The newspapers are conducting disputes regarding a new book by the former Minister of Agriculture Yermolov about the "contemporary fire epidemic in Russia." The Liberal press has noted that fires in the countryside after the revolution have not weakened, but have intensified. The reactionary newspapers have seized upon Yermolov's cries and wails about the "impunity of arsonists," about "terror in the countryside," and so forth. The number of fires in the countryside has increased to extraordinary proportions: for example, in Tambov Province from 1904 to 1907—twofold, in Orel Province—two and a half times, in Voronezh Province—threefold. "Peasants of any considerable means," writes the *Novoe Vremya*, servile before the government, "wish to move to individual farms, attempt to introduce new agricultural methods, but as if in enemy territory they experience partisan siege from the part of the brutalized countryside rabble. They are burned and harassed, harassed and burned, 'just drop everything and flee, wherever your eyes lead you.'"

An unpleasant admission the supporters of the tsar's government are forced to make! For us Social-Democrats, the new data are not without interest, as further confirmation of the government's lies and the pitiful impotence of Liberal politics.

The Revolution of 1905 fully demonstrated that the old order in the Russian countryside stands irrevocably condemned by history. No force in the world will be able to strengthen these orders. How are they to be remade? The peasant masses answered this through their uprisings of 1905, answered through their deputies in the First and Second Dumas.{42} The lands of the landowners must be seized from the landowners without compensation. When 30,000 landowners (with Nicholas Romanov at their head) possess 70 million desiatinas of land, while 10 million peasant households possess almost the same quantity, nothing but bondage, hopeless poverty, ruin, and stagnation in the entire national economy can result. And the Social-Democratic workers' party called the peasants to revolutionary struggle. Workers throughout all Russia through their mass strikes of 1905 united and directed the peasant struggle. The Liberals' plan to "reconcile" peasants with landowners through "redemption at fair valuation" was an empty, pitiful, traitorous evasion.

How does the Stolypin government wish to remake the old countryside order? It wishes to accelerate the complete ruin of the peasants, to preserve the landowners' lands, to help a negligible handful of wealthy peasants "move to individual farms," to draw off as much communal land as possible. The government understood that the entire mass of peasants stands against it, and it strives to find allies among the peasant rich.

To implement the government's "reform," one needs "20 years of peace," Stolypin himself said once. By "peace" he means the submission of the peasants, the absence of struggle against violence. But without the violence of the land captains and other authorities, without violence at every step, without violence against tens of millions, without the suppression of the slightest manifestations of their independence, Stolypin's "reform" cannot be carried out. "Peace" not only for 20 years, but even for three years—Stolypin has not created and cannot create: therein lies the unpleasant truth that the book of the former minister about countryside fires has reminded the tsar's servants of.

The peasants have no other way out, nor can they have any other way out of that position of desperate need, poverty, and starvation to which the government reduces them, save through mass struggle together with the proletariat for the overthrow of tsarist power. The preparation of the forces of the proletariat for such a struggle, the creation, development, and strengthening of proletarian organizations—therein lies the immediate task of the RSDLP.

*Rabochaya Gazeta* No. 2, December 18 (31), 1910

Printed from the text of *Rabochaya Gazeta*