Written in the first half of 1908.

Printed according to the text of the pamphlet.

The task of this article is to provide a concise overview of the entire complex of socio‑economic relations within Russian agriculture. Such an undertaking cannot assume the character of a specialized study; rather, it must draw upon and synthesize Marxist analysis, situating each major feature of our agricultural economy within the broader framework of the Russian national economy, outlining the general trajectory of agrarian relations in Russia, and exposing the class forces that, in one way or another, shape this development. Accordingly, we shall examine land ownership in Russia from the perspective just outlined—first the landed estates of the nobility, then the peasant economy—and, in conclusion, offer general conclusions regarding the outcomes of our evolutionary process over the course of the nineteenth century and the tasks that this process bequeathed to the twentieth century.

I

By the end of the nineteenth century, we can delineate land ownership in European Russia using data from the most recent land statistics compiled in 1905 (published by the Central Statistical Committee, St. Petersburg, 1907{55}).

According to this survey, a total of 395.2 million desyatins of land were registered in European Russia. The distribution of this land across three primary categories is as follows:

It should be noted that our statistical records include more than one hundred million desyatins of state-owned land located in the far north, in the guberniyas of Arkhangelsk, Olonets, and Vologda. A substantial portion of these state lands must be excluded if we are to arrive at a true assessment of the actual agricultural resource base of European Russia. In my work on the agrarian program of the Social Democrats in the Russian Revolution (this work was completed in late 1907, though its publication was delayed due to circumstances beyond the author’s control), I estimate the real agricultural resource base of European Russia at roughly 280 million desyatins. Of the state lands, only 39.5 million desyatins—not one hundred fifty million—are actually part of the agricultural resource base. Consequently, less than one-seventh of the land area in European Russia remains outside the private ownership of either the landed gentry or the peasantry. Six-sevenths of the land are held by two antagonistic classes.

Let us now turn to the land holdings of these classes—classes that differ not only in terms of social status, but also because the majority of privately owned land consists of noble estates, while the allotment lands belong to the peasantry. Of the 101.7 million desyatins of privately owned land, 15.8 million desyatins are held by societies and partnerships, while the remaining 85.9 million desyatins are in individual private ownership. Here is the breakdown of the latter by social class, for both 1905 and, for comparison, 1877:

Thus, the principal private landowners in Russia are the nobility. They possess an enormous amount of land. Yet the trend of development is toward a decline in noble landownership—and a rapid, indeed extraordinary, rise in the “classlessness” of landholding. Over the period from 1877 to 1905, landownership among “other classes” increased eightfold in just twenty-eight years, followed by a more than doubling of peasant landholdings. Peasants are increasingly emerging as distinct social groups, gradually transforming into private landowners. This is a general historical fact—and as we analyze the peasant economy, we will need to uncover the socio‑economic mechanisms that drive this process of differentiation. For now, it is crucial to establish with precision that the evolution of private landownership in Russia is characterized by a shift from a system based on social rank to one grounded in classlessness. By the end of the nineteenth century, feudal or serf-based landownership among the nobility still accounted for the vast majority of all private landholdings; however, the trajectory of development clearly points toward the emergence of bourgeois private property in land. Private landholdings acquired through inheritance—by descendants of retinues, estate-holders, service-bearers, and the like—are diminishing, while private landholdings acquired simply through the purchase of land with money are steadily increasing. The power of land is waning; the power of money is rising. Land is becoming ever more deeply integrated into commercial circulation—and as we proceed, we will see that the extent of this integration is many times greater than what is revealed by mere data on land ownership.

But how deeply the “power of land” still persisted—the power of medieval landownership exercised by serf-owning landlords in Russia by the end of the nineteenth century—is particularly evident in the data concerning the distribution of private landholdings according to size. The source we are using provides especially detailed information on the largest private landholdings. Here is the overall distribution by size of holdings:

From this it is clear that in private, individual land ownership, petty property plays a negligible role. Six-sevenths of all landowners—619,000 out of 753,000—possess a total of just 6.5 million dessiatins. By contrast, latifundia are vast and sprawling: seven hundred owners hold an average of thirty thousand dessiatins each. These seven hundred individuals control three times as much land as the six hundred thousand small landholders combined. Indeed, latifundia constitute a defining feature of Russian private landholding. If we isolate all holdings exceeding 500 dessiatins, we find twenty-eight thousand owners who collectively control 62 million dessiatins—roughly 2,227 dessiatins per owner on average. In the hands of these 28,000, three-quarters of all private landholdings are concentrated[6]. By estate, these enormous latifundia are predominantly owned by the nobility: of the 27,833 holdings, 18,102—nearly two-thirds—are held by nobles, who control 44.5 million dessiatins, accounting for more than 70% of all land under latifundial management. It is thus evident that, by the end of the nineteenth century in Russia, a vast quantity of land—land that, as we know, is among the finest in quality—remained, in accordance with medieval patterns, concentrated in the hands of the privileged noble class, in the very same hands that had once been those of serf-owning landlords. We will discuss in detail below the forms of economic organization that emerge on such latifundia. For now, let us merely add a brief note to the well‑known fact—clearly elaborated in the literature by Mr. Rubakin—that high-ranking officials of the bureaucracy appear one after another among the owners of these noble latifundia{56}.

Let us turn to allotment-based land ownership. With the exception of 1.9 million dessiatins that remain undistributed according to size of landholding, the remaining 136.9 million dessiatins are held by 12.25 million peasant households. On average, this amounts to 11.1 dessiatins per household. Yet even allotment land is distributed unevenly: nearly half of it—64 million dessiatins out of 137—lies in the hands of 2.1 million households that are rich in land, representing just one-sixth of the total number of households.

Here are the aggregated data on the distribution of allotment land in European Russia:

Thus, more than half of all allotment households—6.2 million out of 12.3—have no more than 8 dessiatins per household. Taken as a whole, and averaged across Russia, this is clearly an insufficient amount of land to sustain a family. To assess the economic condition of these households, let us recall the general figures from the military–census surveys (the only statistical records that periodically and systematically covered the entire territory of Russia). Across 48 gubernias in European Russia—excluding the Don Cossack Region and Arkhangelsk Gubernia—between 1896 and 1900, a total of 11,112,287 peasant households were counted. Of these, 3,242,462 households were completely without horses, accounting for 29.2%. Another 3,361,778 households possessed just one horse, representing 30.3%. As we know, a peasant without a horse in Russia—of course, we are speaking here of aggregate totals, not of any exceptional dairy-farming districts in the suburbs, tobacco-growing regions, or the like—is a peasant whose livelihood is precarious at best. The hardship and poverty of the single-horse peasant are equally well known. A population of six million households means between 24 and 30 million people—and all of them are paupers, destitute peasants, endowed with meager scraps of land from which they cannot make a living, where they can only hope to die a slow, starving death. If we assume that at least 15 dessiatins are required to make ends meet in a reasonably prosperous agricultural household, then we arrive at 10 million peasant households that fall below this threshold, holding a total of 72.9 million dessiatins of land.

Further. With regard to allotment landholding, one particularly important feature must be noted. The uneven distribution of allotment land among peasants is incomparably less pronounced than the uneven distribution of privately owned land. Yet among allotment peasants there exists a vast array of other distinctions, divisions, and barriers—differences that have emerged over centuries, historically crystallized into distinct social strata. To illustrate these divisions vividly, let us first turn to aggregate data for all of European Russia. The 1905 statistical survey identifies the following principal categories: former proprietary peasants hold an average of 6.7 dessiatines of allotment land per household; former state peasants own 12.5 dessiatines; former appanage peasants possess 9.5 dessiatines; colonists hold 20.2 dessiatines; tenants paying quitrents own 3.1 dessiatines; rezeshi own 5.3 dessiatines; Bashkirs and Teptyars{57} hold 28.3 dessiatines; Baltic peasants own 36.9 dessiatines; Cossacks own 52.7 dessiatines. Even from this it is clear that peasant allotment landholding is thoroughly medieval in character. Serfdom still lives on in the myriad divisions that persist among the peasantry. These strata differ not only in the quantity of land they possess but also in the scale of their payments, the terms of redemption, the nature of their land tenure, and a host of other factors. If we take instead of the broad national figures for all of Russia the data for a single province, we will then see just how significant these divisions truly are. Consider the zemstvo statistical compendium for Saratov Province. In addition to the all‑Russian categories—those we have already mentioned—we find here that local researchers distinguish between peasants who are darschnikov (gifted peasants), full owners, state peasants with communal tenure, state peasants with quarter‑share tenure, state peasants formerly belonging to landed estates, tenants of state lands, settler‑owners, resettlers, freed serfs, those without landholdings, free tillers of the soil, former factory workers, and many others.{58} This intricate web of medieval divisions extends so far that sometimes peasants within the same village are divided into two utterly distinct categories: “former Mr. N. N.” and “former Mrs. M. M.” Our writers, hailing from the liberal‑populist camp—and unable to view Russian economic relations through the lens of historical development, as a transition from serfdom to bourgeois relations—ordinarily overlook this fact. In reality, however, the history of nineteenth‑century Russia, and especially its immediate aftermath—the events at the dawn of the twentieth century in Russia—cannot be fully understood unless one grasps the full significance of this phenomenon. A country undergoing the growth of exchange and the rise of capitalism cannot avoid experiencing crises of every kind if, in the very core of the national economy, medieval relations stand as a constant brake and obstacle at every turn. The infamous commune{59}, whose importance we will yet discuss, far from protecting the peasant from proletarianization, in fact serves as a medieval barrier, dividing the peasantry—binding them fast to petty associations and to social strata that have lost all sense of “the meaning of existence.”

Before moving on to our final conclusions regarding landholding in European Russia, we must point out one more aspect of the matter. Neither the data on the amount of land held by the “top 30,000” landlords nor the figures for the millions of peasant households, nor even the data on the medieval divisions within peasant landholding, are sufficient to capture the true extent to which our peasant has been “restrained,” “pressed down,” and “crushed” by the living remnants of serfdom. First, the lands left to peasants as allotments after the expropriation of peasant holdings in favor of landlords—which was known as the Great Reform of 1861{60}—are vastly inferior in quality to landlord-owned lands. This is borne out by the immense body of local descriptions and studies in zemstvo statistics. There is irrefutable, mass‑scale evidence showing that peasant lands yield lower harvests than landlord lands; it is widely recognized that this difference stems primarily from the poorer quality of allotment lands, and only secondarily from inferior cultivation practices and from the meager, impoverished conditions of peasant farming. Second, in most cases, when peasants were “freed” from their land by landlords in 1861, the boundaries of their plots were demarcated in such a way that the peasants found themselves trapped within the confines of “their own” landlord. Russian zemstvo statistical literature has enriched the science of political economy with a description of a remarkably original, uniquely Russian method of managing landlord estates—a practice scarcely ever seen elsewhere in the world. It is the system of “cut‑off” lands. Peasants were “freed” in 1861 from the waterways, pastures, and other resources essential to their agricultural livelihood. Peasant lands were carved out like wedges between landlord lands, ensuring that the lordly landlords could secure an extraordinarily reliable—and extraordinarily noble—source of income from fines levied for crop damage and the like. “There’s nowhere to lead the herd,”—this bitter peasant truth, this “gallows humor,” speaks more eloquently than any lengthy quotation about that particular feature of peasant landholding which defies statistical expression. Needless to say, this feature is pure serfdom—both in its origins and in its profound influence on the organization of landlord agriculture.

Now we turn to our conclusions regarding land ownership in European Russia. We have examined the conditions of both landed gentry and peasant landholding, considered separately. It is now incumbent upon us to view these conditions in their interrelation. To do so, let us take the approximate figure for the total land endowment in European Russia—280 million dessiatins—and consider how this vast expanse of land is distributed among different types of landholdings. The specific types will be elaborated upon in due course; for now, anticipating somewhat, we may provisionally identify the principal categories. Landholdings of no more than 15 dessiatins per household we shall classify as belonging to the first group—impoverished peasants, crushed under the yoke of serfdom. The second group comprises the middle peasantry—landholdings ranging from 15 to 20 dessiatins. The third group consists of prosperous peasants (the peasant bourgeoisie) and capitalist landholdings, spanning from 20 to 500 dessiatins. The fourth group encompasses serf-based latifundia—landholdings exceeding 500 dessiatins. By aggregating both peasant and gentry landholdings within these groups and performing a few rough approximations[7] and preliminary calculations (detailed in my aforementioned work), we arrive at the following picture of Russian landownership at the close of the nineteenth century.

Land Ownership in European Russia by the End of the Nineteenth Century

Let us reiterate: the accuracy of the economic characterization of the groups presented here will be substantiated in the subsequent discussion. Should particular details of this picture—details which, by their very nature, must inevitably remain approximate—invite criticism, we ask the reader to bear in mind that such critiques of specifics must not, under any circumstances, serve as a pretext for denying the fundamental issue at hand. For the crux of the matter lies in this: at one pole of Russian landownership we find 10.5 million households (roughly 50 million people) possessing 75 million dessiatins of land; while at the other pole we encounter thirty thousand families (about one hundred fifty thousand people) holding 70 million dessiatins of land.

We now remain only to conclude our inquiry into land ownership by extending our scope beyond the confines of European Russia proper and briefly considering the broader significance of colonization. To provide the reader with some sense of the overall land endowment of the Russian Empire (excluding Finland), we shall draw upon the data compiled by Mr. Mertvago. For clarity, we present these figures in tabular form, supplementing them with population statistics from the 1897 census.[See Table on p. 69. Ed.]

From these figures it becomes abundantly clear how little we yet know about Russia’s peripheral regions. To imagine that the “solution” to the agrarian question in inner Russia could be found through resettlement to the frontier would be nothing short of absurd. There can be no doubt that only charlatans could propose such a “solution”; the contradictions between the old latifundia of European Russia and the new conditions of life and economic activity within European Russia—contradictions we have already outlined above—must be “resolved” through some form of revolutionary transformation within European Russia itself, rather than beyond its borders. The issue is not simply to relieve the peasantry of serfdom through resettlement; rather, alongside the agrarian question of the center stands the agrarian question of colonization. The task is not to deflect attention from the crisis in European Russia by shifting the focus to colonization, but to expose the devastating consequences of serf-based latifundia—both for the center and for the periphery. Russian colonization is held back by the lingering vestiges of serfdom in the heart of Russia. Only through an agrarian revolution in European Russia—only through the emancipation of the peasantry from the oppressive grip of serf-based latifundia—can Russian colonization be truly liberated and brought into proper order. This ordering must not consist in bureaucratic “concerns” about resettlement, nor in the “organization of resettlements” so often touted by writers aligned with the liberal‑populist camp; instead, it must lie in the elimination of those conditions that doom the Russian peasant to ignorance, subjugation, and barbarization—condemning him to perpetual bondage under the masters of the latifundia.

In his pamphlet, co-authored with Mr. Prokopovich (“How Much Land Does Russia Possess, and How Do We Use It?” Moscow, 1907), Mr. Mertvago rightly points out that advances in cultivation can transform unproductive lands into fertile ones. Back in 1845, the scholars Ber and Helmersen—experts in the field—wrote that the steppes of Taurida “will forever remain among the poorest and most difficult to cultivate, owing to their harsh climate and severe water scarcity!!”{61}. At that time, the population of Taurida Governorate produced 1.8 million quarters of grain. Sixty years later, the population had doubled, and grain production soared to 17.6 million quarters—nearly ten times the earlier output.

