V. I.

Lenin

The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

6. Why Had the Small Proprietors in Russia to Declare in Favour of
Nationalisation?

Look from this angle at the agrarian evolution of Russia since the second half
of the nineteenth century.

What was our “great” Peasant Reform, the “cutting off” of the peasants lands, the removal of the peasants to the
“poor lands”, the enforcement of the new land regulations by military force, shootings, arid floggings? It was the first act of mass
violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in
agriculture. It was the “clearing of estates” for capitalism by the
landlords.

What is Stolypin’s agrarian legislation under Article 87, that
encouragement of the kulaks to plunder the village communes, that
breaking-up of the old agrarian relation ships for the benefit of a handful
of well-to-do proprietors at the price of the rapid ruin of the masses? It
was the second big step in mass violence against the peasantry in the
interests of capitalism. It was the second “clearing of
estates” for capitalism by the landlords .

And what does the Trudovik nationalisation of the land stand for in the Russian
revolution?

It stands for “ clearing of estates ” for capitalism by the peasantry .

The main source of all the well-meant foolishness of our municipalisers
is precisely their failure to understand the economic basis of the
bourgeois agrarian revolution in Russia in its two possible types, i.e.,
the landlord-bourgeois revolution, and the peasant-bourgeois
revolution. Without a “clearing” of the medieval agrarian
relationships and regulations, partly feudal and partly Asiatic, there can be no bourgeois-revolution in agriculture, because capital
must—through economic necessity—create for itself new agrarian relationships, adapted to the new conditions of free commercial
agriculture. That “clearing” of the medieval lumber in the
sphere of agrarian relations in general, and of the old system of
landownership first and foremost, must chiefly affect the landlords’
estates and peasant allotments, since both kinds of landed property are
now, in their present form, adapted to the labour-service system, to the
corvée heritage, to bondage, and not to a free capitalistically
developing economy. Stolypin’s “clearing” undoubtedly follows the line of the progressive capitalist development of Russia; but
it is adapted solely to the interests of the landlords: let the rich
peasants pay the “Peasant” (read: Landlord) Bank an exorbitant
price for the land; in return we shall give them freedom to plunder the
village communes, to forcibly expropriate the masses, to round off their
plots, to evict the poor peasants, to undermine the very foundations of the life of entire villages, and, at any price, in
spite of everything, setting at naught the life and husbandry of any number
of “old established” allotment peasants, to set up new otrub [5] holdings, as the basis for new capitalist
agriculture. There is unquestionable economic sense in that line; it
faithfully expresses the real course of development as it
should be under the rule of landlords who are being transformed
into Junkers.

What is the other line, the peasant line? Either it is economically
impossible—in which case all talk about the peasants confiscating the
landlords’ estates, about the peasant agrarian revolution, etc., is either
humbug or an empty dream. Or it is economically possible—provided one
element of bourgeois society is victorious over the other element of bourgeois
society—in which case we must form a clear idea of, and clearly show to
the people, the concrete conditions for that development, the conditions under
which the peasants can reshape the old agrarian relations on a new, capitalist
basis.

Here there naturally arises the thought that this peasant line is precisely the
division of the landlords estates among the peasants for their private
property. Very well. But if this division is to correspond to the really new,
capitalist conditions of agriculture, it must he carried out in a new way and
not in the old way. The division must be based riot on the old allotment land
distributed among the peasants a hundred years ago at the will of the landlords’
bailiffs or of the officials of Asiatic despotism, but on the needs of free,
commercial agriculture. To meet the requirements of capitalism, the division
must be a division among free farmers , not among “indolent”
peasants, the great majority of whom run their economies by routine and
tradition in conformity with patriarchal, not with capitalist conditions. A
division according to the old standards, i.e., in conformity with the old forms
of landownership based on peasant allotments, will not be the clearing
of the old land ownership, but its perpetuation ; not clearing the way
for capitalism, but rather encumbering it with a mass of unadapted and
unadaptable “indolents” who cannot become free farmers. To be
progressive, the division must be based on a new sorting process among
the peasant cultivators, which will sift the farmers from the useless lumber. And this new sorting out
is nationalisation of the land, i.e., the total abolition of private
landownership, complete freedom to till the land, the unhampered transformation
of the old peasantry into free farmers.

