V. I.

Lenin

The Question of the (General) Agrarian Policy of the Present Government [1]

The agrarian policy of the government has radically changed
in character since the Revolution of 1905. Formerly, the autocracy followed
the line of Katkov and Pobedonostsev and tried to appear in the eyes of the
masses of the people as standing “above classes”, safeguarding the
interests of the peasant masses, safeguarding them from loss of land and
from ruin. Needless to say, this hypocritical “concern” for the muzhik in
reality masked a purely feudal policy which the above-mentioned “public
men” of old pre-revolutionary Russia were conducting with pig-headed
directness in all spheres of public and state life. Autocracy in those days
relied entirely on the backwardness, ignorance and lack of
class-consciousness on the part of the peasant masses. By posing as a
champion of the “inalienability” of the peasants’ allotments, as an
advocate of the “village commune”, [2] the autocracy, in the pre-revolutionary period, tried to
find support in the economic immobility of Russia, in the deep political
slumber of the masses of the peasant population. At that time the land
policy was through and through that of the feudal aristocracy.

The Revolution of 1905 caused a change in the entire land policy of the
autocracy. Stolypin, punctiliously carrying out the dictates of the Council
of the United Nobility, decided, as he himself expressed it, to “bank on
the strong”. This means that our government was no longer able to
pose as a champion of the weak after the mighty awakening
of the proletariat and the broad strata of the democratic peasantry which
the Revolution of 1905 brought about in Russia. The people, having
succeeded in making the first (though as yet inadequate) breach in the old feudal state system of Russia, proved
thereby that they had so far awakened from their political slumber, that
the tale of the government protecting the “village commune” and the
“inalienability of allotments”, of the defence of the weak by a
government standing above classes—that this tale had finally lost
credence among the peasants.

Up to 1905 the government had been able to entertain the hope that the
downtrodden state and inertness of the peasants in the mass, of people
incapable of ridding them selves of the age-long political prejudices of
slavery, patience and obedience, would serve as a prop for it. As long as
the peasants remained obedient and downtrodden, the government
could pretend that it “banked on the weak”, i.e., was taking
care of the weak, although, in fact, it was concerned exclusively with the
feudal landowners and the preservation of its own absolute power.

After 1905, the collapse of the old political prejudices was so
profound and widespread that the government and the “Council of the United
Feudalists” that controlled it saw that they could no longer gamble on the
ignorance and the sheep-like obedience of the muzhik. The government saw
that there could be no peace between it and the masses of
the peasant population it had ruined and reduced to complete destitution
and starvation. It was this consciousness of the impossibility of “peace”
with the peasants that caused the “Council of the United Feudalists” to
change its policy. The Council decided to try at all costs to split the
peasantry and to create out of it a stratum of “new landowners”,
well-to-do peasant proprietors, who would “ conscientiously ”
protect from the masses the peace and security of the huge landed
estates, which, after all, had suffered somewhat from the onslaught of the
revolutionary masses in 1905.

Therefore, the change in the entire agrarian policy of the government
after the revolution was by no means accidental. On the contrary,
from the class point of view, this change was a necessity
for the government and for the “Council of the United Feudalists”. The
government could find no other way out. The government saw that there could
be no “peace” with the masses of the peasants, that the peasantry had
awakened from its age-long slumber of serfdom. The government had no alternative but to try by frantic efforts to split the
peasantry, no matter how much this might ruin the villages, to surrender
the countryside to “plunder and exploitation” by the kulaks and the
well-to-do muzhiks, and to seek support in an alliance between the
feudal nobles and the “new landowners”, i.e., an alliance with the rich
peasant proprietors, with the peasant bourgeoisie.

Stolypin himself, who served the “Council of the United Feudalists”
faithfully and well and carried out their policy, said “Give me twenty
years of quiet and I shall reform Russia.” By “quiet” he meant the
quiet of a graveyard , the quiet suffering of the countryside
silently enduring like sheep the unprecedented ruin and destitution that
had overtaken it. By “quiet” he meant the quiet of the land owners who would like to see the peasants utterly inert, down trodden,
offering no protest, ready to starve peacefully and amiably, to give up
their land, to abandon their villages, to be ruined, as long as it were
convenient and pleasing to the landed gentry. By the reform of Russia,
Stolypin meant a change that would leave in the villages only contented
landowners, contented kulaks and bloodsuckers, and scattered, downtrodden,
weak and helpless farm labourers.