This is a profoundly accurate and important observation—but Mr. Mertvago overlooked one crucial point: the primary condition that enabled the rapid colonization of Novorossiya was the abolition of serfdom in the heart of Russia. It was only through a revolutionary transformation in the center that the South could be settled quickly, extensively, and on a scale reminiscent of the American model—and that the region could be industrialized (much has been written, indeed, about the remarkable growth of southern Russia after 1861). And today, it is only through a revolution in European Russia—only through the complete eradication of all remnants of serfdom within its borders, and the emancipation of the peasantry from medieval latifundia—that we can truly usher in a new era of colonization.

The question of colonization in Russia is a subordinate issue in relation to the agrarian question at the heart of the country. The late nineteenth century presents us with a stark choice: either decisively abolish serfdom in the “ancestral” Russian gubernias—whereby the rapid, large-scale, American-style development of our frontier regions would be assured—or else drag out the agrarian question at the center, thereby inevitably delaying the development of productive forces, perpetuating serfdom‑like traditions even in the realm of colonization. In the former case, agriculture would be conducted by free farmers; in the latter, by peasants bound in debt and by landowners who “manage” their estates through allotments of land.

II

Let us turn now to the organization of the landed estate. It is widely known that the hallmark of this organizational model lies in the fusion of a capitalist system—“free wage labor”—with a labor‑rent system. But what, precisely, is this labor‑rent system?

To answer this question, we must first examine the organization of the landed estate under serfdom. Everyone is familiar with the legal, administrative, and domestic aspects of serfdom. Yet very few ask what, in essence, constituted the economic relations between landlords and peasants under the serf system. Landlords endowed peasants with land; sometimes they also advanced peasants other means of production, such as forests, livestock, and the like. But what was the significance of these landlords’ grants of land to serf peasants? From the standpoint of modern economic relations, such an endowment was, in effect, a form of wage payment. In capitalist production, wages are paid to workers in money; the capitalist’s profit is realized in monetary form. Necessary labor—and surplus labor (that is, the labor that covers the worker’s subsistence costs and the labor that yields unpaid surplus value for the capitalist)—are combined into a single labor process on the factory floor, into a single factory day, and so forth. The situation is quite different in a corvée-based economy. Necessary labor and surplus labor exist there, just as they do in a slave‑based economy—but these two forms of labor are separated both in time and in space. A serf peasant works three days for his lord, then three days for himself. He labors for his lord on the landlord’s land or on the landlord’s grain; he works for himself on his allotted plot, producing for himself and his family the very bread needed to sustain the labor power that serves the landlord.

Thus, the serf or corvée-based system of agriculture shares one fundamental feature with capitalism: in both systems, the worker receives only the product of necessary labor, while surrendering the product of surplus labor—without compensation—to the owner of the means of production. Yet the serf system differs from capitalism in three crucial respects. First, serfdom is a natural‑economy system, whereas capitalism is a money‑economy. Second, in the serf system, the instrument of exploitation is the attachment of the worker to the land—a system of land tenure that endows the worker with land; in capitalism, by contrast, the worker is freed from the land. To generate income (i.e., surplus product), the serf landlord must have on his lands a peasant who possesses an allotment, implements, and livestock. A landless, horseless, and unmanaged peasant is unfit for serf exploitation. To generate income (profit), the capitalist must deal with a landless, unmanaged worker—forced to sell his labor power in the free labor market. Third, the peasant who is granted land must remain personally dependent upon the landlord, for though he owns the land, he will not undertake corvée labor except under duress. The system of agriculture here gives rise to “non‑economic coercion,” to serfdom, to legal dependency, to limited rights, and the like. By contrast, “ideal” capitalism represents the fullest freedom of contract in a free market—between owner and proletarian.

Only by clearly grasping this economic essence of the serf or, equivalently, the corvée-based system can we understand the historical place and significance of labor‑rent arrangements. Labor‑rent is a direct, immediate remnant of the corvée system. Labor‑rent marks the transition from corvée to capitalism. The essence of labor‑rent lies in the fact that peasants cultivate the landlord’s land using their own implements, paying part in money and part in kind—for land, for plots, for grazing rights, for winter loans, and the like. The form of agricultural organization known as sharecropping is but one variety of labor‑rent. For a labor‑rent-based landed estate, it is essential that the peasant possess land—and even the most meager stock of movable and immovable property; it is also essential that this peasant be crushed by need and driven into bondage. Bondage, rather than free wage labor, is the indispensable companion of labor‑rent. Here, the landlord does not appear as an entrepreneurial capitalist who controls money and the full array of instruments of production. Instead, in the context of labor‑rent, the landlord acts as a moneylender, exploiting the need of the neighboring peasant and acquiring his labor at a fraction of its true value.

To illustrate this more clearly, let us turn to the data provided by the Department of Agriculture—a source that stands above any suspicion of bias against landowners. The well-known publication “Wage Labor in Agriculture and Related Fields” (Vol. V, “Agricultural and Statistical Data Collected from Farm Owners,” St. Petersburg, 1892) offers insights into the average black-earth region over an eight‑year period (1883–1891): the average cost of fully cultivating one desyatina of winter wheat using peasant implements should be reckoned at 6 rubles. Yet if we calculate the cost of the same work under free wage labor, the same publication tells us that it comes to 6 rubles and 19 kopeks—this figure accounts only for manual labor, not including the cost of horse‑driven operations; such work, moreover, cannot be priced lower than 4 rubles and 50 kopeks (quoted in the cited edition, p. 45; see “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” p. 141[8]). Consequently, the wage‑based price amounts to 10 rubles and 69 kopeks, while the labor‑in‑kind rate is 6 rubles. How are we to explain this phenomenon—if it is not a random or isolated occurrence, but rather the norm and the everyday reality? Terms like “bondage,” “usury,” “greed,” and the like describe the form of the transaction and its character, but they do not reveal its economic essence. How can a peasant, over the course of many years, perform work worth 10 rubles and 69 kopeks for the meager sum of 6 rubles? The peasant is able to do so because his allotment covers part of the rural household’s expenses and allows him to keep wages below the “free‑wage” standard. The peasant is compelled to act this way precisely because his meager plot of land ties him to the neighboring landlord, leaving him no means of sustaining himself from his own farm. And it is only natural that such a state of affairs can be regarded as “normal” only as one link in the broader process by which serfdom is being displaced by capitalism. For under these conditions, the peasant is inevitably driven into ruin and, slowly but surely, transformed into a proletarian.

Here are some further, albeit somewhat more comprehensive, data pertaining to Saratov County. The average cost of cultivating one desyatina—including harvesting, hauling grain, and threshing—stands at 9.6 rubles when winter contracts are employed, with 80–100% of wages paid in advance. Under labor‑in‑kind arrangements for arable land, the price is 9.4 rubles. In contrast, under free wage labor, the cost rises to 17.5 rubles! Harvesting and hauling under labor‑in‑kind arrangements amount to 3.8 rubles per desyatina, whereas under free wage labor they reach 8.5 rubles—and so on. Each of these figures carries within it a long narrative of endless peasant need, bondage, and destitution. Each of these figures testifies to the persistence, even at the end of the nineteenth century, of serf‑like exploitation and vestiges of corvée labor in Russia.

The prevalence of labor‑in‑kind systems is exceedingly difficult to quantify. As a rule, in landed estates both labor‑in‑kind and capitalist systems are combined, applied to different agricultural operations. A small portion of the land is cultivated using the landlord’s own implements and hired laborers. The greater part of the land is leased to peasants, either through sharecropping or under labor‑in‑kind agreements. Below are several illustrations drawn from the meticulous work of Mr. Kaufmann, who has compiled a wealth of recent data on privately owned farms[9]. In Tula Governorate (the data cover the years 1897–1898), “landlords have retained the old three‑field system… distant lands are farmed by the peasants themselves”; the cultivation of owner‑held lands is woefully inadequate. In Kursk Governorate: “…the distribution of land to peasants on a per‑desyatina basis—profitable due to high grain prices… has led to soil exhaustion.” In Voronezh Governorate: …medium‑ and small‑scale owners “in the majority conduct their farms exclusively with peasant implements, or else lease their estates… in most cases, farming practices are characterized by a complete lack of any improvement whatsoever.”

Such assessments reveal that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the general characterization of the various governorates of European Russia—with regard to the predominance of labor‑in‑kind or capitalist systems—proposed by Mr. Annensky in his book “The Influence of Crop Yields, etc.” remained entirely valid. We present this characterization in tabular form:

In the black‑earth region, therefore, labor‑in‑kind undoubtedly prevails, receding into the background across all 43 governorates included in this table. It is important to note, however, that Group I—characterized by the capitalist system—includes not the regions typically associated with agricultural centers: the Baltic governorates, the southwestern provinces (the sugar beet belt), the southern regions, and both capital cities.

The impact of labor‑in‑kind on the development of agriculture’s productive forces is eloquently demonstrated by the materials compiled in Mr. Kaufmann’s work. “There can be no doubt,” we read there, “that small‑scale peasant leasing and sharecropping constitute one of the chief factors impeding progress in rural agriculture…” In agricultural surveys of Poltava Governorate, it is consistently pointed out that “tenants cultivate the land poorly, sow inferior seeds, and allow the fields to become overrun with weeds.”

In the Mogilev Governorate (1898), “any improvement in agricultural practices is hampered by the inefficiencies inherent in the system of sharecropping.” The communal landholding system{62} stands as one of the primary causes behind the fact that “agriculture in the Dnieper District has reached such a state that there is no question of introducing any innovations or making meaningful improvements.” “Our data,” writes Mr. Kaufmann (p. 517), “provide us with a clear set of indications that, even within the confines of a single estate, on lands leased out, outdated, obsolescent methods of cultivation persist—while on the owner‑owned arable lands, newer, more advanced systems of crop rotation have already been adopted.” For example, on leased lands, farmers often adhere to a three‑field system, sometimes even without the use of manure; whereas on the estate’s own arable lands, multi‑crop rotations are employed. Sharecropping discourages the sowing of grasses, obstructs the spread of fertilizer, and delays the adoption of superior agricultural implements. The cumulative effect of all this is vividly reflected in the yield statistics. Take, for instance, a large latifundium in Simbirsk Governorate: the rye yield on estate-owned arable land is 90 poods per desyatina, wheat yields 60 poods, and oats 74 poods—while on sharecropped lands, yields are 58–28–50 poods. Here are the aggregate figures for an entire district (Gorbátovskiy, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate):

* In Mr. Kaufmann’s work, p. 521, there appears to be a typographical error in these two figures.

Thus, landlord-owned lands cultivated under the serf‑based system (sharecropping and small-scale leasing) yield less than allotment lands! This is a fact of immense significance, for it irrefutably demonstrates that the principal and underlying cause of Russia’s agricultural backwardness, the stagnation of the national economy as a whole, and the unprecedented degradation of the peasant farmer lies in the labor‑rental system—that is, in the direct remnants of serfdom. No matter how many loans are extended, no matter how much land reclamation is undertaken, no matter how much “assistance” is offered to the peasantry, and no matter how many “supportive” measures are favored by bureaucrats and liberals—none of these will produce any substantial results so long as the oppressive burden of serf‑based latifundia and the entrenched traditions and economic systems of the old feudal order remain in place. On the contrary, an agrarian revolution that abolishes landlord landownership and dismantles the old medieval commune (for example, through the nationalization of land—which, in turn, breaks up the commune not by police force or bureaucratic fiat but through fundamental social transformation)—would inevitably serve as the foundation for remarkably rapid and truly broad-based progress. The unbelievably low yields on sharecropped and leased lands are directly attributable to the labor‑rental system: “for the master.” Not only would the yields from these lands rise if the same peasant farmers were freed from the obligation to work “for the master”; even the yields from allotment lands would inevitably increase simply because the serf‑based impediments to agricultural production would be removed.

Given the current state of affairs, capitalist progress in privately owned agriculture is, of course, evident—but it proceeds at an exceedingly slow pace and, in the long run, inevitably burdens Russia with the political and social dominance of the “wild landlord.” We shall now examine how this progress manifests itself and attempt to identify some of its broader implications.

The fact that the yield of “economic” crops—i.e., those cultivated on landlord-owned lands under capitalist conditions—is higher than that of peasant‑grown crops points to the technical progress of capitalism in agriculture. This progress is closely linked to the transition from the labor‑rental system to wage labor. The ruin of the peasantry, the loss of draft animals, the depletion of farm implements, and the proletarianization of the rural laborer compel landlords to begin working their lands with their own capital and equipment. The use of machinery in agriculture is steadily increasing, boosting labor productivity and inexorably leading to the development of purely capitalist relations of production. From 1869 to 1872, agricultural machinery was imported into Russia from abroad to the value of 788,000 rubles; from 1873 to 1880, imports rose to 2.9 million rubles; from 1881 to 1888, they reached 4.2 million rubles; from 1889 to 1896, they amounted to 3.7 million rubles; and in 1902–1903, imports surged to 15.2–20.6 million rubles. Agricultural machinery production in Russia was estimated—at roughly, and rather crudely, according to factory and plant statistics—to be worth 2.3 million rubles in 1876, 9.4 million rubles in 1894, and 12.1 million rubles in 1900–1903. There is no doubt that these figures attest to progress in agriculture—and, of course, to capitalist progress in particular. Yet it is equally undeniable that this progress is extraordinarily slow compared to what is possible in a modern capitalist state: consider, for example, the United States. According to the census conducted on June 1, 1900, the United States possessed 838.6 million acres of farmland—roughly 324 million desyatins. The number of farms totaled 5.7 million, meaning that the average farm size was 146.2 acres (about 60 desyatins). And yet, in 1900, the output of agricultural implements for these farmers reached 157.7 million dollars (compared to 145.3 million dollars in 1890, and 62.1 million dollars in 1880)[10]. The Russian figures are laughably small in comparison to these—and they are small precisely because our serf‑based latifundia remain vast and powerful. The relative prevalence of improved agricultural implements among both landowners and peasants was the subject of a special survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture in the mid‑1890s. We can present the summary of this survey’s findings—detailed by Mr. Kaufmann—in the following table:

On average across all these regions, we find that 42% of the land is cultivated by landlords, while only 21% is cultivated by peasants.

As for the spread of manure-based fertilization, the statistical data leave no room for doubt: “in this regard, landlord farming has consistently advanced—and continues to stand far ahead of peasant farming” (Kaufmann, p. 544). Moreover, in post‑reform Russia, it was quite common for landlords to purchase manure directly from peasants—a phenomenon that arose precisely from the most extreme forms of peasant need. In recent years, however, this practice has been steadily declining.

Finally, precise and large-scale statistical data concerning the level of agricultural technology in both landlord and peasant farming are available—specifically regarding the extent to which grassland cultivation had been adopted (Kaufmann, p. 561). The main conclusions are as follows:

What, then, is the ultimate outcome of all these differences between landlord and peasant farming? To judge this, we have only yield data at our disposal. Across European Russia, over an average span of 18 years (1883–1900), the average yields were as follows (in quarters):

G. Kaufmann is entirely correct when he asserts that this difference “is not very great” (p. 592). In assessing this, we must bear in mind not only that the peasants were left with the poorest lands in 1861, but also that the overall averages—which, as we shall see, obscure the substantial disparities within the peasant class—tend to mask the true nature of these differences.