Picture to yourselves the present system of peasant f arming and the character
of the old peasant landownership based on allotments. “Although united by
the village commune into tiny administrative, fiscal, and land-holding
associations, the peasants are split up by a mass of diverse divisions, into
grades, into categories according to size of allotment, amount of payments,
etc. Let us take, for example, the Zemstvo statistical returns for Saratov
Gubernia; there the peasants are divided into the following grades:

gift-land peasants, owners, full owners, state peasants, state peasants with
communal holdings, state peasants with quarter holdings, state peasants that
formerly belonged to landlords, crown-land peasants, state-land tenants and
landless peasants, owners who were formerly landlords’ peasants, peasants whose
farmsteads have been redeemed, owners who are former crown-land peasants,
colonist free-holders, settlers, gift-land peasants who formerly belonged to
landlords, owners who are former state peasants, manumitted,those who do not
pay quit-rent, free tillers, temporarily-bound, former factory-bound peasants,
etc.; further there are registered peasants, migrant, etc. [6] All these grades differ in the history of their agrarian
relations, in size of allotments, amount of payments, etc., etc. And within
the grades there are innumerable differences of a similar kind: sometimes
even the peasants of one and the same village are divided into two quite
distinct categories: ‘Mr. X’s former peasants’ and ‘Mrs. Y’s former
peasants’. All this diversity was natural and necessary in the Middle

Ages.” [1]

If the new division of the landlords’ estates were carried out in
conformity with this feudal system of landownership—whether by
levelling to a uniform rate, i.e., equal division, or by fixing some kind
of ratio between the new and the old, or in some other way—not only would it not
guarantee that the new plots would meet the requirements of capitalist
agriculture, but, on the contrary, it would perpetuate the obvious
lack of conformity . Such a division would impede social
evolution, would tie the new to the old instead of liberating the new
from the old. Real liberation can only be achieved by nationalising the land, thus creating the conditions for the rise
of free farmers, for the development of free farming without
connection with the old, without any relation to medieval landownership in
the form of peasant allotments.

Capitalist evolution on the medieval peasant allotments proceeded in
post-Reform Russia in such a way that the progressive economic elements
freed themselves from the determining influence of the allotments. On the one hand, proletarians emerged, who rented out their
allotments, abandoned them, or let the land go to waste. On the other hand,
peasant owners emerged, who purchased or rented land, built up a
new economy out of various fragments of the old, medieval
system of landownership. The land that is now cultivated by a more or less
well-to-do Russian peasant, i. e., by one who, given a favourable outcome
of the revolution, is really capable of becoming a free farmer, consists
partly of his own allotment, partly of an allotment he has rented from a
neighbour who is a village-commune member, partly, perhaps, of land rented
on long-term lease from the state, land leased annually from the landlord,
land purchased from the bank, and so forth. Capitalism requires the
abolition of all these distinctions of category; it requires that
all economy on the land be organised exclusively in accordance with the new
conditions and demands of the market, the demands of agriculture. Nationalisation of the land fulfils this requirement by the
revolutionary peasant method; at one stroke it completely divests the
people of all the rotten rags of all forms of medieval landownership. There must be neither landlord nor allotment ownership , there must be only the new, free landowner ship—such is the
slogan of the radical peasant. And that slogan expresses in the most
faithful, in the most consistent and categorical manner the interests
of capitalism (which the radical peasant in his simplicity tries to
ward off by making the sign of the cross), and expresses the need for the utmost
development of the land’s productive forces under commodity production.

