If we now compare the agrarian programmes put forward by the various classes in the revolution with the economic basis outlined above, we shall immediately discern two lines of these programmes, corresponding to the two types of agrarian evolution indicated.

Take the programme of Stolypin, shared by the Right landowners and Octobrists. This is an openly landlord programme. But can it be said that it is reactionary in the economic sense, i.e., that it excludes or strives to exclude the development of capitalism? prevent a bourgeois agrarian evolution? Not in the least. On the contrary, Stolypin’s famous agrarian legislation under Article 87 is thoroughly imbued with a purely bourgeois spirit. It beyond all doubt follows the line of capitalist evolution, facilitates and pushes forward this evolution, accelerates the expropriation of the peasantry, the break-up of the village commune, the creation of a peasant bourgeoisie. This legislation is undoubtedly progressive in the scientific-economic sense.

Does this mean that the Social-Democrats should “support” it? No. Only vulgar Marxism, the seeds of which are so assiduously sown by Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, who sing, wail, clamour and proclaim: the bourgeoisie must be supported in its struggle against the old order, could reason thus. No. In the interests of the development of the productive forces (that supreme criterion of social progress) we must support not the bourgeois evolution of the landlord type, but the bourgeois evolution of the peasant type. The former signifies the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (reshaped in a bourgeois fashion), the least rapid development of the productive forces and retarded development of capitalism, and entails immeasurably greater calamity and suffering, exploitation and oppression for the broad masses of the peasantry and, consequently, also of the proletariat. The latter signifies the most rapid development of the productive forces and the best conditions of existence for the peasant masses (the best at all possible under commodity production). The tactics of Social-Democracy in the Russian bourgeois revolution are determined not by the task of supporting the liberal bourgeoisie, as the opportunists think, but by the task of supporting the struggling peasantry.

Take the programme of the liberal bourgeoisie, i.e., the Cadet programme. True to the motto “what is your pleasure?” (i.e., what is pleasing to the landed gentry), they put forward one programme in the First Duma, and another in the Second. A change of programmes is for them as easy and imperceptible a matter as it is for all unprincipled bourgeois careerists in Europe. In the First Duma the revolution seemed strong, and the liberal programme borrowed from it a bit of nationalisation (a “state land fund”). In the Second Duma the counter-revolution seemed strong, and the liberal programme threw the state land fund overboard, turned towards Stolypin’s idea of solid peasant property, and strengthened and widened the cases of exemption from the general rule of compulsory expropriation of the landed estates. But this duplicity of the liberals we note here in passing. What is important to note here is something else: the fundamental basis common to both “faces” of the liberal agrarian programme. This common fundamental basis is: 1) redemption; 2) preservation of the landlord farms; 3) preservation of landlord privileges in the carrying out of the reform.

Redemption is a tribute exacted from social development, a tribute to the owners of the latifundia of serfdom. Redemption is the bureaucratically and police-guaranteed realisation of serf-owning methods of exploitation in the form of a bourgeois “universal equivalent.” Further, the preservation of the landlord farms in one measure or another is evident in both Cadet programmes, no matter how much the bourgeois politicos try to conceal this fact from the people. Thirdly – landlord privileges in the carrying out of the reform – is expressed with full definiteness in the Cadet attitude towards the election of local land committees on the basis of universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage. We cannot go into details here[45], which belong to another part of our exposition. Here we need only determine the line of the Cadet agrarian programme. And in this connection it must be noted that the question of the composition of the local land committees is of cardinal importance. Only political babes could let themselves be deluded by the sound of the Cadet slogan: “compulsory expropriation.” The question is: who will compel whom: the landlords the peasants (to pay exorbitantly for sandpits) or the peasants the landlords. The Cadet speeches about “equitable representation of the conflicting interests” and the undesirability of “one-sided violence” show more clearly than clear the essence of the matter, namely, that in the Cadet compulsory expropriation the landlords compel the peasants!

The Cadet agrarian programme follows the line of Stolypin’s, i.e., landlord bourgeois progress. This is a fact. Failure to understand this fact is the fundamental error of those Social-Democrats who, like certain Mensheviks, are capable of considering the Cadet agrarian policy more progressive than the Narodnik policy.

In the representatives of the peasantry, i.e., the Trudoviks, the popular Socialists and partly the Socialist-Revolutionaries, we see in both Dumas, despite numerous vacillations and hesitations, an absolutely clear line of defence of the interests of the peasantry against the landlords. There are, for example, vacillations on the question of redemption, which is allowed in the Trudovik programme, but, firstly, it is often interpreted in the sense of public charity for landlords incapable of work[46]; secondly, you may find in the minutes of the Second Duma a whole series of extremely characteristic peasant speeches rejecting redemption and proclaiming the slogan: all the land to the whole people[47]. On the question of local land committees – this most important question of who will compel whom – the peasant deputies are the originators and advocates of the idea of electing them by universal suffrage.

We are not touching for the time being on the question of the content of the agrarian programme of the Trudoviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, on the one hand, and the Social-Democrats, on the other. We must first of all note the indisputable fact that the agrarian programmes of all the parties and classes that openly came forward in the Russian revolution clearly fall into two main types, corresponding to the two types of bourgeois agrarian evolution. The dividing line between the “Right” and “Left” agrarian programmes does not run between the Octobrists and the Cadets, as the Mensheviks very often quite erroneously assume (allowing themselves to be deafened by the ring of “constitutional-democratic” words and substituting an analysis of party names for a class analysis). The dividing line runs between the Cadets and the Trudoviks. This line is determined by the interests of the two main classes of Russian society struggling for the land: the landlords and the peasantry. The Cadets preserve landlord landownership and champion the cultural, European, but landlord-bourgeois evolution of agriculture. The Trudoviks (and the Social-Democratic worker deputies), i.e., the representatives of the peasantry and the representatives of the proletariat, champion the peasant-bourgeois evolution of agriculture.

The ideological vestments of the agrarian programmes, their various political details, etc., must be strictly distinguished from the economic basis of these programmes. The difficulty now is not to understand the bourgeois character of both the landlord and the peasant land demands and programmes: this work was already done by the Marxists before the revolution, and the revolution confirmed it. The difficulty is to give oneself a full account of the basis of the struggle of the two classes on the soil of bourgeois society and bourgeois evolution. This struggle cannot be understood as a law-governed social phenomenon unless it is reduced to the objective tendencies of the economic development of capitalist Russia.

Now, having shown the connection between the two types of agrarian programmes in the Russian revolution and the two types of bourgeois agrarian evolution, we must pass on to the examination of a new, extremely important, side of the question.