The overarching conclusion we must draw from our examination of landlord farming is this: Capitalism is clearly making its way into this sphere. The transition is occurring from corvée-based to wage-based forms of agriculture. The technological progress of capitalist agriculture, as compared with the labor‑rental and small-peasant systems, is unmistakably evident in every direction. Yet this progress is extraordinarily slow for a modern capitalist country. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was confronted with the most acute contradiction between the needs of societal development as a whole and the remnants of serfdom—manifested in the form of landlord aristocratic latifundia and in the labor‑rental system of farming—as a brake on economic evolution, a source of oppression, barbarism, and endless vestiges of Tatar domination in Russian life.

III

Peasant farming constitutes the central focus of the contemporary agrarian question in Russia. We have already examined the conditions governing peasant land ownership; now we must turn to the organization of peasant farming—not in a technical sense, but in a political‑economic one.

First and foremost, we encounter the question of the peasant commune. An extraordinarily extensive body of literature has been devoted to this topic, and the populist current in our social thought has linked the core tenets of its worldview to the national peculiarities of this “egalitarian” institution. It is important to note, above all, that in the literature on the Russian land commune, two distinct dimensions of the issue are constantly intertwined—and often conflated: on the one hand, the agrarian and domestic aspects; on the other, the political‑economic dimension. In the majority of works on the commune (V. Orlov, Trirogov, Kessler, V. V.), so much space and attention is given to the former that the latter is almost entirely relegated to the shadows. Yet such an approach is profoundly misguided. The distinctive character of Russian land relations, as compared with those of any other country, is beyond dispute—but there are no two purely capitalist, universally recognized capitalist countries that do not differ from one another just as markedly in terms of agrarian customs, the history of land relations, the forms of land ownership and land use, and so forth. What gave the question of the Russian land commune its significance and its sharp edge—what, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, divided our social thought into two principal currents, the populist and the Marxist—is by no means the agrarian or the domestic side of the issue. Local researchers may well have had good reason to devote considerable attention to these aspects—both to fully account for the specific local features of peasant agricultural life and to counter the ignorant, brazen attempts by the bureaucracy to impose petty, police‑oriented regulations upon every detail of rural life. But for the economist, it is absolutely impermissible to allow the study of variations in land division, the techniques employed in these divisions, and the like to overshadow the fundamental question: What types of farms emerge within the commune? How do these types evolve? How do relations develop between employers who hire laborers and those who work as day laborers; between the prosperous and the impoverished; between those who improve their farms and those who introduce technological innovations—and those who go bankrupt, abandon their farms, and flee the countryside? Undoubtedly, it was the realization of this truth that prompted our zemstvo statisticians—those who provided invaluable material for the study of Russia’s rural economy—to shift, in the 1880s, from the state‑sanctioned grouping of peasants by commune, by allotment, by the number of revisionary{63} or actual male souls, to a truly scientific classification based on the economic standing of individual households. Let us recall that in those days, when interest in the economic study of Russia was particularly intense, even a writer as “partisan” on this issue as Mr. V. V. wholeheartedly welcomed the “new type of local statistical publication” (the title of Mr. V. V.’s book in the Northern Herald{64}, 1885, No. 3) and declared: “It is essential to link numerical data not to such agglomerations of diverse economic groups within the peasantry as the village or the commune, but rather to these groups themselves.”

The defining characteristic of our commune—what endowed it with particular significance in the eyes of the Populists—is its egalitarian land-use regime. We will set aside, for the moment, the question of how the commune achieves this equality and turn instead directly to the economic facts, to the concrete outcomes of this egalitarian distribution. As we have shown above, based on precise data, the allocation of all allotment land in European Russia is far from equitable. Among different classes of peasants, among peasants from different villages—even among peasants belonging to different landlords (“former” landlords) within a single village—the distribution bears little resemblance to true equality. It is only within small communes that the mechanism of land redistribution fosters a measure of equity among these narrowly circumscribed, self-contained communities. Let us now examine the data from zemstvo statistics regarding the distribution of allotment land among households. In doing so, we must, of course, group households not according to family size or the number of laborers, but rather by the actual economic standing of individual households (measured by sown area, the number of head of draft animals, the number of cows, and the like), for the very essence of the capitalist evolution of small-scale agriculture lies in the creation and intensification of property-based inequality within patriarchal households—and ultimately in the transformation of simple inequality into fully developed capitalist relations. To overlook these nuances of the new economic evolution would be to fail to grasp the specific differences in economic viability that exist within the peasantry itself.

Let us first take a typical county—as zemstvo statistical surveys, complete with detailed cross-tabulations, are systematically conducted for individual counties—and then present the evidence that compels us to extend our findings to the peasantry across all of Russia. The material we draw upon comes from “The Development of Capitalism,” Chapter II[11].

In Krasnoufimskii County, Perm Governorate—which features exclusively communal peasant land ownership—allotment land is distributed as follows:

We observe that as household economic standing increases, family size likewise rises in a perfectly predictable manner. It is clear that large families are one of the key factors contributing to peasant well‑being; this is beyond dispute. The only question is: under the prevailing socio‑economic conditions of the national economy, what kind of socio‑economic relations does this level of well‑being ultimately give rise to? With regard to allotment land, we see that while the distribution is uneven, the disparities are not especially pronounced. The more prosperous a peasant household, the greater the share of allotment land per capita. In the lowest group, there are fewer than three dessiatines of allotment land per person of both sexes; in the subsequent groups, the figure hovers around three dessiatines—roughly three dessiatines—then rises to about four dessiatines—and finally, in the highest group, each person of both sexes receives more than five dessiatines of allotment land. Thus, large families and the greatest access to allotment land form the foundation of prosperity for a small minority of peasants. For the two highest groups together account for no more than one-tenth of all households. The following percentages illustrate the relationship between household numbers, population size, and the distribution of allotment land:

These figures make it abundantly clear that a proportional distribution of allotment land does indeed exist—and that we are taking into account the egalitarian effects of communal land tenure. The percentage shares of population within each group closely approximate the corresponding percentages of allotment land. Yet even here, the influence of individual households’ economic standing begins to emerge: in the lower groups, the share of land is smaller than the share of population; in the higher groups, it is larger. This phenomenon is not isolated to a single county—it is a general trend across all of Russia. In the aforementioned work, I have compiled homogeneous data from 21 counties spanning seven governorates located in the most diverse regions of Russia. These data, covering half a million peasant households, reveal consistent patterns everywhere. Twenty percent of the wealthiest households hold 26.1%–30.3% of the total population, while accounting for 29.0%–36.7% of all allotment land. By contrast, 50% of the poorest households account for 36.6%–44.7% of the population, yet possess only 33.0%–37.7% of the allotment land. Proportional distribution of allotment land is evident throughout—but at the same time, everywhere we see that the commune tends to favor the peasant bourgeoisie; deviations from proportionality consistently favor the upper strata of the peasantry.

Thus, it would be a grave error to assume that, in studying the peasantry according to their economic standing, we are somehow ignoring the “egalitarian” impact of the commune. On the contrary, it is precisely through meticulous data that we come to appreciate the real economic significance of this egalitarian principle. We demonstrate just how far this egalitarian impulse extends—and, ultimately, where the entire system of land redistribution leads. While this system may ensure the most equitable allocation of lands of varying quality and differing uses, it remains an undeniable fact that the growing economic advantage enjoyed by the wealthier segments of the peasantry over the poorest is reflected in the distribution of allotment land itself. As we shall see shortly, the distribution of non-allotment lands is far more uneven—indeed, immeasurably so.

The significance of tenancy in the peasant economy is well known. The need for land gives rise to an extraordinarily diverse array of exploitative relationships rooted in this fundamental condition. As we have already noted above, peasant tenancy often amounts, in essence, to a form of labor service under the landlord’s estate—indeed, it represents a serf-like mode of securing labor power for the master. Thus, the serf‑like character of our peasant tenancy is beyond dispute. However, since we are dealing with the capitalist evolution of this country, we must examine in detail how bourgeois relations manifest themselves—and whether they do so at all—in peasant tenancy. To do this, we once again require data not on entire communes or villages, but on the various economic strata within the peasantry. For example, in his “Summary of Zemstvo Statistics,” Mr. Karyshev was compelled to acknowledge that, as a general rule, natural leases—i.e., leases not paid in money, but in kind, either half‑share or through labor services—are everywhere more costly than monetary leases, and often significantly so, sometimes even doubling the cost; moreover, he pointed out that natural leases are most prevalent among the poorest segments of the peasantry. More affluent peasants, by contrast, strive to rent land for cash. “The tenant seizes upon the slightest opportunity to pay the rental in money, thereby reducing the cost of utilizing another’s land” (Karyshev, op. cit., p. 265).

Thus, the serf‑like features of our tenancy weigh most heavily upon the poorest peasants. The wealthier households seek to break free from the medieval yoke—and they succeed only to the extent that they possess sufficient financial resources. If you have the means, you can rent land outright at prevailing market rates. But if you lack the funds, you are reduced to bondage, paying exorbitant prices for land—whether in the form of sharecropping or through labor services. We have seen above how much lower wage labor costs are compared to the wages paid to free laborers. And when tenancy conditions vary according to the varying levels of wealth among peasants, it becomes clear that we cannot limit ourselves—as Karyshev so consistently does—to classifying peasants solely by their land allotments, for such a grouping artificially conflates households of differing economic standing, blurring the line between rural proletarians and peasant bourgeoisie.

To illustrate this point, let us turn to the data from Kamyshin District in Saratov Governorate, where nearly the entire population lived under communal tenure (of the 2,455 communes in the governorate, 2,436 held land in common ownership). Here are the patterns of land tenancy among different household groups:

We are already familiar with the distribution of allotted land: wealthier households are better endowed with land per capita than poorer ones. Yet the distribution of tenancy proves to be dozens of times more uneven. In the highest group, the amount of allotted land is three times greater than in the lowest group (16.1 versus 5.4). By contrast, the amount of leased land in the highest group is fifty times greater than in the lowest group (16.6 versus 0.3). Tenancy, therefore, does not level out the differences in economic standing among peasants—it amplifies and sharpens those disparities by factors of ten. The reverse conclusion, which repeatedly appears in the writings of populist economists—V. V., Nik., Marès, Karyshev, Vikhlyaev, and others—is based on the following error. These scholars typically group peasants according to their land allotments and then demonstrate that small‑allotment households rent more land than large‑allotment households. They stop there, failing to note that it is primarily the wealthier households within small‑allotment communes that lease land—and that, consequently, the apparent equality among communes merely masks the greatest inequalities in the internal distribution of land within each commune. Karyshev himself, for instance, acknowledges that “larger leases are used by a) less well‑endowed landholders, but b) by more affluent groups within those holdings” (p. 139, op. cit.), yet he still fails to systematically analyze the distribution of tenancy across different groups.

To make this error of populist economists clearer, let us consider one example—the work of Mr. Marès (in his book “The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices,” Vol. I, p. 34). Drawing on data from Melitopol District, Marès concludes that “the distribution of tenancy per capita is roughly equitable.” What is the real story? When households are grouped according to the number of male laborers, it turns out that households without any laborers rent, on average, 1.6 desyatins per renting household; households with one laborer rent 4.4 desyatins; households with two laborers rent 8.3 desyatins; and households with three laborers rent 14.0 desyatins. The crux of the matter is that these “averages” aggregate households of vastly different economic capacities: among households with just one laborer, some rent 4 desyatins while sowing 5–10 desyatins, relying on 2–3 head of draft animals; while other households rent 38 desyatins, sowing over 50 desyatins with 4 or more head of draft animals. Thus, the supposed equity advanced by Mr. Marès is nothing more than a fiction. In reality, in Melitopol District, the wealthiest 20% of households—despite being the best supplied with both allotted and purchased land—concentrate 66.3%, or two-thirds of all leased land, leaving only 5.6% of leased land to the poorest half of all households.

Further. When we observe, on the one hand, the leasing of a single desyatina—or even a portion thereof—by households lacking horses or possessing only a single horse, while, on the other hand, we see the leasing of 7–16 desyatins by households owning four or more horses, it becomes clear that quantity is giving way to quality. The former form of leasing arises out of necessity—a form of bondage and exploitation. The “tenant” who finds himself in such circumstances cannot help but be transformed into an instrument of exploitation through labor obligations, winter hiring, moneylending, and the like. By contrast, a household that owns 12–16 desyatins of allotted land yet leases an additional 7–16 desyatins is clearly not leasing out of need, but out of wealth; not for “subsistence,” but for enrichment, for the purpose of “making money.” Here we witness, with our own eyes, the transformation of leasehold into capitalist farming—and the emergence of entrepreneurial activity in agriculture. As we shall see below, such households invariably employ hired agricultural laborers.

The question now arises: how widespread is this distinctly entrepreneurial form of leasing? We will show below that the growth of entrepreneurial farming manifests itself in different ways across various regions characterized by commercial agriculture. For now, let us offer a few more examples and draw general conclusions about leasing.

In the Dneprovsky Uyezd of Taurida Governorate, households cultivating 25 desyatins or more account for 18.2% of the total. These households possess 16–17 desyatins of allotted land per household and lease an additional 17–44 desyatins. In the Novouzensky Uyezd of Samara Governorate, households owning five or more head of draft animals constitute 24.7% of the total. They cultivate 25–53–149 desyatins per household, leasing an extra 14–54–304 desyatins of non-allotted land per household (the first figure pertains to the group with 5–10 head of draft animals, comprising 17.1% of households; the second, to those with 10–20 head, accounting for 5.8% of households; the third, to households with 20 or more head, representing 1.8% of households). They lease allotted land from other communities at 12–29–67 desyatins per household, while leasing within their own community at 9–21–74 desyatins per household. In the Krasnoufimsky Uyezd of Perm Governorate, 10.1% of all households cultivate 20 desyatins or more. These households have 28–44 desyatins of allotted land per household and lease 14–40 desyatins of arable land and 118–261 desyatins of hayland. In two uyezds of Oryol Governorate (Yelets and Trubchevsk), households with four or more horses make up 7.2% of the total. With 15.2 desyatins of allotted land, they expand their land use through purchase and lease, bringing their total land holdings up to 28.4 desyatins. In the Zadonsky Uyezd of Voronezh Governorate, the corresponding figures are: 3.2% of households with 17.1 desyatins of allotted land and a total land use of 33.2 desyatins. In three uyezds of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate (Knyagininsky, Makaryevsky, and Vasil’sky), 9.5% of households own three or more horses. They have 13–16 desyatins of allotted land per household, with a total land use ranging from 21 to 34 desyatins.

From this it is evident that entrepreneurial leasing among the peasantry is neither an isolated nor a sporadic phenomenon—it is common and pervasive. Everywhere, within every community, prosperous households emerge as a small minority, always constituting a negligible minority yet consistently organizing capitalist agriculture through entrepreneurial leasing. Consequently, vague generalizations about “subsistence” versus “capitalist” leasing cannot shed any real light on the issues facing our peasant economy; what is needed is a detailed examination of the concrete data concerning the persistence of serf-like features in leasing practices and the gradual formation of increasingly capitalist relations within these arrangements.