One may judge from this how clever Pyotr Maslov is in thinking that the
only difference between his agrarian programme and the peasant
programme of the Trudoviks is the perpetuation of the old, medieval,
allotment ownership! The peasant allotment land is a ghetto in which the
peasantry is suffocating and from which it is straining to escape to free [2] land. Yet in spite of the peasants’ demands for free, i. e., nationalised,
land, Pyotr Maslov seeks to perpetuate this ghetto, to perpetuate the old
system; he would subject the best lands, confiscated from the land lords
and converted to public use, to the conditions of the old system of
landownership and the old methods of farming. In deeds , the
Trudovik peasant is a most determined bourgeois revolutionary, but i u
words he is a petty-bourgeois utopian who imagines that a “General
Redistribution” is the starting-point of harmony and fraternity, [3] and not of capitalist farming. Pyotr Maslov is, in deeds, a
reactionary who, fearing the Vendée of a future counter-revolution, seeks to consolidate the present
anti-revolutionary elements of the old forms of landownership and to
perpetuate the peasant ghetto, while in words lie thoughtlessly
repeats mechanically learnt phrases about bourgeois progress. What the
real conditions are for real free-bourgeois progress and not for the
Stolypin-bourgeois progress of Russian agriculture, Maslov and
Co. absolutely fail to understand.

The difference between the vulgar Marxism of Pyotr Maslov and the methods of
research that Marx really used can be seen most clearly in the latter’s attitude towards the
petty-bourgeois utopias of the Narodniks (including the
Socialist-Revolutionaries). In 1846, Marx ruthlessly exposed the
petty-bourgeois character of the American Socialist-Revolutionary Hermann
Kriege, who proposed a veritable General Redistribution for America. and
called it “communism”. Marx’s dialectical and revolutionary criticism swept away the husks of petty-bourgeois doctrine
and picked out the sound kernel of the “attacks on landed
property” and of the “Anti-Rent movement”. Our vulgar
Marxists, however, in criticising “equalised redistribution”,
“socialisation of the land”, and “equal right to the land”, confine themselves to repudiating the doctrine, and
thus reveal their own obtuse doctrinairism, which prevents them from
seeing the vital life of the peasant revolution beneath the lifeless
doctrine of Narodnik theory. Maslov and the Mensheviks have carried this
obtuse doctrinairism—ex pressed in our “municipalisation”
programme,, which perpetuates the most backward arid medieval form of land
ownership—to such lengths that in the Second Duma the following truly
disgraceful things could be uttered in the name of the Social-Democratic
Party: ...“While on the question of the method of land alienation we
[Social-Democrats] stand much nearer to these [Narodnik] groups than to the
People’s Freedom group, on the question of the forms of land tenure
we stand farther away from them” (47th sitting, May 26, 1907, p. 1230
of Stenographic Record).

Indeed, in the peasant agrarian revolution the Mensheviks stand farther
away from revolutionary peasant nationalisation, and closer to
liberal-landlord preservation of allotment (and not only allotment)
ownership. The preservation of allotment ownership is the preservation of
downtroddenness, backwardness, and bondage. It is natural for a liberal
landlord, who dreams of redemption payments, to stand up for allotment ownership [4]

... with the preservation of a goodly share of landlord ownership! But the Social-Democrat, led
astray by the “municipalisers”, does not understand that the
sound of words vanishes but the deed remains. The sound of the words about
equality, socialisation, etc., will. vanish, because there cannot
be equalisation under commodity production. But the deed will
remain, i. e., the greatest break with the feudal past that can possibly be
achieved under capitalism, the break with medieval allotment ownership and
with all routine and tradition. When people say “nothing will come of
equalised redistribution”, the Marxist ought to understand that this
“nothing” relates exclusively to the socialist aims, exclusively to the fact that this is not going to abolish capitalism. But
from attempts to bring about such a redistribution, even from the very idea
of such a redistribution, very much will come that will be of
advantage to the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

For that revolution may take place either with the predominance of the
landlords over the peasants—and that requires the preservation of the
old form of ownership and the Stolypin reform of it exclusively by the
power of the ruble; or it will take place as a result of the victory of the
peasantry over the landlords—and that, in view of the objective
conditions of capitalist economy, is impossible without the abolition of
all forms of medieval landownership, both landlord and peasant. The choice
is between the Stolypin agrarian reform and peasant revolutionary
nationalisation. Only these solutions are economically real. Anything intermediate, from Menshevik municipalisation to Cadet
redemption payments, is petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, a stupid
distortion of theory, a poor invention.

