
dispose freely of his land. In order to abolish the most revolting forms
of bondage, peasant committees must be set up for the purpose of restoring
the cut-off lands. We need not the unity of the mir , but unity of
the rural poor in the different village communes all over Russia, unity of
the rural proletarians with the urban proletarians. All sorts of societies (co-operatives) and the communal purchase of land will always benefit the
rich peasants most, and will always serve to hoodwink the middle peasants.

The Russian Government realises that some relief must be given to the
peasants, but it wants to make shift with trifles; it wants everything to
be done by the officials. The peasants must be on the alert, because
commissions of officials will cheat them just as they were cheated by the
committees of nobles. The peasants must demand the election of free
peasant committees. The important thing is not to expect improvement from
the officials, but for the peasants to take their fate into their own
hands. Let us at first take only one step, at first abolish only the
vicious forms of bondage—so that the peasants should become
conscious of their strength, so that they should freely reach a common
agreement and unite! No honest person can deny that the cut-off lands
often serve as the instruments of the most outrageous serf bondage. No
honest person can deny that our demand is the primary and fairest of
demands: let the peasants freely elect their own committees,
without the officials, for the purpose of abolishing all serf bondage.

In the free peasant committees (just as in the free all-Russian assembly
of deputies) the Social-Democrats will at once do all in their power to
consolidate a distinct union of the rural proletarians with the urban
proletarians. The Social-Democrats will make a stand for all measures for
the benefit of the rural proletarians and will help them to follow up the
first step, as quickly as possible and as unitedly as possible, with the
second and the third step, and so on to the very end, to the complete victory of the proletariat. But can we say today, at once, what
demand will be appropriate tomorrow for the second step? No, we cannot,
because we do not know what stand will be taken tomorrow by the rich
peasants, and by many educated people who are concerned with all kinds of
co-operatives and with the land passing from capital to labour.

Perhaps they will not yet succeed in reaching an under standing with the
landlords on the morrow; perhaps they will want to put an end to landlord
rule completely. Very good! The Social-Democrats would very much like this
to happen, and they will advise rural and urban proletarians to demand that all the land be taken from the landlords and transferred to
the free people’s state. The Social-Democrats will vigilantly see to it
that the rural proletarians are not cheated in the course of this, and
that they still further consolidate their forces for the final struggle
for the complete emancipation of the proletariat.

But things may turn out quite differently. In fact, it is more likely that
they will turn out differently. On the very day after the worst forms of
bondage have been restricted and curtailed, the rich peasants and many
educated people may unite with the landlords, and then the entire rural
bourgeoisie will rise against the entire rural proletariat. In that event
it would be ridiculous for us to fight only the landlords. We would then
have to fight the entire bourgeoisie and demand first of all the greatest
possible freedom and elbow-room for this fight, demand better conditions
of life for the workers in order to facilitate this struggle.

In any case, whichever way things turn out, our first, our principal and
indispensable task is to strengthen the alliance of the rural
proletarians and semi-proletarians with the urban proletarians. For
this alliance we need at once, immediately, complete political liberty
for the people, complete equality of rights for the peasants and the
abolition of serf bondage. And when that alliance is established and
strengthened, we shall easily expose all the deceit the bourgeoisie
resorts to in order to attract the middle peasant; we shall easily and
quickly take the second, the third and the last step against the entire
bourgeoisie, against all the government forces, and we shall unswervingly
march to victory and rapidly achieve the complete emancipation of all
working people .

## Notes

[1] The title-deeds—the name given to the deeds drawn up by the
landlords at the time of the “emancipation” of the peasants
under the 1861 Reform. The deeds recorded the amount of land in use by the
peasants before the Reform, and determined the land the despoiled peasants
kept after the “emancipation.” The deeds also enumerated the
services the serf peasants had previously performed for the landlord, and
served as the basis in determining the amount of land redemption payment.