Quite naturally and understandably Stolypin, as a land owner, wanted
twenty years of this graveyard quiet in Russia, wanted it with all his
heart. But we now know, we now all see and feel, that the result of it has
been famine affecting thirty million peasants and neither “reform” nor
“quiet”, that there has been an unparalleled (unparalleled even in
long-suffering Russia) intensification of destitution and ruin, and
extremely great bitterness and ferment among the peasantry.

To make clear the causes of the failure of the government’s
so-called “Stolypin” agrarian policy, the policy which the State Duma is
invited once more to approve by sanctioning the budget (and which
undoubtedly will be approved by the landowners’ parties in the Duma), I
shall dwell at somewhat greater length on the two principal, so to
say, trump cards of our “new” agrarian policy:

First, on the resettlement of the peasants, and, secondly, on the
notorious farmsteads .

As far as resettlement is concerned, the Revolution of 1905 revealed to
the landowners the political awakening of the peasantry and forced them to
“open” the safety valve a little and, instead of hampering migration as
they had done before, to try to pack off as many restless
peasants as possible to Siberia in an attempt to render the atmosphere less
“tense” in Russia.

Did the government achieve success? Did it achieve any pacification of the peasantry, any improvement in the peasants’
conditions in Russia and in Siberia? Just the opposite. The government only
brought about a new sharpening and worsening of the conditions of the
peasants both in Russia and in Siberia .

I shall prove this to you in a moment.

In the explanatory memorandum of the Minister of Finance on the budget
for 1913 we find the usual official optimism and applause for the
“successes” of the government’s policy.

The settlers, we are told, transform the unsettled regions into
“civilised localities”, the settlers are growing rich, improving their
farms, and so on and so forth. The usual official panegyric. The old, old
“ everything is all right ”, “ all quiet on Shipka ”. [3]

The only pity is that the explanatory memorandum completely ignored the statistics of returned settlers! A strange and significant
silence!

Yes, gentlemen, the number of settlers increased after 1905 to
an average of half a million a year. Yes, by 1908, the migration wave
reached its highest point—665,000 settlers in one year. But later the
wave began rapidly to recede , and in 1911 dropped to
189,000 . Is it not clear that the highly praised government
“arrangements” for the settlers have turned out to be bluff ? Is
it not clear that only six years after the revolution the government is
back where it started ?

And the statistics of the number of returned settlers—so prudently
ignored by the Minister of Finance in his “explanatory” (or rather,
confusing) memorandum—these statistics reveal a monstrous
increase in the number of returned settlers—up to 30 or 40 per cent in 1910, and up to 60 per cent in 1911 . This gigantic wave of
returning settlers reveals the desperate suffering, ruin and destitution of
the peasants who sold everything at home in order to go to Siberia, and who are now forced
to come back from Siberia completely ruined and pauperised.

This enormous stream of destitute returned settlers reveals with
irrefutable clarity the complete failure of the government’s
resettlement policy. To produce tables of figures showing the improvement
in the farms of the settlers who remained in Siberia for a long time (as
was done in the explanatory memorandum on the estimates of the resettlement
administration) and to hush up the complete and utter ruin of
tens of thousands of returned settlers simply means distorting the
facts! This means presenting the Duma deputies with castles in Spain and
fairy-tales about general well being, whereas in fact we observe ruin and
destitution.

Gentlemen, the fact that the Minister of Finance’s explanatory
memorandum conceals the figures of the returned settlers, their
desperate, destitute condition, their utter ruin, signifies
frantic attempts on the part of the government to conceal the truth . The attempts are in vain. The truth will out! The truth will
have to be admitted. The destitution of the ruined peasants who
returned to Russia, the destitution of the ruined old inhabitants
of Siberia, will have to be spoken about.