---
Notes:
[1]
The Development of Capitalism , Chapters V, IX, “Some Remarks
on the Pre-Capitalist Economy of Our Countryside”. (See present edition,
Vol. 3, pp. 381-82.— Ed .) — Lenin

[2]
The “Socialist-Revolutionary” Mr. Mushenko, the most consistent
exponent of the views of his party in the Second Duma, bluntly declared:
“ We raise the banner of the liberation of the land ” (47th
sitting, May 26, 1907, p. 1174), One must be blind to fail to perceive not
only the essential capitalist nature of this supposedly
“socialist” banner (Pyotr Maslov sees this too), hut also the progressive
economic nature of such an agrarian revolution compared with the
Stolypin-Cadet revolution (this Pyotr Maslov does not see). — Lenin

[3]
Cf. the naive expression of this bourgeois-revolutionary point of view
in the speech of the “Popular Socialist” Volk-Karachevsky about
“equality, fraternity, and liberty”. (Second Duma, 16th sitting, March
26, 1907, pp. 1077-80.) — Lenin

[4]
Incidentally, the Mensheviks (including Comrade Tsereteli, whose speech
I have quoted) are deeply mistaken in believing that the Cadets are at all
consistent in their defence of free peasant owner ship. They are
not . Mr. Kutler, on behalf of the Cadet Party, spoke in the Second Duma in favour of ownership (as distinct from the Cadet Bill
on state land reserve introduced in the First Duma), but at the same time
he added: “ The Party proposes only [ ! ] to limit their [ the peasants ’] right to alienate, and right to mortgage , i. e., to prevent the selling and buying of land on a
large scale in future” (12th sitting, March 19, 1907, p. 740 of
Stenographic Record). That is the archreactionary programme of a
bureaucrat disguised as a liberal. — Lenin a

[5]
Otrub ( farmstead)—land allotted to peasants, who, under a law is sued by the tsarist Minister Stolypin in 1906, were
allowed to with draw from the village communes. The purpose of this law was
to create a mainstay for the autocracy in the countryside in the shape of a
kulak class.

[6]
The peasants in Russia, as a class of feudal society, were divided into
three major categories:

1) privately owned (landlords’) peasants,

2) state peasants, and

3) crown-land peasants (belonging to the tsar’s family). Each of
these categories, in turn, was divided into grades and special groups,
which differed from one another in origin, forms of land ownership and land
tenure, legal and agrarian status, etc. The Peasant Reform of 1861, carried
out from above by the tsarist government in the interests of the, feudal
landlords, kept this diversity of grades intact right up to 191 7.

Gilt-land peasants —former serfs, chiefly of the southern
and south-eastern black-earth gubernias, who, at the time of the abolition
of serfdom, received from their landlords gift allotments without having to
pay compensation. Under the “Regulations” of the Peasant Reform
of 1861, the landlord had the right, “by voluntary agreement”
with the peasant, to make him a “gift” of a quarter of the
“top” or “statutory” allotment due to the peasant (including the cottage plot) on the understanding that all the rest of
peasant’s land became the property of the landlord. Gift allotment,
which strikingly illustrated the predatory nature of the 1861 Reform, was
known among the people as “quarter”, “orphan”, “cat’s”, or “Gagarin” allotment (the latter from
the name of Prince P. P. Gagarin, who put forward a draft of the
corresponding clauses to the local regulations governing land endowment of
the peasants in the Great Russian and Ukrainian gubernias).