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### 7. The Class Struggle in the Countryside

What is the class struggle? It is a struggle of one part of the
people against the other; a struggle waged by the masses of those who have
no rights, are oppressed and engage in toil, against the privileged, the
oppressors and drones; a struggle of the wage-labourers, or proletarians,
against the property-owners, or bourgeoisie. This great struggle has
always gone on and is now going on in the Russian countryside too, although not everyone sees it, and although not everyone understands
its significance. In the period of serfdom the entire mass of the peasants
fought against their oppressors, the landlord class, which was protected,
defended, and supported by the tsarist government. The peasants were then
unable to unite and were utterly crushed by ignorance; they had no helpers
and brothers among the urban workers; nevertheless they fought as best
they could. They were not deterred by the brutal persecution of the
government, were not daunted by punitive measures and bullets, and did not
believe the priests, who tried with all their might to prove that serfdom
was approved by Holy Scripture and sanctioned by God (that is what
Metropolitan Philaret actually said!); the peasants rose in rebellion, now
in one place and now in another, and at last the government yielded,
fearing a general uprising of all the peasants.

Serfdom was abolished, but not altogether. The peasants remained without
rights, remained an inferior, tax-paying, “black” social-estate, remained in the clutches of serf bondage. Unrest among the
peasants continues; they continue to seek complete, real
freedom. Meanwhile, after the abolition of serfdom, a new class struggle
arose, the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Wealth increased, railways and big factories were built, the towns grew
still more populous and more luxurious, but all this wealth was
appropriated by a very few, while the people became poorer all the time,
became ruined, starved, and had to leave their homes to go and hire
themselves out for wages. The urban workers started a great, new struggle
of all the poor against all the rich. The urban workers have united in the Social-Democratic Party and are waging their struggle stubbornly,
staunchly, and solidly, advancing step by step, preparing for the great
final struggle, and demanding political liberty for all the people.

At last the peasants, too, lost patience. In the spring of last year,
1902, the peasants of Poltava, Kharkov, and other gubernias rose against
the landlords, broke open their barns, shared the contents among
themselves, distributed among the starving the grain that had been sown
and reaped by the peasants but appropriated by the landlords, and demanded
a new division of the land. The peasants could no longer bear the endless oppression, and began to seek a better lot. The peasants
decided—and quite rightly so—that it was better to die fighting the oppressors than to die of starvation without a struggle. But
they did not win a better lot for themselves. The tsarist government
proclaimed them common rioters and robbers (for having taken from the
robber landlords grain which the peasants themselves had sown and
reaped!); the tsarist government sent troops against them as against an
enemy, and the peasants were defeated; peasants were shot down, many were
killed; peas ants were brutally flogged, many were flogged to death; they
were tortured worse than the Turks torture their enemies, the
Christians. The tsar’s envoys, the governors, were the worst torturers,
real executioners. The soldiers raped the wives and daughters of the
peasants. And after all this, the peasants were tried by a court of
officials, were compelled to pay the landlords 800,000 rubles, and at the
trials, those infamous secret trials, trials in a torture chamber,
counsels for the defence were not oven allowed to tell how the peasants
had been ill-treated and tortured by the tsar’s envoys, Governor
Obolensky, and the other servants of the tsar.

The peasants fought in a just cause. The Russian working class will always
honour the memory of the martyrs who were shot down and flogged to death
by the tsar’s servants. Those martyrs fought for the freedom and happiness
of the working people. The peasants were defeated, but they will rise
again and again, and will not lose heart because of this first defeat. The
class-conscious workers will do all in their power to inform the largest
possible number of working people in town and country about the peasants’
struggle and to help them prepare for another and more successful
struggle. The class-conscious workers will do all in their power to help
the peasants clearly to understand why the first peasant uprising (1902) was crushed and what must be done in order to secure victory
for the peasants and workers and not for the tsar’s servants .