We have already presented data showing what share of the population and of allotted land is concentrated in the hands of the 20% most prosperous households. We may now add that these households control anywhere between 50.8% and 83.7% of all land leased by the peasantry, while the remaining 50% of households—those belonging to the lower strata—account for just 5% to 16% of all leased land. The conclusion is clear: if asked which form of leasing predominates in Russia—subsistence leasing or entrepreneurial leasing, leasing out of necessity or leasing by affluent peasants, serf-based (labor-obligated, exploitative) leasing or bourgeois leasing—the answer can only be one. In terms of the number of households engaged in leasing, the vast majority of tenants undoubtedly lease out of necessity. For the overwhelming majority of peasants, leasing is little more than bondage. In terms of the amount of land leased, there is no doubt that at least half of all leased land falls into the hands of prosperous peasants—the rural bourgeoisie that organizes capitalist agriculture.

Data on rental prices are usually reported only “on average” across all tenants and for all land. To what extent these averages obscure the profound need and oppression faced by the peasantry becomes evident when we examine the zemstvo statistical data for the Dneprovsky Uyezd of Taurida Governorate, where, as a rare exception, rental rates are given for different groups within the peasantry:

Thus, the “average” rental price of 4 rubles 23 kopeks per desyatina directly distorts reality, obliterating the very contradictions that lie at the heart of the matter. The poor are forced to lease land at ruinous rates—more than three times the average. The wealthy, on the other hand, profitably purchase land “in bulk” and, of course, pass it on to a neighbor in need, pocketing a handsome 275% markup. There is leasing—and then there is leasing. There is serf-based bondage, there is Irish-style tenancy, and there is the trade in land, capitalist farming.

Such a phenomenon as peasants’ leasing out of their allotted land provides an even more striking illustration of capitalist relations within the commune, of the impoverishment of the poor and the enrichment of a minority at the expense of this increasingly destitute mass. Land rental and land leasing are processes that bear no meaningful connection to the commune or to its egalitarian principles. What real significance can the so‑called “egalitarian” distribution of allotted land possibly hold in actual life, when the poor are compelled to lease out the very land that was supposedly distributed to them on an equal footing? And what could serve as a more vivid refutation of “communalist” views than this very fact—namely, that life itself consistently bypasses the official, census‑based, state‑imposed equality in the allocation of allotments? The utter impotence of any form of egalitarianism in the face of burgeoning capitalism is made abundantly clear by the very act of the poor leasing out their allotted land while the wealthy concentrate land rentals in their hands.

How widespread is this practice of leasing out allotted land? According to those now outdated zemstvo statistical surveys from the 1880s—surveys which we are still forced to rely upon—the number of households leasing land and the proportion of allotted land being leased appear relatively small. For example, in the Dneprovsky Uyezd of Taurida Governorate, 25.7% of households lease out their allotted land; the share of allotted land leased amounts to 14.9%. In the Novouzensky Uyezd of Samara Governorate, 12% of households lease land. In the Kamyshinsky Uyezd of Saratov Governorate, the proportion of land leased reaches 16%. In the Krasnoufimsky Uyezd of Perm Governorate, 8,500 households out of 23,500—more than a third—lease out their allotted arable land. Of the 410,000 dessiatins of allotted land, 501,500 dessiatins are leased, accounting for roughly 12%. In the Zadonsky Uyezd of Voronezh Governorate, 6,500 dessiatins of allotted land are leased out of 135,500 dessiatins—less than 5%. In three uyezds of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, 19,000 dessiatins are leased out of 433,000 dessiatins—again, less than 5%. Yet these figures only seem modest, for such percentage ratios tacitly assume that land is leased out more or less evenly across all strata of households. In reality, however, this assumption is diametrically opposed to the truth. Far more significant than the absolute figures for land rental and leasing, far more telling than the average percentages of land leased or of households leasing land, is the fact that it is primarily the poor who lease out their land, while the well‑to‑do rent the greatest quantities of land. The data from zemstvo statistical surveys leave no room for doubt on this score: the 20% of the wealthiest households account for anywhere between 0.3% and 12.5% of all land that is leased out. By contrast, the 50% of households belonging to the lower strata account for between 63.3% and 98.0% of the total land leased. And of course, it is the same well‑to‑do peasants who rent the land that the poor have leased out. Here again, it becomes clear that the act of leasing land carries different meanings depending on the peasant class: the poor lease out of necessity—lacking the means to cultivate the land, lacking seeds, livestock, tools, and desperately in need of cash. The rich, on the other hand, lease out only sparingly—either exchanging one plot of land for another in the interests of their farming operations, or directly engaging in outright land trading. Consider the following concrete data from the Dneprovsky Uyezd of Taurida Governorate:

Is it not evident from these figures that the abandonment of land and the proletarianization of vast segments of the population are here intertwined with the land trade conducted by a tiny clique of the wealthy? Is it not characteristic that the percentage of allotted land being leased actually rises among those large-scale cultivators who possess 17 dessiatins of allotted land per household, 30.0 dessiatins of purchased land, and 44.0 dessiatins of rented land? Overall, the entire poor group in the Dneprovsky Uyezd—representing 40% of households—possesses 56,000 dessiatins of allotted land, rents 8,000 dessiatins, and leases out 21,500 dessiatins. Meanwhile, the well‑to‑do group, though comprising only 18.4% of households, holds 62,000 dessiatins of allotted land yet leases out just 3,000 dessiatins of allotted land while renting 82,000 dessiatins. In three uyezds of Taurida Governorate, this well‑to‑do group rents 150,000 dessiatins of allotted land—three fifths of all land leased out! In the Novouzensky Uyezd of Samara Governorate, 47% of horseless households and 13% of single‑horse households lease out their allotted land, whereas owners of 10 or more head of draft animals—accounting for only 7.6% of all households—rent 20–30–60–70 dessiatins of allotted land.

Regarding purchased land, we must say almost the same as we said about leased land. The key difference lies in the fact that leasehold arrangements retain vestiges of serfdom; under certain conditions, leasing can take on the character of labor-based bondage—indeed, it often serves as a means of binding the laboring hands of impoverished neighboring peasants to the landlord’s estate. By contrast, the acquisition of land into private ownership by allotment peasants represents a thoroughly bourgeois phenomenon. In the West, tenant farmers and day laborers are sometimes tied to the land through the sale of small plots of land to them. In Russia, a similar process was long ago carried out by the state in the form of the “Great Reform” of 1861—and today, peasant purchases of land exclusively signify the emergence within the commune of representatives of the rural bourgeoisie. We have already discussed how peasant land purchases evolved after 1861 when examining data on landholding; here, we must point out the staggering concentration of purchased land in the hands of a minority. Twenty percent of the wealthiest households hold between 59.7% and 99% of all land acquired through purchase; meanwhile, the poorest 50% of households possess only 0.4% to 15.4% of the total land bought by peasants. We can therefore confidently assert that of the 7.5 million dessiatins of land acquired by peasants into private ownership between 1877 and 1905 (as noted above), two-thirds to three-quarters are held by a tiny minority of prosperous households. The same holds true, of course, for land purchased by peasant societies and cooperatives. In 1877, peasant societies owned 765,000 dessiatins of purchased land; by 1905, this figure had risen to 3.7 million dessiatins, while peasant cooperatives held 7.6 million dessiatins of privately owned land in 1905. It would be a mistake to assume that land acquired or leased by communities is distributed any differently than when purchased or leased individually. The facts tell a different story. For example, data collected from three mainland counties in Taurida Governorate revealed that 76% of the land leased from the state by peasant societies was concentrated in the hands of the affluent group (roughly 20% of households), while the poorest 40% of households controlled only 4% of all leased land. Peasants divide leased or purchased land no differently than they do “by the purse”—that is, according to their financial capacity.

IV

The aggregate of the above data concerning allotment, leased, purchased, and rent‑leased peasant land leads to the conclusion that the actual land use of the peasantry is, with each passing day, becoming ever less aligned with the official, state‑sanctioned, allotment system of peasant landholding. Of course, if one looks at gross figures or “average” values, the surrender of allotment land will be offset by leasing, and the remaining leased and purchased land will be distributed among the entire mass of households as if evenly divided—giving the impression that actual land use differs only slightly from the state‑sanctioned, i.e., allotment, system. But such an impression would be illusory, for the actual land use of the peasantry diverges most sharply from the original egalitarian structure of allotment land precisely among the extreme groups—so that when one relies on “average” figures, the true picture is inevitably distorted.

In reality, for the lower strata, all forms of peasant land use turn out to be relatively—sometimes even absolutely—less than the allotment system allows (through land surrender; through the negligible share of leased land); whereas for the upper strata, land use is always both relatively and absolutely greater than what the allotment system provides, owing to the concentration of purchased and leased land. As we have seen, the poorest 50% of households hold between 33% and 37% of all allotment land—but account for only 18.6%–31.9% of total land use. In some cases, the reduction is nearly twofold: for instance, in Krasnoufimsk County, Perm Governorate, 37.4% of allotment land corresponds to just 19.2% of total land use. Meanwhile, the 20% of prosperous households hold 29–36% of allotment land, yet account for 34–49% of total land use. Let us consider some concrete data to illustrate these relationships. In Dneprovsk County, Taurida Governorate, the poorest 40% of households possess 56,000 dessiatins of allotment land; their total land use, however, amounts to only 45,000 dessiatins—11,000 dessiatins less. The affluent group (18% of households) owns 62,000 dessiatins of allotment land; their total land use, by contrast, reaches 167,000 dessiatins—105,000 dessiatins more. Here are the figures for three counties in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate:

And here, too, in the very lowest group, the result of leasing and land surrender led to an absolute reduction in land use. This lowest group—those without horses—accounts for a full 30% of households. Nearly a third of households lose land entirely due to leasing and land surrender. Single-horse households (37% of households) did increase their land use, but only by a very modest margin, in a proportion far smaller than the average increase in peasant land use (from 8.3 dessiatins to 10.3 dessiatins). Consequently, this group’s share of total land use declined: while they once held 36.6% of allotment land across all three counties, their share of total land use now stands at just 34.1%. By contrast, the tiny minority of upper‑stratum households increased their land use far above the average. Three‑horse households (7.3% of households) more than doubled their land holdings—from 13 dessiatins to 21 dessiatins. Multi‑horse households (2.3% of households) increased their land holdings by more than double, from 16 dessiatins to 35 dessiatins.

We thus observe, as a general phenomenon, the declining role of allotment land in peasant farming. This decline unfolds along two distinct trajectories across the rural landscape. Among the poorest peasants, the significance of allotment land is diminishing, as mounting need and economic ruin compel them to lease it out, abandon their holdings, and scale back their agricultural operations due to shortages of livestock, tools, seed, and capital—driving them either toward wage labor or, ultimately, toward the “kingdom of heaven.” The lower strata of the peasantry are steadily disappearing; famine, scurvy, and typhus take their toll. Meanwhile, among the wealthier segments of the peasantry, allotment land is losing its former importance, as expanding farms are forced to extend far beyond its boundaries—requiring new forms of land ownership, no longer tied to labor obligations but grounded in freehold tenure, not rooted in ancestral kinship but acquired through market transactions: purchase and lease. The more land-rich a peasant household becomes, the weaker the vestiges of serfdom remain, and the faster the pace of economic development, the more pronounced this shift away from allotment land—and the deeper the integration of all land into commercial circulation, as farmers build their enterprises on leased plots, cultivating commercial agriculture. A prime example is Novorossiya. We have seen that here, prosperous peasants manage their farms more often through purchased and leased land than through allotment land. This may seem paradoxical, yet it is a fact: in Russia’s most heavily land‑endowed regions, even the wealthiest peasants—those who possess 16–17 dessiatins of allotment land per household—have shifted the center of gravity in their agricultural operations from allotment land to non-allotment land!

The fact that the role of allotment land is shrinking across both rapidly advancing poles of the peasantry, moreover, bears immense significance for assessing the conditions underlying the agrarian revolution bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century—and which has sparked class struggle throughout our own revolution. This fact vividly demonstrates that the dismantling of old landholding systems—both landlord and peasant—has become an absolute economic necessity. Such a breakdown is utterly inevitable; no earthly power can prevent it. The struggle centers on the form this breakdown will take, on the methods by which it is carried out: will it proceed along Stolypin’s path—preserving landlord landownership while allowing kulaks to exploit the commune—or will it follow a peasant-oriented course, abolishing landlord landownership and eradicating all medieval barriers to land use through the nationalization of land? We shall return to these questions in greater detail below. For now, it is crucial to highlight an important development: the waning role of allotment land leads to an extraordinarily uneven distribution of taxes and dues.

It is well known that the taxes and dues levied upon the Russian peasant bear the heavy imprint of the medieval era. We cannot delve here into the intricate details of Russia’s financial history; suffice it to say that redemption payments represent a direct continuation of the medieval quitrent—a tribute owed to serf-owning landlords, collected with the aid of a police‑state apparatus. It suffices to recall the unequal burden of taxation between noble and peasant lands, the prevalence of natural labor services, and the like. We present only the aggregate figures for taxes and dues, based on data from Voronezh statistics on peasant households{65}. The average gross income of a peasant family (according to data from 66 typical budgets) is recorded at 491 rubles and 44 kopecks, with total expenditures amounting to 443 rubles, leaving a net income of 48 rubles and 44 kopecks. Yet the total sum of taxes and dues borne by the “average” household reaches 34 rubles and 35 kopecks. Thus, taxes and dues account for 70% of net income. Of course, this figure reflects only the formal tax burden; in reality, it represents the legacy of pre‑modern serf exploitation of the “laboring class.” The net monetary income of the average family amounts to just 17 rubles and 83 kopecks—meaning that “taxes” on the Russian peasant exceed his net monetary income by a factor of two—this according to data from 1889, not 1849!

But even these averages tend to gloss over the true depth of peasant hardship, portraying the condition of the peasantry as far better than it actually is. Data on the distribution of taxes and dues across peasant groups differing in economic standing reveal that for the horseless peasant and the one‑horse peasant—i.e., for three‑fifths of all peasant households in Russia—taxes and dues far exceed not only net monetary income but also gross income. Consider the following figures:

The dialectics of self-movement and cognition are central to understanding the dynamics of historical development. Imperialism, as a stage in the evolution of capitalism, represents the culmination of class struggle within the capitalist mode of production. The bourgeoisie, driven by its insatiable quest for profit, seeks to expand its control over the means of production, thereby intensifying exploitation and deepening social antagonisms. In this context, the proletariat emerges as the vanguard of revolutionary change, tasked with overthrowing the capitalist system and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat—a transitional phase toward a classless society.

Class struggle is not merely a theoretical abstraction; it is the very engine of historical progress. The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie is both a reflection of the inherent contradictions within capitalist society and a necessary step toward transcending those contradictions. Through the relentless pursuit of surplus value, the bourgeoisie extracts ever more wealth from the labor of the working class, while simultaneously undermining the material conditions of life for the majority. Yet, it is precisely in these moments of crisis—when the contradictions of capitalism reach their breaking point—that the potential for revolutionary transformation becomes most evident.

The means of production, as the foundation upon which all social relations are built, are themselves shaped by the dialectics of accumulation and distribution. Under capitalism, the concentration of capital in the hands of a few leads to the increasing polarization of wealth and power, while the vast majority of people are reduced to mere appendages of the machinery of production. This process is not inevitable; rather, it is the result of specific historical conditions that can be altered through conscious political action. The proletariat, armed with a clear understanding of these dynamics, must seize the initiative to dismantle the structures of exploitation and build a new society based on collective ownership and democratic control over the means of production.