In order to explain graphically the conclusion I have drawn concerning
the complete failure of the government’s resettlement policy, I shall quote
another opinion, that of a civil servant, who for twenty-seven
years—twenty-seven years , gentlemen!—served in the Forestry
Department in Siberia, an official who has studied resettlement conditions,
an official who was unable to bear all the abominations that are
committed in our resettlement administration.

This civil servant is State Councillor A. I. Komarov, who, after
serving for twenty-seven years, was compelled to acknowledge that the
notorious journey made to Siberia in 1910 by Stolypin and Krivoshein, the
Prime Minister and the Chief Administrator of Agriculture and Land
Settlement respectively, was a “ clownish tour”—such is
literally the expression used by a State Councillor, a civil servant of
twenty-seven years’ standing! This official resigned the service ,
lie could not tolerate the deception of all Russia that was being practised
by means of such “clownish tours”, and he published a special pamphlet containing a truthful account of all
the thefts and embezzlement of government funds, the utter absurdity,
brutality and wastefulness of our resettlement policy.

The pamphlet is entitled The Truth About the Resettlement Scheme and was published in St. Petersburg in the present year, 1913,
price sixty kopeks—not expensive, considering the wealth of revealing
material it contains. As usual our government, in resettlement, as in all
other “affairs” and “branches of administration”, is exerting every
effort to conceal the truth, and fears lest “its dirty linen be washed in
public”. Komarov had to lie low as long as he was in the service,
he had to write his letters of exposure to the news papers under an
assumed name , and the authorities tried to “ catch ” the
correspondent. Not all civil servants are able to leave the service and
publish pamphlets that reveal the truth! But one such pamphlet enables us
to judge what rottenness, what an abomination of desolation reigns in
general in this “dark realm”.

The civil servant A. I. Komarov is not a revolutionary, nothing like
one. He himself tells us about his loyal hostility to the theories of both
the Social-Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. He is just an
ordinary, very loyal, Russian civil servant, who would be quite satisfied
with elementary, rudimentary honesty and decency. He is a man who is
hostile to the Revolution of 1905 and ready to serve the
counter-revolutionary government.

It is all the more significant, therefore, that even such a man has
left, has abandoned the service, shaking its dust from his feet. He could
not stand “ the complete disruption of all hat is called rational forestry ” (p. 138) by our resettlement policy. He could not
stand the “ expropriation of the arable land of the old inhabitants ” which leads to the “gradual impoverishment of the old inhabitants ” (pp. 137 and 138). He could not stand “state
spoilation or, rather, devastation of Siberian lands and
forests that makes the plunder of the Bashkirian lands that once
took place seem trivial indeed ” (p. 3).

The following are Komarov’s conclusions:

“ Absolute unpreparedness of the Chief
Resettlement Administration for work on a large scale ... absolute lack of
planning in the work and its bad quality ... allotment of plots with soil unsuitable for
agriculture, where there is no water at all, or with no drinking water ” (p. 137).

When the tide of migration rose, the officials were caught
napping. They “tore to pieces areas of state forest that had been surveyed
only the day before ... took whatever they first laid eyes on, anything so
long as they could accommodate, get rid of, the scores of emaciated exhausted people hanging around the resettlement centre and standing
for long hours outside the resettlement office...” (p. 11).

Here are a few examples. The Kurinsky area is set apart for
settlers. This area consists of land that had been taken from the native
population near the Altai salt works. The natives have been robbed. The new
settlers get salt water unfit for drinking purposes! The government wastes
money endlessly on digging wells—but without success. The new settlers
have to drive 7 or 8 (seven or eight!) versts for water! (p. 101).

The Vyezdnoi area in the upper reaches of the River Mann, where thirty
families were settled. After seven haard years the new settlers finally
became convinced that farming was impossible there. Nearly all of them fled. The few who remained engage in hunting and fishing (p. 27).

The Chuna-Angara region: hundreds of plots are mapped out—900 plots, 460 plots, etc. There are no settlers. Impossible to live
there. Mountain ridges, marshes, undrinkable water.