The peasant uprising was crushed because it was an up rising of an
ignorant and politically unconscious mass, an uprising without clear and
definite political demands, i.e., without the demand for a change
in the political order. The peasant uprising was crushed because no preparations had been
made for it. The peasant uprising was crushed because the rural
proletarians had not yet allied themselves with the urban
proletarians. Such were the three causes of the peasants’ first
failure. To be successful an insurrection must have a conscious political
aim; preparations must be made for it in advance; it must spread
throughout the whole of Russia and be in alliance with the urban
workers. And every step in the struggle of the urban workers, every
Social-Democratic pamphlet or newspaper, every speech made by a
class-conscious worker to the rural proletarians will bring nearer the
time when the insurrection will be repeated and end in victory.

The peasants rose without a conscious political aim, simply because they
could not bear their sufferings any longer, because they did not want to
die like dumb brutes, without resistance. The peasants had suffered so
much from every manner of robbery, oppression, and torment that they could
not but believe, if only for a moment, the vague rumours about the tsar’s
mercy; they could not but believe that every sensible man would regard it
as just that grain should be distributed among starving people, among
those who had worked all their fives for others, had sown and reaped, and
were now dying of starvation, while the “gentry’s” barns were
full to bursting. The peasants seemed to have forgotten that the best land
and all the factories had been seized by the rich, by the landlords and
the bourgeoisie, precisely for the purpose of compelling the starving
people to work for them. The peasants forgot that not only do the priests
preach sermons in defence of the rich class, but the entire tsarist
government, with its host of bureaucrats and soldiers, rises in its
defence. The tsarist government re minded the peasants of that. With
brutal cruelty, the tsarist government showed the peasants what state
power is, whose servant and whose protector it is. We need only remind the
peasants of this lesson more often, and they will easily understand why it
is necessary to change the political order , and why we need political liberty. Peasant uprisings will have a conscious
political aim when that is understood by larger and larger numbers of
people, when every peasant who can read and write and who thinks for
himself becomes familiar with the three principal demands which must be fought
for first of all. The first demand—the convocation of a national
assembly of deputies for the purpose of establishing popular elective
government in Russia in place of the autocratic government. The
second demand—freedom for all to publish all kinds of books and
newspapers. The third demand—recognition by law of the peasants’ complete equal ity of rights with the other social-estates, and
the institution of elected peasant committees with the primary object of
abolishing all forms of serf bondage. Such are the chief and
fundamental demands of the Social-Democrats, and it will now be very easy
for the peasants to understand them, to understand what to begin
with in the struggle for the people’s freedom. When the peasants
understand these demands, they will also understand that long, persistent
and persevering preparations must be made in advance for the
struggle, not in isolation, but together with the workers in the
towns— the Social-Democrats.

Let every class-conscious worker and peasant rally around himself the most
intelligent, reliable, and fearless comrades. Let him strive to explain to
them what the Social-Democrats want, so that every one of them may
understand the struggle that must be waged and the demands that must be
advanced. Let the class-conscious Social-Democrats begin gradually,
cautiously, but unswervingly, to teach the peasants the doctrine of
Social-Democracy, give them Social-Democratic pamphlets to read and
explain those pamphlets at small gatherings of trustworthy people.