The petty bourgeoisie, though often caught between the hammer of the bourgeoisie and the anvil of the proletariat, nonetheless plays a crucial role in the unfolding of class struggle. Its economic instability and ideological ambivalence make it susceptible to both co-optation by the bourgeoisie and radicalization by the proletariat. In this sense, the petty bourgeoisie serves as a bridge between the old order and the new, embodying the tensions and contradictions that define the transition from one social formation to another.

Commodity production, as the dominant form of economic organization under capitalism, is inherently tied to the logic of exchange value. The production of goods for sale, rather than for use, transforms human labor into a commodity itself, subject to the imperatives of profit and competition. This commodification of labor not only alienates workers from the products of their own labor but also fragments society into discrete, mutually antagonistic classes. The proletariat, however, recognizes that the true source of value lies not in the commodities themselves, but in the labor that produces them. By reclaiming control over the means of production, the proletariat can break free from the chains of wage labor and begin to reorganize society according to the principles of equality and solidarity.

The Soviets, as organs of workers’ self‑government, represent the concrete realization of the proletarian revolution. They embody the aspirations of the working class for direct democracy, collective decision‑making, and the abolition of hierarchical power structures. Through the Soviets, the proletariat can articulate its demands, mobilize its forces, and ultimately lay the foundations for a socialist society. Yet, the path to socialism is fraught with challenges, as the bourgeoisie will inevitably resist any attempt to undermine its economic and political dominance. The struggle for socialism is not just a battle for economic justice; it is a struggle for the very meaning of human existence—a struggle to transcend the alienating effects of capitalism and to create a world in which human beings can live in harmony with one another and with nature.

The Central Committee, as the highest organ of the RCP(b), bears the responsibility of guiding the revolutionary movement toward its ultimate goal: the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The VTsIK, as the representative body of the working class, plays a vital role in ensuring that the interests of the proletariat are reflected in the policies and decisions of the state. The Sovnarkom, as the executive branch of the Soviet government, is tasked with implementing the policies of the Central Committee and coordinating the efforts of the various organs of the state. The Council of Labour and Defence, meanwhile, serves as a mechanism for mobilizing the working class in times of crisis, ensuring that the proletariat remains united in its fight against counterrevolutionary forces.

The NEP, as a temporary measure aimed at stabilizing the economy after the devastation of the civil war, marked a significant departure from the rigidities of the early years of Soviet power. While it allowed for limited private enterprise and market mechanisms, the NEP was never intended to become a permanent feature of the Soviet economy. Instead, it was a strategic pause in the march toward full-scale collectivization—a pause that underscored the need for a deeper understanding of the relationship between the base and the superstructure. The lessons learned during the NEP period would prove invaluable in shaping the subsequent course of Soviet development.

In the final analysis, the struggle for socialism is a struggle for the liberation of humanity from the shackles of exploitation and oppression. It is a struggle that requires not only the courage to confront the entrenched interests of the bourgeoisie but also the wisdom to navigate the complex interplay of economic, political, and ideological forces. Only by embracing the dialectics of history—and by recognizing that the road to socialism is paved with both triumphs and setbacks—can the proletariat hope to achieve its ultimate goal: the creation of a world free from class divisions, where every individual has the opportunity to fulfill their potential and live in dignity and freedom.

The number of landless peasants in European Russia between 1896 and 1900 reached 3.25 million households. One can easily imagine the plight of their agricultural “households,” with annual expenditures on both live and dead implements amounting to a mere eight kopeks per year. Single-horse peasants numbered 3.33 million households; with an annual outlay of five rubles for replenishing tools and livestock, they could only perpetually languish in hopeless poverty. Even among two-horse peasants (2.5 million households) and three-horse peasants (1 million households), the annual expenditure on both live and dead implements totaled no more than 9–10 rubles. Only in the two highest groups—of which there were roughly 1 million peasant households out of a total of 11 million across Russia—did the expenditure on live and dead implements begin to approach anything resembling a properly organized agricultural economy.

It is entirely natural that, under such conditions, the quality of livestock cannot be uniform across households of different categories. The value of a single working horse, for example, is determined as follows: 27 rubles for a single-horse peasant, 37 rubles for a two-horse peasant, 61 rubles for a three-horse peasant, 52 rubles for a four-horse peasant, and 69 rubles for a household with multiple horses. The disparity between the extreme groups exceeds 100%. This phenomenon is common to all capitalist countries, where both small and large-scale farming coexist. In my book “The Agrarian Question” (Part I, St. Petersburg, 1908)[12], I demonstrated that Dräxler’s research on German agriculture and animal husbandry yielded precisely the same results{66}. The average weight of a typical head of livestock stood at 619 kilograms in large estates (1884, cited work, p. 259), while in peasant households cultivating 25 hectares or more it was 427 kilograms; in households ranging from 7.5 to 25 hectares, it averaged 382 kilograms; in those with 2.5–7.5 hectares, it was 352 kilograms; and finally, in households with less than 2.5 hectares, it averaged just 301 kilograms.

The care given to the land—and particularly its fertilization—depends not only on the quantity but also on the quality of livestock. We have shown above that statistical data from across Russia consistently indicate that landlord-owned lands are better fertilized than peasant lands. Now we see that this division, once considered correct and legitimate during the era of serfdom, has become obsolete. A profound gulf has opened up between different peasant households, and all studies, calculations, conclusions, and theories based on the notion of a “typical” peasant household lead to utterly erroneous conclusions in this regard. Unfortunately, zemstvo statistics rarely examine the various subgroups of farmsteads, often limiting themselves to communal data. However, in Perm Governorate (Krasnoufimsk District), researchers conducted an exceptional household-level survey that yielded precise data on soil fertilization by different peasant households:

Here we already observe distinct agro‑cultural types of farming, depending on the size of the household. And in other regions as well, researchers who turned their attention to this issue arrived at similar conclusions. Orel statisticians report that affluent peasants accumulate nearly twice as much manure per head of cattle as their less prosperous counterparts. With 7.4 heads of livestock per household, the manure yield reaches 391 poods; whereas with only 2.8 heads of cattle per household, the yield is 208 poods. A “normal” accumulation is considered to be 400 poods; consequently, this standard is met only by a small minority of well-off peasants. The poor, meanwhile, are forced to use straw and manure as fuel, and sometimes even to sell off their manure—and so on.

In light of this, we must consider the question of the growing number of landless peasants. Between 1888 and 1891, in 48 governorates of European Russia, 2.8 million households were completely without horses, out of a total of 10.1 million—representing 27.3%. Roughly nine to ten years later, during the period 1896–1900, among 11.1 million households, 3.2 million were landless—that is, 29.2%. The increase in the expropriation of the peasantry is thus undeniable. Yet if we examine this process from an agronomic perspective, we arrive at a seemingly paradoxical conclusion. This insight was first articulated by the renowned populist writer V. V. back in 1884 (“Vestnik Evropy”{67}, 1884, No. 7), when he compared the number of dessiatins of arable land allocated to each horse in our peasant households with the figure for a “normal” three-field system—normal, that is, from an agronomic standpoint. It turned out that peasants kept far too many horses: they had only 5–8 dessiatins of arable land per horse, whereas the agronomic norm called for 7–10 dessiatins. “Therefore,” concluded Mr. V. V., “we should view the reduction of horse ownership among parts of the population in this region of Russia—particularly the central black earth zone—as, to a certain extent, a restoration of the proper balance between the number of working animals and the area under cultivation.” In fact, the apparent paradox arises because the process of de‑horse‑ownership is accompanied by a concentration of land in the hands of wealthier households, where the ratio of horses to cultivated acreage becomes “normal.” This “normal” ratio is not “restored” (for it never existed in our peasant households); rather, it is achieved only through the rise of a peasant bourgeoisie. The “abnormality,” on the other hand, lies in the fragmentation of the means of production within small peasant holdings: the same amount of land that a million single-horse peasants cultivate with the aid of a million horses is cultivated far more efficiently and thoroughly by affluent peasants using only half a million or three-quarters of a million horses.

Regarding the inventory in peasant households, it is necessary to distinguish between ordinary peasant implements and advanced agricultural tools. The distribution of the former generally mirrors that of working livestock; we find nothing new in this regard when characterizing peasant economies. In contrast, improved implements—far more costly—are only economically viable in larger farms; they are adopted only by those farms that are successfully expanding, and their concentration is incomparably greater. Data on this concentration are of paramount importance, for they are the sole reliable indicators enabling us to determine precisely in which direction, under what social conditions, peasant farming is progressing. There is no doubt that since 1861 a step forward has been taken in this direction—but the capitalist nature of this progress is all too often disputed or called into question, not only in landlord-owned estates but also in peasant holdings.

Here are the data from zemstvo statistics concerning the distribution of advanced implements among peasants:

In this region, advanced implements are relatively rare among peasants. The overall percentage of households possessing such tools is utterly negligible. Yet while the lower strata almost entirely lack access to these implements, they are systematically employed by the higher strata. In Novouzensky Uyezd of Samara Governorate, only 13% of households own advanced implements—and this percentage rises to 40% among households with 5–20 head of working livestock, and to 62% among households with 20 or more head of working stock. In Krasnoufimsky Uyezd of Perm Governorate (across three districts within the uyezd), there are 10 advanced implements per 100 households—a general average; among 100 households cultivating 20–50 desyatins, there are 50 implements, while among 100 households cultivating 50 desyatins, the figure climbs as high as 180 implements. If we examine the same proportional relationships we used earlier to compare data across various uyezds, we find that 20% of the wealthiest households hold between 70% and 86% of all advanced implements, while the remaining 50% of poor households account for just 1.3% to 3.6%. It is therefore beyond any doubt that the progress in the dissemination of advanced implements among the peasantry—progress that, incidentally, was noted in the aforementioned 1907 work by Mr. Kaufmann—is, in fact, the progress of the affluent peasantry. Three-fifths of all peasant households, those without horses or with only a single horse, are almost entirely unable to benefit from these improvements.

V

When examining the peasant economy, we have thus far regarded peasants primarily as householders, while noting at the same time that the lower strata are constantly being pushed out of the ranks of independent farmers. But pushed out where? Clearly, into the ranks of the proletariat. We must now examine in detail how this process of proletarianization unfolds—especially in the rural sphere—and how the labor market in agriculture takes shape. While the typical class figures in subsistence farming are the landlord-serf owner and the land‑bound serf peasant, in capitalist farming the archetypal figures are the employer‑farmer and the hired laborer, or day‑laborer. We have already shown how the landlord and the prosperous peasant can be transformed into employers. Let us now turn our attention to the transformation of the peasant into a wage earner.

How widespread is the use of wage labor among prosperous peasants? If we calculate the average percentage of households employing laborers relative to the total number of peasant households—as is commonly done—we arrive at a very low figure: 12.9% in Dneprovsky Uyezd of Taurida Governorate, 9% in Novouzensky Uyezd of Samara Governorate, 8% in Kamyshinsky Uyezd of Saratov Governorate, 10.6% in Krasnoufimsky Uyezd of Perm Governorate, 3.5% in two uyezds of Oryol Governorate, 3.8% in one uyezd of Voronezh Governorate, and 2.6% in three uyezds of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. Yet these kinds of data are, in essence, largely fictitious—since they measure the ratio of households employing laborers to the total number of households, including those that themselves hire out laborers. In every capitalist society, the bourgeoisie constitutes a tiny minority of the population. The number of households relying on wage labor will always remain “small.” The question is: does a distinct type of farm emerge here, or is wage employment merely incidental? The data from zemstvo statistics provide a definitive answer to this question, consistently showing that among the prosperous peasant classes, the proportion of households employing laborers is far higher than the average for the uyezd as a whole. Let us take the example of Krasnoufimsky Uyezd in Perm Governorate, where—by way of exception—information exists not only on the hiring of laborers but also on the hiring of day‑laborers, that is, on a form of employment more characteristic of agriculture.

We observe that prosperous households are distinguished by larger family units and employ more domestic, family-based laborers than their impoverished counterparts. Yet despite this, they rely far more heavily on hired labor. “Family-based cooperation” serves as the foundation for expanding agricultural enterprises, gradually transforming into capitalist forms of cooperation. In the upper strata, wage labor becomes clearly institutionalized—indeed, it emerges as a systemic necessity for the conduct of expanded agricultural operations. Meanwhile, the practice of hiring day laborers proves to be remarkably widespread even among middle‑class peasants: while in the two highest income brackets (10.3% of households) the majority of farms hire workers, in the group cultivating 10–20 dessiatines (22.4%) over two-fifths of all households engage hired hands for the harvest season. From this we may conclude that affluent peasant households could not sustain themselves without a vast army of sharecroppers and day laborers ready to serve them. And while county-level data on the average percentage of households employing sharecroppers exhibit considerable variation—as we have seen—what is undeniably universal is the concentration of sharecropping households within the upper strata of the peasantry; in other words, the transformation of prosperous households into entrepreneurial farm owners. Between 48% and 78% of all households employing sharecroppers are found among the 20% most affluent households.

At the opposite end of the rural spectrum, statistical records typically fail to provide reliable information on the number of households that regularly hire workers of all kinds. In many respects, our zemstvo statistics have made an extraordinarily significant leap forward compared to the old state-run statistics found in governor’s reports and various government departments. Yet in one crucial area, the old state-centric perspective has persisted—even within zemstvo statistics—namely, in the classification of so‑called “earnings” among peasants. Farming on one’s own plot is regarded as the true vocation of the peasant; any other form of employment, by contrast, is categorized as “side earnings” or “secondary occupations”—a classification that conflates economic categories which, according to the rudiments of political economy, must be carefully distinguished. For example, under the rubric of “agricultural entrepreneurs,” we find not only large numbers of hired laborers but also owner‑entrepreneurs (such as melon growers), while at the same time, the poorest households—and merchants, servants, artisan‑owners, and the like—are likewise counted among “households with secondary earnings.” Clearly, this glaringly flawed economic and political categorization is a direct legacy of serfdom. To the landowner, it was entirely immaterial whether his serf-peasant engaged in trade, wage labor, or entrepreneurial activity as a master craftsman; the same fixed annual tribute was levied upon all serf peasants, and all were considered temporarily—and conditionally—absent from their primary occupation.

After the abolition of serfdom, this perspective increasingly came into sharp conflict with reality. While the majority of peasant households engaged in secondary earnings undoubtedly belong to the category of households that hire wage laborers, we cannot yet obtain a fully accurate picture, because a minority of entrepreneurial household heads still slip into the general count, thereby skewing the overall picture in favor of those in need. Let us consider a single illustrative example. According to statistics from Novouzensky Uyezd in Samara Governorate, “agricultural pursuits” were singled out from the broader category of “occupations”{68}. Of course, even this term is imprecise—but the list of professions at least indicates that, of the 14,063 “entrepreneurs” of this type, 13,297 were sharecroppers and day laborers. Here, then, the dominance of hired labor is strikingly pronounced. The distribution of agricultural pursuits reveals the following pattern:

Among horseless peasants, fully seven-tenths are employed as hired laborers; among single-horse households, nearly half are so engaged. In Krasnoufimsky Uyezd of Perm Governorate, the average percentage of households engaged in agricultural pursuits stands at 16.2%, while among those who do not cultivate land, 52.3% of “entrepreneurs” are classified as such; among households cultivating up to 5 dessiatines, the figure is 26.4%. In other uyezds where agricultural pursuits were not specifically delineated, the picture is less clear—but it remains a general rule that “occupations” and “secondary earnings,” in the broadest sense, are the domain of the lower strata. Between 50% of the lowest-income households account for 60% to 93% of all households engaged in secondary earnings.