There were numerous gift-land peasants in such land-poor blackearth
gubernias as Voronezh, Kharkov, Poltava, and Tambov, where the market price
of land seized by the landlords was very high. Many peasants received gift
allotments in the south-eastern and southern black-earth gubernias of
Orenburg, Ufa, Saratov, Ekaterinoslav, and Samara, where rentals were much
lower than the quit-rents due to the landlord, under the “Regulations
of February 19”. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of
the growth of the population and the reallotments which this involved, the
gift-landers lost practically all their allotments and formed the bulk of
the land-poor peasants, Temporarily-bound peasants —former landlords’ peasants
who, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, were obliged to perform
various services for the landlords (corvée service or quit-rent
payment) in return for the use of allotments. This “temporarily-bound
status” continued until the peasants, by agreement with the
landlords, had purchased their allotments by redemption payments. The
landlords were obliged to accept redemption payments which became
obligatory only after the Ukase of 1881, by which the “obligatory
relation” between the peasants and the landlords had to cease as from
January 1, 1883.

Owners—former landlords’ peasants who had redeemed their
allotments under the “Regulations of February 19, 1861” and
thus ceased to be temporarily bound.

Full owners—former landlords’ peasants who had redeemed
their allotments before the specified date and had the right to own the land as private property. The full owners were comparatively few and
constituted the most well-to-do element in the countryside.

State peasants —a category of peasants who tilled state
lands and who, in addition to the poll-tax, paid feudal quit-rent to the
state or the leaseholder of state property. They also performed numerous
services (road repairs, billeting of soldiers, stage-horse posting, etc.);
Under Peter I this category included odnodvortsi , chernososhniye peasants, half-croppers, Siberian ploughmen of the
Northern maritime country, and peoples of the Volga and Ural regions
(Tatars, Chuvashes, Mordovians, Udmurts, and Komi). Later other categories
were added—“economy” peasants (serfs who passed to the state
from the secularised church estates), state peasants of the western
territories and Transcaucasia, Ukrainian Cossacks, and others. The forms of
land tenure and land ownership among the state peas ants were extremely
varied, and this condition continued even after the Peasant Reform.

State peasants with communal holdings had no right to own land
as private property; they used arable and other lands belonging to the
village commune.

State peasants with quarter holdings —descendants of former servicemen in the lower ranks (children of boyars, Cossacks, the
streltsi , dragoons, soldiers, etc.) who guarded the southern and
south-eastern borderlands of the State of Muscovy. The Tsar of Muscovy
reward ed their services with an endowment of a quarter lot (half
a dessiatin) and they settled in single households (hence their name
odnodvortsi ). Communal landownership arose among them in addition
to their quarter holdings.

These odnodvortsi , being freemen, for a long time held an
intermediate position between the nobles and peasants, and had the right to
acquire serfs. Under Peter I they were turned into state peasants, and
their land became the property of the state. Actually, however, the state
peasants with quarter holdings disposed of their lands as their own private
property; in this they differed from the state peasants with communal in s,
who had no right to buy, sell, or bequeath their land.

State peasants who formerly belonged to landlords —a category of state peasants, acquired by the state from private owners or
donated to the state, etc. Although regarded as state peasants they enjoyed
fewer rights; they were given, equal rights in 1859 on the eve of the 1861
Reform, but certain distinctions remained.

Crown-land peasants —a category of peasants who tilled the crown lands. Besides the poll-tax, they paid feudal quit-rent,
performed various services and were subjected to exactions in kind, all of
which went for the maintenance of members of the tsarist household. When
the crown lands took shape in 1797 the status of the peasants living on
these estates was defined as something between state and landlords’
peasants. The abolition of serfdom was first applied to the crown-land
peasants in 1858, but did not take full effect until 1863.

These peasants received allotments as their private property subject to
redemption payments over a period of 49 years. They were provided with land
slightly better than the landlords’ peasants, but worse than the state
peasants.

Free tillers —the category of peasants freed from serfdom
under the law of February 20,1803. This law permitted the landlords to
decide the terms on which they gave their peasants freedom with land.

Registered peasants —a category of state peasants attached to state-owned and private manufactories for performing auxiliary
jobs (wood chopping, coal handling, ore breaking, haulage, etc). This
practice of attachment assumed wide dimensions in the Urals, Olonets
gubernia, and other places in the early eighteenth century. Beginning with
the early nineteenth century the registered peasants were gradually freed
from factory jobs. They won complete freedom as a result of the Peasant
Reform of 1861.