But the doctrine of Social-Democracy must not be taught from books alone;
every instance, every case of oppression and injustice we see around us
must be used for this purpose. The Social-Democratic doctrine is one of
struggle against all oppression, all robbery, all injustice. Only he who
knows the causes of oppression and who all his life fights every case
of oppression is a real Social-Democrat. How can this be done? When
they gather in their town or village, class-conscious Social-Democrats
must themselves decide how it must be done to the best advantage of the
entire working class. To show how it must be done I shall cite one or two
examples. Let us suppose that a Social-Democratic worker has come on a
visit to his village, or that some urban Social-Democratic worker has come to any village. The entire village is in the clutches of
the neighbouring landlord, like a fly in a spider’s web; it has always
been in this state of bondage and cannot escape from it. The worker must
at once pick out the most sensible, intelligent, and trustworthy peasants,
those who are seeking justice and will not be frightened by the first
police agent who comes along, and explain to them the causes of this
hopeless bondage, tell them how the landlords cheated the peasants and
robbed them with the aid of the committees of nobles, tell them how strong
the rich are and how they are supported by the tsarist government, and
also tell them about the demands of the Social-Democratic workers. When
the peasants understand all these simple things they must all put their
heads together and discuss whether it is possible to put up united
resistance to the landlord, whether it is possible to put forward the
first and principal demands (in the same way as the urban workers present
their demands to the factory owners). If the landlord holds one big
village, or several villages, in bondage, the best thing would be to
obtain, through trustworthy people, a leaflet from the nearest
Social-Democratic committee. In the leaflet the Social-Democratic
committee will correctly describe, from the very be ginning, the bondage
the peasants suffer from and formulate their most immediate demands
(reduction of rent paid for land, proper rates, and not half-rates, of pay
for winter hire, or less persecution for damage done by straying cattle or
various other demands). From such a leaflet all peasants who can read and
write will get to know very well what the issue is, and those who cannot
read will have it explained to them. The peasants will then clearly see
that the Social-Democrats support them, that the Social-Democrats condemn
all robbery. The peasants will then begin to under stand what relief, if
only slight, but relief for all that, can be obtained now, at once, if all
stand together, and what big improvements for the whole country they must
seek to obtain by a great struggle in conjunction with the
Social-Democratic workers in the towns. The peasants will then prepare
more and more for that great struggle; they will learn how to find
trustworthy people and how to stand unitedly for their demands. Perhaps
they may sometimes succeed in organising a strike, as the urban workers
do. True, this is more difficult in the countryside than in the towns, but it
is sometimes possible for all that; in other countries there have been
successful strikes; for instance, in the busy seasons, when the landlords
and rich farmers are badly in need of hands. If the rural poor are
prepared to strike, if an agreement has long been reached about the
general demands, if those demands have been explained in leaflets, or
properly explained at meetings, all will stand together, and the landlord
will have to yield, or at least put some curb on his greed. If the strike
is unanimous and is called during the busy season, the landlord, and even
the authorities with their troops, will find it hard to do any
thing—time will be lost, the landlord will be threatened with ruin,
and he will soon become more tractable. Of course, strikes are a new
thing, and new things do not come off well at first. The urban workers,
too, did not know. how to fight unitedly at first; they did not know what
demands to put forward in common; they simply went out to smash machinery
and wreck a factory. But now the workers have learned to conduct a united
struggle. Every new job must first be learned. The workers now understand
that immediate relief can be obtained only if they stand together; mean
while, the people are getting used to offering united resistance and are
preparing more and more for the great and decisive struggle. Similarly,
the peasants will learn to stand up to the worst robbers, to be united in
their demands for some measure of relief and to prepare gradually,
persistently, and everywhere for the great battle for freedom. The number
of class-conscious workers and peasants will constantly grow, and the
unions of rural Social-Democrats will become stronger and stronger; every
case of bondage to the land lord, of extortion by the priest, of police
brutality and bureaucratic oppression, will increasingly serve to open the
eyes of the people, accustom them to putting up united resistance and to
the idea that it is necessary to change the political order by force.

At the very beginning of this pamphlet we said that at the present time
the urban workers come out into the streets and squares and publicly
demand freedom , that they inscribe on their banners and cry out:
“Down with the autocracy!” The day will soon come when the urban
workers will rise not merely to march shouting through the streets, but for the great and final
struggle; when the workers will declare as one man: “We shall win
freedom, or die in the fight!”; when the places of the hundreds who have
been killed, fallen in the fight will be taken by thousands of fresh and
still more resolute fighters. And the peasants, too, will then rise all
over Russia and go to the aid of the urban workers, will fight to the end
for the freedom of the workers and peasants. The tsar’s hordes will be
unable to withstand that onslaught. Victory will go to the working people,
and the working class will march along the wide, spacious road to the
liberation of all working people from any kind of oppression. The working
class will use its freedom to fight for socialism!