From this we can see that the lower strata of the peasantry—particularly single-horse and horseless households—by virtue of their position within the overall structure of the national economy, essentially function as sharecroppers and day laborers (more broadly: as hired laborers) who possess small plots of land. This conclusion is corroborated by evidence of the growing prevalence of wage labor across Russia after 1861, by budgetary studies examining the sources of income among the lower strata, and finally by data concerning the living standards of these groups. We will now examine these three lines of evidence in somewhat greater detail.

General data on the growth of rural wage laborers across all of Russia are available only with regard to seasonal migrant workers, without a precise distinction being made between agricultural and non-agricultural laborers. The question of whether the former or the latter predominated in the overall number was debated in populist literature, with the former being favored; however, we will present below the grounds for a contrary view. The fact that the number of seasonal migrant workers among the peasantry increased rapidly after 1861 is beyond any doubt. All available sources bear this out. An approximate statistical indication of this phenomenon can be gleaned from data on passport revenue and the number of passports issued. In 1868, passport revenue stood at 2.1 million rubles; by 1884 it had risen to 3.3 million; and by 1894 it had reached 4.5 million rubles—a more than twofold increase. The number of passports and travel permits issued in European Russia was 4.7 million in 1884, rising to 7.8–9.3 million in 1897–1898. Over these thirteen years, we observe a doubling of this figure. Taken as a whole, these data are consistent with other estimates—for example, the calculations of Mr. Uvarov, who collated largely outdated zemstvo statistical data pertaining to 126 counties across 20 gubernias and arrived at an estimated figure of 5 million seasonal migrant workers.{69} Mr. S. Korolenko, drawing on figures for the number of locally surplus laborers, put this figure at 6 million.

According to Mr. Nikolai, “the vast majority” of this total consists of agricultural laborers. I have set forth in detail in “The Development of Capitalism”[13] that the data and research of the 1860s, 1880s, and 1890s conclusively demonstrate the invalidity of this conclusion. While not the overwhelming majority, the largest segment of seasonal migrant workers are non-agricultural laborers. Below are the most comprehensive and most recent data on the provincial distribution of residence permits issued in European Russia in 1898:

If we assume that half of the seasonal laborers in the transitional gubernias are agricultural workers, then the most likely, approximate distribution would be as follows: roughly 4.2 million non-agricultural wage laborers and approximately 3.6 million agricultural wage laborers. Parallel to this figure, we must also consider the estimate offered by Mr. Rudnev{70}, who, in 1894, compiled zemstvo statistical data for 148 counties across 19 gubernias and arrived at an approximate figure of 3.5 million agricultural wage laborers. According to data from the 1880s, this figure encompassed both local and seasonal agricultural laborers. By the late 1890s, the number of seasonal agricultural laborers alone had reached such proportions.

The growth in the number of agricultural wage laborers is directly linked to the development of capitalist enterprise in agriculture, a process we have traced in both landed estates and peasant households. Take, for example, the adoption of machinery in agriculture. We have shown, using concrete data, what this shift toward entrepreneurial practices entails for the prosperous peasant. In the estate economy, the use of machinery—and of improved implements in general—inevitably leads to the displacement of sharecroppers by capitalist relations. Peasant tools are replaced by estate implements; old three-field rotation gives way to new, technologically advanced methods tied to changes in agricultural equipment; the serf-peasant is ill-suited to work with improved implements, and his place is taken by day laborers or hired hands.

In that region of European Russia where the use of machinery had developed most extensively following the reforms, the employment of hired labor—of migrant workers—was likewise most widespread. This region comprises the southern and eastern fringes of European Russia. The influx of agricultural laborers into this area gave rise to distinctly typical, sharply delineated capitalist relations. It is precisely these relations that warrant closer examination, so that we may juxtapose the old forms of labor—still dominant to this day—with the new currents that were beginning to break through ever more forcefully. First and foremost, it should be noted that the southern region boasted the highest wages in agriculture. According to data spanning an entire decade (1881–1891), which smooths out all random fluctuations, wages were highest in Russia in the gubernias of Taurida, Bessarabia, and Don; here, a year‑round agricultural laborer could expect to earn 143 rubles and 50 kopeks—including board—and a seasonal worker (working only during the summer) could expect 55 rubles and 67 kopeks. The next highest wage levels were found in the most industrialized regions—the gubernias of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vladimir, and Yaroslavl. Here, a year‑round rural laborer received 135 rubles and 80 kopeks, while a seasonal worker earned 53 rubles. The lowest wage levels, by contrast, were observed in the central agricultural gubernias (Kazan, Penza, Tambov, Ryazan, Tula, Orel, and Kursk)—that is, in the very heartland of corvée labor, serfdom, and all manner of vestiges of feudal bondage. In these regions, a year‑round agricultural laborer earned but 92 rubles and 95 kopeks—a sum fully one and a half times lower than in the most capitalist gubernias—and a seasonal worker earned 35 rubles and 64 kopeks, some 20 rubles less per summer than in the south. It was precisely from this central region that we witnessed the massive exodus of laborers. Each spring, more than 1.5 million people left these areas—some heading off to agricultural work (primarily to the south), others, as we shall see below, moving on to industrial gubernias—as well as taking up non‑agricultural employment in the capital cities and in the industrial gubernias. Lying between this principal region of labor migration and the two main regions of labor recruitment (the agricultural south and the capital cities with their two industrial gubernias) were a series of gubernias characterized by average wage levels. These gubernias drew workers from the “cheapest” and most impoverished center, while in turn sending a portion of their own labor force to the more lucrative regions. In his book “Free Labor,” based on an extraordinarily extensive body of material, Mr. S. Korolenko provides a detailed account of this process of labor mobility and population displacement. In this way, capitalism achieved a more even distribution of the population—certainly from the standpoint of capital’s needs—while leveling wages across the country, creating a truly unified, national labor market; gradually undermining the foundations of old modes of production, “enticing” the serf-peasant with high wages. Hence the endless complaints lodged by landowners against the moral corruption of local laborers, against the rampant drunkenness and debauchery brought about by labor migration, against the “corruption” of workers by the city, and so on and so forth.

By the end of the nineteenth century, fairly large-scale capitalist enterprises had taken root in agriculture in the region of greatest labor influx. Capitalist cooperatives emerged, for example, with the adoption of machinery such as threshing machines. Mr. Tezyakov, who described the living and working conditions of agricultural laborers in the Kherson gubernia{71}, notes that a horse‑drawn threshing machine required anywhere from 14 to 23 or more laborers, while a steam‑powered machine demanded 50 to 70. In some farms, as many as 500–1000 laborers would gather—figures that were extraordinarily high for agriculture. Capitalism made it possible to replace costly male labor with female and child labor. For instance, in the town of Kakhovka—one of the principal labor markets in the Taurida gubernia, where as many as 40,000 laborers once gathered, and where in the 1890s the number had fallen to 20–30 thousand—by 1890, 12.7% of the workforce consisted of women, and by 1895, that figure had risen to 25.6%. In 1893, children accounted for just 0.7% of the labor force; by 1895, that share had already climbed to 1.69%.

By recruiting laborers from every corner of Russia, capitalist enterprises sorted them according to their own needs, creating something akin to a hierarchy among factory workers. One distinguishes, for example, full‑time laborers, part‑time laborers—among whom one further identifies “strong‑arm laborers” (aged 16–20) and “light‑help laborers” (children aged 8–14). Not a trace remained of those old so‑called “patriarchal” relations between the landowner and his “own” peasant. Labor power became a commodity like any other. Serfdom of the “truly Russian” type disappeared, giving way to weekly cash payments, fierce competition, and strikes between workers and employers. The concentration of vast masses of laborers at hiring markets, coupled with incredibly harsh and unsanitary working conditions, led to attempts at public oversight of large-scale agricultural enterprises. Such efforts were characteristic of “large‑scale industry” in agriculture—but, of course, they could never attain real solidity in the absence of political freedom and open workers’ organizations. How grueling the working conditions were for migrant laborers becomes clear when one considers that the workday often lasted from 12½ to 15 hours. Traumatic injuries among workers engaged with machinery became commonplace. Occupational diseases began to emerge among laborers—such as those employed in threshing operations—and so on. All the “delights” of purely capitalist exploitation, in their most advanced, American form, could be observed in late‑nineteenth‑century Russia, alongside practices of corvée and barter farming that were thoroughly medieval in character—practices long since vanished in the advanced nations. The immense diversity of agrarian relations in Russia ultimately boiled down to an intricate interplay between feudal and bourgeois modes of exploitation.

To conclude our discussion of the conditions of wage labor in Russian agriculture, let us turn once more to the budgetary data pertaining to the households of the lower peasant strata. Wage labor here is often cloaked under the euphemistic terms “earnings” or “trades.” But how does the income derived from these earnings compare with the income generated by agricultural production? The budgets of horseless and single-horse peasants in Voronezh provide a precise answer. For the horseless household, total income from all sources amounts to 118 rubles and 10 kopeks, of which 57 rubles and 11 kopeks come from farming, while 59 rubles and 4 kopeks are derived from “trades.” Of this latter sum, 36 rubles and 75 kopeks stem from “personal trades,” and 22 rubles and 29 kopeks represent various other incomes—including, notably, income from land rental! For the single-horse peasant, total income reaches 178 rubles and 12 kopeks, comprising 127 rubles and 69 kopeks from farming and 49 rubles and 22 kopeks from trades (35 rubles from personal trades, 6 rubles from transportation, 2 rubles from “commercial and industrial establishments and enterprises,” and 6 rubles from miscellaneous income). When we deduct expenses related to agricultural operations, we are left with 69 rubles and 37 kopeks from farming, compared to 49 rubles and 22 kopeks from trades. This is how three-fifths of all peasant households in Russia eke out a meager existence. It is clear that the standard of living among such peasants is no higher—and in some cases even lower—than that of day laborers. In the same Voronezh Governorate, the average annual wage for a year‑round day laborer (over the decade 1881–1891) was 57 rubles, plus board worth 42 rubles. Meanwhile, the cost of supporting an entire family—seven8 rubles per year for a household of four persons, and 98 rubles per year for a household of five—was far greater than the income earned by the horseless peasant. The Russian peasant, squeezed by labor obligations, taxes, and capitalist exploitation, has been reduced to a level of subsistence so impoverished and hungry that it seems almost unbelievable in Europe. There, such social types are commonly referred to as paupers.

VI

In order to draw a comprehensive conclusion from everything we have discussed above regarding the disintegration of the peasantry, we will first present the only available aggregate data on European Russia found in the literature—data that allow us to assess the various groups within the peasantry across different historical periods. These are the figures from military census reports. In the second edition of my book, “The Development of Capitalism,” I collated these data for 48 gubernias of European Russia, covering the periods 1888–1891 and 1896–1900.[14] Below is an excerpt highlighting the most significant findings:

As I briefly noted earlier, these data bear witness to the growing expropriation of the peasantry. The entire one‑million‑household increase in rural households was entirely absorbed by the two lowest strata. The total number of horses declined over this period from 16.91 million to 16.87 million—meaning that, overall, the peasantry as a whole became slightly poorer in terms of equine capital. Even the upper stratum experienced a decline: whereas in 1888–1891 it averaged 5.5 horses per household, by 1896–1900 that figure had fallen to 5.4 horses per household.

From these data, it is easy to draw the conclusion that what is occurring in the peasantry is not “differentiation”: the poorest group has grown the most, while the wealthiest group has shrunk the most—in terms of household numbers. This is not differentiation; it is a leveling of poverty! And conclusions based on such methods can be found all too frequently in the literature. Yet if we ask whether the relative positions of the various groups within the peasantry have changed, we arrive at a different picture. In 1888–1891, half of the households in the lower strata held 13.7% of the total horse population; in 1896–1900, the same proportion persisted. In the first period, one-fifth of the households in the wealthiest strata controlled 52.6% of the total horse population; by the second period, that share had risen to 53.2%. Clearly, the relative standing of the various groups has remained virtually unchanged. The peasantry has grown poorer; the wealthier groups have become impoverished; the crisis of 1891 made itself felt in the most profound way—but the relationship between the rural bourgeoisie and the declining peasantry neither changed nor, in essence, could have changed.

This fact is often overlooked by those who attempt to judge the disintegration of the peasantry on the basis of isolated statistical data. It would be absurd, for example, to suppose that a few scattered figures on horse ownership could shed any meaningful light on the question of peasant decay. Such distributional data, in and of itself, proves nothing at all—unless it is examined in conjunction with the full body of information pertaining to peasant farming. Once we have sifted through these data and identified the common patterns linking such diverse factors as the distribution of land leases and land transfers, the adoption of improved tools and fertilizers, wage labor and land purchases, hired hands and livestock holdings—if we have demonstrated that all these varied aspects of the phenomenon are inextricably interrelated and that they in fact reveal the emergence of distinct economic types: the proletariat and the rural bourgeoisie—only then, and to the extent that this has been established, may we turn to individual data on horse ownership, even if only to illustrate the broader arguments outlined above. To the contrary, if one were to cite a single instance of declining horse numbers—in, say, the prosperous group over a given period—it would be sheer folly to draw from this isolated case any general conclusions about the relative positions of the rural bourgeoisie within the peasantry and the other social strata. In no capitalist country, and in no sector of the economy, can—or indeed should—one expect uniform, steady development under the sway of the market: capitalism can only advance in leaps and bounds, in zigzags—sometimes surging ahead with great rapidity, sometimes temporarily slipping back below its previous level. The crux of the Russian agrarian crisis and the impending revolution does not lie in the precise degree of capitalist development or in the pace of that development; rather, the central question is whether a capitalist crisis and revolution are indeed underway—and if so, whether they are unfolding in the context of the peasantry’s transformation into a rural bourgeoisie and a proletariat; whether the relations among individual households within the commune are, in fact, bourgeois in nature—or not. In other words: the primary task of any study of the agrarian question in Russia is to establish the fundamental facts necessary to characterize the class-based essence of agrarian relations. Only once we have determined which classes are involved and in what direction development is proceeding can we begin to address more specific questions—such as the rate of development, the particular forms taken by the overarching trend, and so forth.

At the heart of the Marxist understanding of post-reform peasant agriculture in Russia lies the recognition that this type of farming is fundamentally petty-bourgeois in character. The debates between economists aligned with the Marxist camp and the populist economists—above all, when the goal is to uncover the true nature of their disagreements—have always revolved around precisely this question: Is this characterization accurate? Is it applicable? Until this question is settled with complete clarity, no further progress can be made toward more concrete or practical issues. For example, to pursue any of the paths to resolving the agrarian question that were bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century would be an utterly hopeless and muddled endeavor—unless we first determine in which direction our agrarian evolution is actually heading, which classes stand to gain under one scenario or another, and so on.

The detailed data on peasant decomposition that we have presented above lay bare the very foundation upon which all other questions concerning the agrarian revolution rest—and without a firm grasp of this foundation, there can be no further progress. The intricate web of relationships among the various groups within the peasantry, which we have painstakingly examined at opposite ends of Russia, reveals to us the very essence of the socio‑economic relations prevailing within the commune. These relationships vividly demonstrate the petty-bourgeois nature of peasant farming in this particular historical context. When Marxists argued that the small-scale producer in agriculture—whether tending land held in allotments or some other form of tenure—is inevitably driven, as commodity production develops, toward the status of a petty bourgeois—this claim was met with skepticism; critics dismissed it as unsubstantiated, a crude abstraction transplanted from foreign models onto our own uniquely local conditions. Yet the data on group interactions—on wealthy commune members seizing leased land from impoverished fellow villagers, on the hiring of day laborers by the former and the subsequent transformation of the latter into wage laborers, and so on, and so forth, and so forth—these data all corroborate the theoretical conclusions of Marxism and render them incontrovertible. The question of the commune’s role in shaping Russia’s economic development is irrevocably settled by these findings, for it is precisely this real, actual trajectory of the commune—as opposed to some imagined or contrived path—that our data reveal. Despite the ostensibly equalizing nature of allotment land, despite periodic redistributions and the like, it turns out that the true course of economic development among communal peasants leads inexorably toward the formation of a rural bourgeoisie and the gradual displacement of the poorest households into the ranks of the proletariat. And as we shall see below, both Stolypin’s agrarian policy and the land nationalization advocated by the Laborites align with this same developmental trajectory—though between these two “solutions” to the agrarian question lies a profound difference in terms of the speed of social progress, the growth of productive forces, and the extent to which the interests of the masses are best served.

We must now turn to the question of the development of commercial agriculture in Russia. The preceding discussion has already taken for granted the well‑known fact that the entire post‑reform era has been characterized by a marked expansion of trade and exchange. To present statistical data corroborating this seems to us entirely superfluous. However, we must first demonstrate just how thoroughly contemporary peasant households are already subordinated to the market—and second, what particular forms agricultural production assumes as it becomes increasingly subject to market forces.

With regard to the first question, the most precise data are available in the budgetary statistics of the Voronezh zemstvo. Here we can isolate the monetary expenditures and revenues of the peasant household from the total expenditures and revenues (the gross totals for income and outlays were presented above). The following table illustrates the role of the market:

Thus, even the household of the average peasant—let alone those of the prosperous peasants, the impoverished semi‑proletarians, or the rural laborers—is subjected to the market to an extraordinarily strong degree. Consequently, any analysis of peasant farming that ignores the dominant and ever‑growing role of the market, of exchange, and of commodity production is fundamentally flawed. The abolition of serfdom‑based latifundia and landlord landownership—the measure on which the hopes of the Russian peasantry were pinned by the end of the nineteenth century—would strengthen rather than weaken the power of the market, since the growth of trade and commodity production is held back by feudal burdens and bondage.

As for the second question, it is essential to point out that the penetration of capital into agriculture is a complex process that cannot be properly understood if one confines oneself to broad, all‑Russian generalizations. Agricultural production does not suddenly become commercial, nor does it assume the same character across all farms or in every region of the country. On the contrary, the market typically subordinates one aspect of the complex agricultural enterprise in one locality, while in another locality it may subordinate a different aspect; the remaining aspects do not disappear, but instead adapt themselves to the “main”—that is, the monetary—side of the equation. For example, in one region, a predominantly commercial grain‑producing farm may emerge, with grain as the primary product destined for sale. Livestock raising plays a subordinate role in such a farm—and in cases of extreme specialization in crop cultivation, it may almost vanish altogether. In some instances, “wheat mills” in the American Midwest were organized for a single summer season with virtually no livestock at all. In other regions, by contrast, a commercial livestock‑raising operation may take shape, with meat or dairy products as the principal commodities produced for sale. Purely agrarian enterprises adapt themselves to livestock‑based systems. It is only natural that the scale of the farm and the methods of its organization will differ in each case. One cannot judge the extent of a suburban dairy farm solely by the size of its grain crops. Nor can one apply the same yardstick to large and small farms alike—whether one is dealing with a steppe grain farmer, a vegetable gardener, a tobacco grower, or a “dairy farmer” (to use the English term), and so forth.

The increasing integration of exchange and trade into agriculture gives rise to specialization, and this specialization continues to intensify. The same agricultural indicators—such as the number of horses, for example—take on different meanings in various regions of commercial agriculture. Among the horseless peasants in the areas surrounding the capital, for instance, there are sizable farmers who, say, raise dairy cattle, generate substantial turnover, and employ hired laborers. Of course, within the broader population of horseless and single‑horse farmers, the number of such “farmers” is quite small—but if we rely solely on aggregate data covering the entire country, we inevitably fail to account for this distinctive form of capitalism in agriculture.

This circumstance demands our special attention. To ignore it means that we cannot form a correct understanding of the development of capitalism in agriculture and easily fall into the trap of oversimplification. Only by taking into account the actual peculiarities of agricultural production can we fully grasp the complexity of this process. When it is claimed that agriculture, by virtue of its inherent characteristics, does not conform to the laws of capitalist development, this is utterly mistaken. While the specific features of agriculture do indeed slow the process of its subordination to the market, the inexorable advance of commercial agriculture continues unabated throughout the world—and in every country. Yet the forms through which commercial agriculture takes shape are, in fact, highly distinctive and demand specialized methods of study.

To clarify the foregoing, let us turn to concrete examples from various regions of commercial agriculture in Russia. In the grain-growing districts—such as Novorossiya and Zavolzhye—we observe an extraordinarily rapid increase in grain yields: between 1864 and 1866, these provinces lagged far behind the central black-earth regions, with a mere 2.1 quarters of net harvest per capita; by 1883–1887, however, they had surged ahead of the center, achieving a net yield of 3.4 quarters per capita. The primary characteristic of this region during the post-reform era was the relentless expansion of cultivated acreage—often accompanied by the most rudimentary methods of land cultivation, with farmers focusing almost exclusively on plowing as much land as possible. By the second half of the nineteenth century, something akin to America’s “wheat farms” had begun to take shape here. The scale of sown acreage—reaching as high as 271 desyatins per household among the more prosperous peasant households—provides a reliable indicator of both the size and the type of agricultural enterprise. In another region—namely, the industrial districts, especially those surrounding the capital—the very notion of such expansive cultivation is out of the question. Here, it is not commercial grain farming but rather commercial livestock breeding that stands out as the most distinctive feature. Neither the number of desyatins under cultivation nor the number of working horses offers a truly accurate picture of the farm’s economic profile; far more telling is the number of dairy cows—a clear measure of the farm’s dairy-oriented specialization. The shift toward crop rotation and the cultivation of forage crops, rather than simply expanding the acreage under cultivation, marks the hallmark of progress in large-scale farming. Fewer households maintain multiple horses; indeed, a reduction in the number of equines sometimes even signals an advance in agricultural efficiency. Yet the local peasants are wealthier in cattle than their counterparts elsewhere in Russia. According to Mr. Blagoveshchensky’s analysis of zemstvo statistics, the average household possessed 1.2 dairy cows; in 18 counties across St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tver, and Smolensk provinces, the figure rose to 1.6, while in a single county within St. Petersburg Province, it reached as high as 1.8 cows per household{72}. Both commercial capital and investment capital directed toward production operate here primarily in the realm of livestock products. The size of income depends above all on the number of dairy cows—and so “dairy farms” begin to emerge. Wealthy peasants increasingly hire agricultural laborers; as we have noted, many rural workers migrate from the depleted central regions to engage in agricultural work in the industrial provinces. In short, the same socio‑economic relations manifest themselves here in an entirely different form, under agro‑cultural conditions that differ markedly from those of purely agrarian economies.

And when we consider specialized crops—such as tobacco cultivation—or the integration of agriculture with the industrial processing of agricultural products (distilling, sugar beet production, oil pressing, potato starch manufacturing, and other related industries), the forms in which entrepreneurial relationships are expressed here prove to be quite distinct from those found in commercial grain farming, as well as from those that develop in commercial livestock breeding. To gauge the true nature of these enterprises, we must look either to the volume of specialized crops sown or to the scale of the industrial processing facility linked to a given farm.

Gross agricultural statistics, which deal solely with the extent of cultivated land or the number of head of livestock, fall woefully short of capturing this rich diversity of forms—and as a result, conclusions drawn exclusively from such statistics often prove to be mistaken. The growth of commercial agriculture proceeds at a far faster pace; the reach of exchange extends more broadly; and capital transforms rural economies far more profoundly than one might infer from aggregate gross figures and abstract averages.

VII

Let us now draw together the key points outlined above regarding the essence of the agrarian question and the agrarian crisis in Russia by the end of the nineteenth century.

What, then, lies at the heart of this crisis? M. Shanin, in his pamphlet “Municipalization or Division into Private Ownership” (Vilna, 1907), insists that our agricultural crisis is, in fact, an agro‑cultural crisis—that its deepest roots lie in the urgent need to modernize agricultural techniques, which in Russia were shockingly underdeveloped; in the imperative to adopt advanced systems of crop cultivation; and in similar demands for technological and organizational progress in rural life.

This view is mistaken, because it is far too abstract. The necessity of transitioning to higher forms of agricultural technology is beyond doubt; yet, first and foremost, this very transition had already begun in Russia after 1861. However slow the progress may have been, it is utterly indisputable that both landed estates and peasant households—through the emergence of a prosperous minority—were gradually shifting toward crop rotation, the adoption of improved implements, more systematic and meticulous soil fertilization, and the like. Now, since this gradual advance in agricultural technique has been a universal process unfolding since 1861, it is clear that merely pointing to it is insufficient to account for the widely acknowledged intensification of the agrarian crisis by the end of the nineteenth century.  Second, the two distinct “solutions” to the agrarian question that had begun to take shape in practice—the Stolypin reform, which sought to resolve the issue from above by preserving landlord landownership while ultimately dismantling the commune and allowing its wealthier members to exploit it through kulak appropriation—and the peasant (labor-based) solution, which aimed to abolish landlord landownership and nationalize all land—both approaches, in their own way, facilitated the transition to higher agricultural techniques and aligned with the broader trajectory of agro‑cultural progress. One solution grounded this progress in accelerating the exodus of impoverished peasants from agriculture; the other relied on hastening the displacement of serf laborers by abolishing feudal latifundia. It is an undeniable fact that impoverished peasants manage their own land with woefully poor results. Consequently, it is equally undeniable that if one were to place these lands at the mercy of a small clique of affluent peasants, subjecting them to exploitation and plunder, agricultural productivity would indeed rise. Yet it is equally certain that landlord-owned lands, cultivated through serf labor and debt bondage, are far less productive than allotment lands—even worse than those under customary tenure (recall the figures cited earlier: 54 poods per desyatina from allotment lands, 66 poods from economic holdings, 50 poods from lands under tenant cultivation, and 45 poods from lands rented out seasonally by peasants). The serf-based system of landlord farming represents the preservation of profoundly backward agricultural practices; it perpetuates barbarism—not only in agriculture but throughout social life as a whole. Thus, it is unquestionably true that if one were to uproot all forms of serf labor—that is, to completely abolish (and without compensation) all landlord landownership—agricultural productivity would soar.

Consequently, the essence of the agrarian question and the agrarian crisis does not lie in eliminating the obstacles to agricultural development, but rather in determining how these obstacles should be removed—and in deciding which class should bear the burden of this transformation, and by what means it should be carried out. To remove the impediments to the development of the country’s productive forces is, without question, not only a subjective necessity but also an objective imperative: such removal is inevitable, and no force can prevent it from occurring.

The error made by M. Shanin—and one shared by many other writers on the agrarian question—lies in his treatment of the need to advance agricultural technology in an overly abstract manner, failing to account for the unique ways in which feudal and capitalist elements were intertwined within Russian agriculture. The primary and most fundamental obstacle to the development of Russia’s rural productive forces is the legacy of serfdom—above all, serf labor and debt bondage; next come serf taxes, the unequal status of the peasant, his subordination to the upper classes, and so on, ad infinitum. The elimination of these vestiges of serfdom has long been an economic necessity—and the agrarian crisis at the end of the nineteenth century intensified to an extraordinary degree precisely because Russia’s journey toward liberation from the medieval past dragged on far too long, because serf labor and debt bondage persisted far too stubbornly. After 1861, these institutions decayed so slowly that the new social order required coercive measures to swiftly purge itself of serfdom.

So what, then, is this new economic organism of Russian agriculture? We have sought to explain this in great detail in our previous discussion, for economists belonging to the liberal‑populist camp often harbor particularly misguided conceptions on this very point. The new economic organism emerging from beneath the shell of serfdom is commercial agriculture—and capitalism. The economic structure of landlord farms, when viewed not through the lens of serf labor or the debt bondage imposed upon allotment peasants, reveals capitalist features with utter clarity. And the economic structure of peasant households—when we are able to look beneath the surface of the commune and observe what is actually happening in daily life, despite the official pretense of equal land ownership—again and again reveals purely capitalist traits everywhere. Despite all obstacles, the growth of commercial agriculture in Russia has been continuous; and this commercial agriculture inevitably evolves into capitalism, though the forms of this transformation are highly diverse and vary significantly from one region to another.

In what, then, must the violent removal of the medieval shell consist—a removal that has become indispensable for the further, unimpeded development of the new economic organism? In the abolition of medieval land ownership. In Russia, to this day, both landlord landownership and, to a considerable extent, peasant landownership remain medieval in character. We have seen how new economic conditions are breaking down these medieval frameworks and barriers of land tenure, compelling the poor peasant to surrender his ancestral allotment, while driving the prosperous peasant to assemble his relatively large farm from fragments of diverse lands—lands that are both allotted, purchased, and leased from the landlord. And even on landlord-owned land, the division of plots under labor services, under seasonal peasant leases, under economic cultivation, reveals that new systems of agricultural management are being built precisely outside the confines of the old, medieval system of land tenure.

This land ownership can be abolished at once, by decisively breaking with the past. Such a measure is the nationalization of land—a step that, more or less consistently, was demanded by all segments of the peasantry during the period 1905–1907. The abolition of private ownership of land does not alter in the slightest the bourgeois foundations of commercial and capitalist landholding. Nothing could be more mistaken than the view that land nationalization has anything in common with socialism—or even with the principle of equal land use. As for socialism, it is well known that socialism consists in the abolition of commodity production. Land nationalization, by contrast, merely transforms land into state property; such a transformation does not affect private farming in the slightest. Whether land is owned outright or becomes the “common heritage” of the entire country, of the entire people, the underlying system of agricultural production remains unchanged—just as the (capitalist) system of farming remains unchanged whether the prosperous peasant buys land “in perpetuity,” rents landlord or state-owned land, or “collects” the allotments of impoverished, insolvent peasants. Once exchange persists, it is absurd even to speak of socialism. And the exchange of agricultural products and means of production is entirely independent of the forms of land tenure. (I should note in passing that I am here concerned only with the economic significance of nationalization—not with defending it as a program; I have offered such a defense in the work cited above[15].)