## Notes

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V. I. Lenin

## To the Rural Poor

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

### The Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Proposed by the Newspaper Iskra in Conjunction with the Magazine Zarya

We have already explained what a programme is, why one is needed, and why
the Social-Democratic Party is the only party that comes out with a clear
and definite programme. A programme can be finally adopted only by the
congress of our Party, i.e., the assembly of representatives of all Party
workers. Preparations for such a congress are now being made by the
Organising Committee. But very many commit tees of our Party have already
openly declared their agreement with Iskra , and their recognition
of Iskra as the leading newspaper. Therefore, prior to the
congress our draft (proposed) programme can fully serve as a precise
indication of what the Social-Democrats want, and we consider it necessary
to give that draft in full as an appendix to our pamphlet.

Of course, without an explanation not every worker will understand
everything that is said in the programme. Many great socialists worked to
create the doctrine of Social-Democracy, which was completed by Marx and
Engels; the workers of all countries went through a great deal to acquire
the experience that we want to utilise and make the basis of our programme. Therefore the workers must learn the teachings of
Social-Democracy in order to understand every word of the programme, their programme, their banner of the struggle. And the
workers are learning and understanding the Social-Democratic programme
with particular ease because that programme speaks of what every thinking
worker has seen and experienced. Let nobody be deterred by the
“difficulty” of understanding the programme all at once: the
more every worker reads and thinks, the more experience he acquires in the
struggle, the more fully will he understand it. But let everybody think
over and discuss the whole programme of the Social-Democrats; let
everybody constantly keep in mind all that the Social-Democrats want,
and what they think about the emancipation of all working people. The
Social-Democrats want everybody to know clearly and precisely the truth,
the whole truth, about what the Social-Democratic Party is.

We cannot here explain the whole programme in detail. A separate pamphlet
would be needed for that. We shall merely indicate briefly what the
programme says, and advise the reader to get hold of two pamphlets to use
as aids. One pamphlet is by the German Social-Democrat Karl Kautsky, and
its title is The Erfurt Programme. It has been translated into
Russian. The other pamphlet is by the Russian Social-Democrat L. Martov,
and its title is The Workers’ Cause in Russia. These pamphlets
will help the reader to understand the whole of our programme.

Let us now indicate each part of our programme by a separate letter (see
the programme below) and show what is spoken about in each part.

A) At the very beginning it says that the proletariat all over the world
is fighting for its emancipation, and the Russian proletariat is only a
detachment in the world army of the working class of all countries.

B) It then goes on to explain the bourgeois order of things in nearly all
countries in the world, including Russia: how the majority of the
population, working for the Landowners and capitalists, live in poverty
and want; how the small artisans and peasants are being ruined while the
big factories grow bigger; how capital crushes the worker and also his
wife and children; how the conditions of the working class are growing worse and worse and unemployment and want are
increasing.

C) It then speaks of the union of the workers, of their struggle, of the
great aim of that struggle: to liberate all the oppressed and completely
abolish all oppression of the poor by the rich. This part also explains
why the working class is growing stronger and stronger, and why it will
certainly defeat all its enemies, all those who defend the bourgeoisie.

D) Then it explains why Social-Democratic parties have been formed in all
countries, how they help the working class to wage its struggle, unite and
guide the workers, enlighten them and prepare them for the great struggle.

E) Further, it explains why the conditions of the people in Russia are
even worse than in other countries, what a great evil the tsarist
autocracy is, and why we must first of all overthrow that autocracy and
establish popular, elective government in Russia.

F) What improvements must elective government bring the whole people? We
explain that in our pamphlet, and it is also explained in the programme.

G) Then the programme indicates what improvements for the whole of the
working class we must strive to immediately achieve in order to make life
easier for it and enable it to fight more freely for socialism.

H) Special reference is made in the programme to those improvements which
we must first of all strive to achieve for all the peasants so as to
enable the rural poor to wage the class struggle more easily and freely
against both the rural bourgeoisie and the entire Russian bourgeoisie.

I) Lastly, the Social-Democratic Party warns the people not to believe any
police or bureaucratic promises or honeyed words, but to fight firmly for
the immediate convocation of a free national assembly of deputies.

## Notes