As for equality in landholding, we have already demonstrated its practical application in the distribution of allotment land. We saw that allotment land was distributed within the commune in a fairly equitable manner, yielding only slightly in favor of the wealthy. Yet very little of this supposed equality ultimately survives, owing to the surrender of land by the poor and the concentration of leasehold rights in the hands of the affluent. It is clear that no matter how equitable landholding may be, it cannot eliminate the inequalities inherent in actual land use—as long as property distinctions between landowners persist and the system of exchange continues to exacerbate these very differences.

The economic significance of nationalization lies not where it is so often—and mistakenly—sought. Its true purpose is not to combat bourgeois relations (for nationalization is, as Marx long ago showed{73}, the most consistent of bourgeois measures), but rather to combat serfdom. The patchwork nature of medieval land tenure hinders economic development; estate-based restrictions impede commercial circulation; the mismatch between old landholding patterns and new modes of production gives rise to acute contradictions; landlords, through their latifundia, prolong the existence of corvée labor; peasants are confined, like so many in a ghetto, within the framework of allotment landholding—a framework that life itself shatters at every turn. Nationalization sweeps away all medieval relations in land tenure, completely dismantling the artificial barriers that divide the land, and renders the land truly free—for whom? For every citizen? Far from it. The freedom of the horseless peasant (that is, of 3.25 million households) consists, as we have seen, in the ability to lease out his allotment land. The land becomes free—for the owner, for the one who genuinely desires and is capable of cultivating it in accordance with the demands of modern agricultural conditions in general and the world market in particular. Nationalization would hasten the demise of serfdom and accelerate the development of purely bourgeois farming on land cleansed of all medieval debris. This, then, is the true historical significance of nationalization in Russia as it had taken shape by the end of the nineteenth century.

As for the other path—objectively not impossible—for clearing the way for capitalism in landholding, we have seen that it consists in the accelerated expropriation of communal lands by the wealthy and in the consolidation of private land ownership among the prosperous peasantry. The principal source of corvée labor and bondage remains untouched; landlord latifundia persist. It is clear that this method of paving the way for capitalism ensures the free development of productive forces to a far lesser degree than the first. For as long as latifundia endure, the corvée peasant, the system of sharecropping, small seasonal leases, and the cultivation of “lordly” lands with peasant implements will inevitably remain—in other words, the most backward forms of culture will endure, along with all that Asiatic barbarism which goes by the name of patriarchal rural life.

The two “solutions” to the agrarian question that I have outlined in developing bourgeois Russia correspond to two distinct paths of capitalist development in agriculture. I refer to these paths as the Prussian and the American. The former is characterized by the fact that medieval land‑holding relations are not abolished outright; rather, they are gradually adapted to capitalism, which, as a result, retains semi‑feudal features for a long time. Prussian landed property was not shattered by the bourgeois revolution; instead, it survived and became the foundation of the “Junker” estate—a fundamentally capitalist system that nonetheless could not entirely escape certain forms of dependency on the rural population, such as the Gesindeordnung[16] and the like. Because of this, the social and political dominance of the Junkers was consolidated for many decades after 1848, and the development of productive forces in German agriculture proceeded at a far slower pace than in America. There, by contrast, the basis of capitalist agriculture was not the old slave‑owning estates of large landowners—though the Civil War had destroyed those slave‑based economies—but rather the free farming enterprise of the independent yeoman farmer, cultivating land that was free from all medieval constraints, from serfdom and feudalism on the one hand, and, on the other, from the fetters of private land ownership. In America, land was distributed from its vast land reserves at a nominal fee, and it was only on this thoroughly capitalist foundation that private land ownership could now fully develop.

Both of these paths of capitalist development became strikingly clear in Russia after 1861. The progress of the landed gentry’s agricultural enterprises is undeniable—and the slowness of this progress is neither accidental nor arbitrary, but rather an inevitable consequence of the lingering vestiges of serfdom. It is equally clear that the more free the peasantry becomes, the less the remnants of serf law weigh upon them (as is the case, for example, in the South, where all these favorable conditions prevail), and, ultimately, the better the peasantry is generally provided with land, the more profound the disintegration of the peasant class, and the faster the emergence of a class of rural entrepreneurs—yeoman farmers. The entire question of the country’s future development hinges on which of these two paths will ultimately prevail over the other—and, accordingly, on which class will carry out the necessary and inevitable transformation: the old landlord‑landowner or the free peasant‑farmer.

It is often assumed among us that the nationalization of land means expropriating land from commercial circulation. The majority of advanced peasants and peasant ideologues unquestionably hold this view. But this perspective is fundamentally mistaken—in fact, the opposite is true. Private land ownership actually stands as an obstacle to the free application of capital to land. Consequently, under a system of free state‑leased land—which is, in essence, what nationalization amounts to in bourgeois society—land is drawn into commercial circulation far more vigorously than when private land ownership prevails. The freedom to apply capital to land, the freedom of competition in agriculture, are far greater under free leasehold than under private ownership. Nationalization of land is, so to speak, landlordism without landlords. And on the role of landlordism in the process of capitalist agricultural development, Marx offers a remarkably profound analysis in “Theories of Surplus Value.” I cited his argument in the aforementioned work on the agrarian program, but given the importance of this issue, I will allow myself to repeat it here once more[17].

In the section on the historical conditions underlying Ricardo’s theory of rent (“Theorien über den Mehrwert,” Volume II, Part 2, Stuttgart, 1905, pp. 5–7[18]), Marx observes that Ricardo and Anderson “start from a view that seems exceedingly strange on the European continent.” Specifically, they assume that “there is no such thing as land ownership as an obstacle to the application of capital to land.” At first glance, this appears to be a contradiction, since it is precisely in England that feudal land ownership is regarded as having been preserved in its most complete form. Yet Marx explains that it was precisely in England that capital “wielded its power over traditional agricultural practices with a ruthlessness unmatched anywhere else in the world.” In this respect, England is “the most revolutionary country in the world.” “Every historically inherited arrangement that clashed with the conditions of capitalist production in agriculture—or failed to conform to those conditions—was mercilessly swept away: not only were rural settlements reorganized, but the very settlements themselves were obliterated; not only were the dwellings and residential centers of the agricultural population dismantled, but the population itself was uprooted; not only were the original centers of economic activity eradicated, but the very modes of agricultural production were transformed. Among the Germans,” Marx continues, “economic arrangements were shaped by traditional patterns of communal landholdings (Feldmarken), by the distribution of agricultural centers, by well‑known population clusters. But among the English, the historical patterns of agricultural practice were gradually forged by capital, beginning in the fifteenth century. The English technical term ‘clearing of estates’—‘land clearance’—is unknown in any continental country. What, then, does this ‘clearing of estates’ actually signify? It means that neither the settled rural population was taken into account—indeed, they were driven out; nor the existing villages—these were leveled to the ground; nor the farm buildings—these were torn down; nor the particular forms of agricultural production—these were radically altered in a single stroke, for example, turning arable fields into pastureland for livestock. In short, rather than respecting the conditions of production as they had existed through tradition, these conditions were historically reshaped so as to meet, in each specific case, the demands of the most profitable application of capital. Consequently, there truly is no such thing as land ownership in the sense that land ownership grants capital—the farmer—a free hand to operate, concerned solely with the pursuit of monetary income. A Pomeranian landowner” (Marx has in mind Rodbertus, whose theory of rent he refutes brilliantly and in meticulous detail in this work)—“whose sole preoccupation is with old‑fashioned communal lands, agricultural centers, landholding associations, and the like—may well throw up his hands in horror at Ricardo’s ‘unhistorical’ view of the evolution of agrarian relations.” In reality, however, “English conditions are the only conditions under which modern land ownership has developed in a manner fully consistent with ideal perfection—that is, land ownership as transformed by capitalist production. In this respect, English theory—namely, Ricardo’s theory of rent—is classical for the modern, i.e., capitalist, mode of production.”

In England, this land clearance proceeded in revolutionary forms, marked by the violent dismantling of peasant landholdings. The overthrow of antiquated, obsolete structures is absolutely inevitable in Russia as well—but the nineteenth century (and even the first seven years of the twentieth) had yet to settle the question of which class, and in what form, would carry out the transformation we so urgently need. We have shown above what the current basis of land distribution in Russia looks like. We have seen that 10.5 million peasant households, holding 75 million desyatins of land, stand opposed to 30,000 latifundia owners who control 70 million desyatins. One possible outcome of the struggle—which is bound to intensify under such conditions—is that the landholdings of ten million households will nearly double, while the landholdings of the top thirty thousand will vanish. Let us consider this potential outcome purely from a theoretical standpoint, examining how the agrarian question had evolved in Russia by the end of the nineteenth century. What would the results of such a transformation be? From the perspective of landholding relations, it is clear that medieval allotment-based landholding and medieval landlord landholding would be completely restructured. The old order would be utterly swept away. No trace of traditional landholding relationships would remain. So what force would determine the new patterns of land ownership? The “principle” of equality? This is the view held by the advanced peasant, influenced by Narodnik ideology—and this is also the belief of the Narodniks themselves. But this is an illusion. Within the commune, the “principle” of equality, though recognized by law and sanctified by custom, in practice leads to the adaptation of landholding to differences in property wealth. And based on this economic fact—repeatedly confirmed both by Russian data and by evidence from Western Europe—we assert that any hope of achieving equality would prove to be nothing more than an illusion, while the reorganization of landholding would remain the only lasting and solid result. How significant is such a result? Extremely significant, for no other measure, no other reform, no other transformation could offer such comprehensive guarantees of the fastest, broadest, and most unimpeded progress of agricultural technology in Russia—and of the complete eradication from our lives of all vestiges of serfdom, estate-based privilege, and Asiatic backwardness.

The progress of technology?—some might object. But have we not already demonstrated, through precise data, that estate-based farming outperforms peasant farming in terms of forage cultivation, machine utilization, fertilizer application, livestock quality, and, of course, many other respects? Indeed, this has been shown, and the fact is utterly beyond dispute. Yet we must not forget that all these differences in agricultural organization, technology, and the like ultimately converge in yields. And we have seen that the harvests from estate lands—whether under sharecropping or other forms of tenancy managed by peasants—are lower than those from allotment lands. This is precisely the circumstance that is almost always overlooked when discussing the agrarian level of estate and peasant farming in Russia! Estate farming stands higher because it is conducted on a capitalist basis. The crux of the matter is that this “because” had, by the end of the nineteenth century, largely given way to the prevailing system of landholding in our core regions. As long as the serf-peasant continues to labor on estate lands using his age‑old tools, methods, and practices, estate landownership remains the primary cause of backwardness and stagnation. The land reform we are considering would raise yields on sharecropped and leased lands (as the figures above show: 50 and 45 poods, compared with 54 poods on allotment lands and 66 poods on owner‑planted crops). Even if such yields were to rise only to the level of those on allotment lands, that alone would represent an enormous step forward. But it is self‑evident that yields on allotment lands would also increase—both because the peasant would be freed from the yoke of feudal latifundia, and because allotment lands would then, like all other state lands, become freehold, equally accessible—not to all citizens, but to those who possess agricultural capital, that is, to farmers.

This conclusion does not at all follow from the yield data we have examined. On the contrary, these data serve merely as a vivid illustration of the broader conclusion drawn from the totality of evidence concerning the evolution of Russian estate and peasant farming. To refute this conclusion, one must first disprove the fact that the history of Russian agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century was, in essence, a history of the replacement of serf‑based relations of production with bourgeois ones.

If we look at the current number of peasant households, one might get the impression that the agrarian transformation we are considering would lead to an extreme fragmentation of agriculture. Good heavens—thirteen million households spread across 280 million desetins! Is that not an appalling dispersion? We reply: we perceive this vast dispersion only because today thirteen million households cultivate less land than the 280 million desetins once did! Therefore, the change we are concerned with could in no way worsen the situation in this regard. Moreover, we may further ask: is there any reason to believe that the total number of households will remain unchanged under this reform? It is common to view things in this way, influenced by Narodnik theories and the views held by the peasants themselves—peasants who are deeply attached to the land and even dream of transforming industrial workers into smallholder farmers. Undoubtedly, some Russian industrial workers at the end of the nineteenth century shared this peasant perspective. But the question is: is this perspective truly valid? Does it correspond to objective economic conditions and the actual course of economic development? It suffices to pose this question clearly in order to see that the peasant outlook is shaped by a bygone, irretrievable past—and not by a burgeoning future. The peasant viewpoint is mistaken; it represents the ideology of yesterday, whereas economic development, in reality, is driving not toward an increase, but toward a decrease in the agricultural population.

The change in land‑holding relations we are examining will neither halt nor reverse this process of declining agricultural population—a process that is common to all countries undergoing the advance of capitalism. One might ask: how, exactly, could this change possibly affect the decline of the agricultural population, now that access to land has become free for all? I will answer with a quotation from a Duma speech delivered by a peasant deputy (from Poltava Governorate), Mr. Chizhevsky. At the session of May 24, 1906, he stated: “Our peasants—those very electors who sent us here—once made the following calculation: ‘If we were just a bit wealthier, and if each of our families could spend five or six rubles a year on sugar, then in every county where sugar beets could be grown, several sugar factories would spring up, in addition to those that already exist.’ It is perfectly natural that, should these factories come into being, how many hands would be required to manage them as their operations intensified! Sugar production would expand, and so on.” (“Stenographic Reports,” p. 622).

This is an extraordinarily revealing admission made by a local official. If one were to ask him about the broader significance of agrarian reform, he would likely espouse populist views. But when the question shifts from “opinions” to the concrete consequences of reform, capitalist reality swiftly trumps populist utopia. For what the peasants told their deputy, Mr. Chizhevsky, is nothing less than the truth of capitalism—the truth of capitalist reality. The expansion in the number of sugar factories and the increase in their productivity would indeed be tremendous under even the most modest improvements in the lot of smallholder farmers; and it goes without saying that not only beet-sugar production, but every branch of manufacturing—textiles, ironworking, machine building, construction in general, and so on—would receive a powerful boost, demanding “a vast pool of labor.” This economic imperative would prove stronger than all the lofty hopes and dreams of egalitarianism. Three and a quarter million horseless households will never become “landowners,” no matter what agrarian reforms are enacted, no matter how land tenure is altered, no matter how “land distribution” is carried out. As we have seen, these millions of households—and even a significant portion of those with just one horse—struggle on their meager plots of land, often leasing out their allotted holdings. The industrial development of America would inevitably draw the majority of such hopeless “farmers” away from agriculture in a capitalist society, and no “right to land” could ever prevent this shift. Thirteen million smallholders, armed with the most pitiful, meager, and antiquated implements, tilling both their own allotments and the estates of their landlords—this is the reality of today; this is artificial overpopulation in agriculture, artificial in the sense that it represents a forcible retention of serfdom’s remnants, which long ago had outlived their usefulness and could not endure a single day without executions, shootings, punitive expeditions, and the like. Any genuine improvement in the condition of the masses, any serious blow against the vestiges of serfdom, would inevitably undermine this rural overpopulation, dramatically accelerating (though slowly, even now) the process of drawing people away from agriculture and into industry, reducing the number of households from 13 million to a far lower figure, and guiding Russia forward along an American path rather than a Chinese one—as it is doing today.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the agrarian question in Russia had placed before the social classes the task of abolishing the old, serf-based order and purifying land ownership—clearing the way for capitalism, for the growth of productive forces, and for the free and open struggle of classes. And it is this very class struggle that will determine how this task is ultimately resolved.

July 1, New Style, 1908