And now the civil servant, A. I. Komarov, tells about those returned
settlers whom the Minister of Finance did not mention the truth
the government finds unpleasant .

“ There are hundreds of thousands of them ,” writes civil servant Komarov, referring to the ruined and
destitute returning settlers. “Those returning are the sort who,
in the future revolution, if it takes place, are destined to play a
terrible role.... The man who is returning is not the one who all his life
has been a farm labourer ...
but the one who until recently was a property-owner, a man who never
dreamed that he and the land could exist apart. This man is justifiably
exasperated, to him it is a mortal offence that he has not been provided
for, but, on the contrary, has been ruined—this man is a menace to any
political system” (p. 74).

Thus writes Mr. Komarov, a civil servant who is terrified of the
revolution. Komarov is mistaken in thinking that only landowner “political systems” are possible. In the best and
most civilised states they manage to get along even without the
landowners. Russia could also manage without them to the advantage of the
people.

Komarov exposes the ruin of the old inhabitants. “Crop failures”—what he really means is famine—arising from the plunder of
the old inhabitants, began to visit even the “Siberian Italy”—Minusinsk
Uyezd. Mr. Komarov exposes the way in which the contractors rob the
Treasury, the absolute fiction, the falsity of the reports and plans drawn
up by the officials, the worthlessness of their work which swallowed up
millions, such as the Ob-Yenisei Canal, the waste of hundreds of millions of rubles .

All our resettlement schemes, states this God-fearing modest official,
are “ nothing but one long and unpleasant anecdote ” (p. 134).

Such is the truth concerning the returned settlers that has been hushed up by the Minister of Finance! Such in
reality is the complete failure of our resettlement policy! Ruin and destitution both in Russia and in
Siberia. Plunder of lands, the destruction of forests, false
reports and official mendacity and hypocrisy.

Let us pass on to the question of the farmsteads.

On this question, too, the explanatory memorandum of the Minister of
Finance gives us the same, general, meaningless, official, hypocritical
data (or rather alleged data) as on the question of migration.

We are informed that by 1912 over one and a half million families had
definitely abandoned the village commune; that over a million of these
families have been established on farmsteads.

There is not a single truthful word anywhere in the government reports about the real state of the farmsteads!

Yet we know already, from the descriptions given of the new land
settlements by honest observers (like the late Ivan Andreyevich Konovalov)
and from our own observations of the countryside and of peasant life, that
there are farmstead peasants of two altogether different
categories. The government, by confusing these categories, by giving data
of a general kind, is only deceiving the people.

One category, an insignificant minority, are the well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, who even before the new land settlement schemes were
introduced, lived very well. Such peasants, by leaving the village commune
and buying up the allotments of the poor, are undoubtedly enriching them
selves at other people’s expense, and still further ruining and enslaving
the masses of the population. But, I repeat, there are very few
farmstead peasants of this type.

The other category predominates, and predominates to an overwhelming
degree—that of the ruined destitute peasants, who set up farmsteads out
of sheer need, because they had nowhere else to go. These peasants say:
“Nowhere to go, then let us set up a farmstead.” Starving and toiling on
their beggarly farms, they clutch at anything for the sake of the
resettlement grant, for the sake of the loan they can obtain by settling on
a farmstead. On these farmsteads they suffer untold hardships; they sell
all their grain in order to pay the bank the instalment on the loan; they
are always in debt; they live like beggars in a state of dire distress;
they are driven from the farmsteads for defaulting with their instalments and they are finally transformed into vagabonds.

Now, if instead of handing us meaningless pictures of fictitious
prosperity, official statistics bad truthfully in formed us of the number
of these destitute farmsteaders who are living in dug-outs, who
keep cattle in their own miser able quarters, who never have enough to eat,
whose children are sick and in rags—then we would hear the
“ truth about the farmsteads ”.

But the point is that the government does its utmost to conceal this
truth. Independent, detached observers of peasant life are persecuted and
sent out of the villages. Peasants writing to the newspapers come up
against tyranny, oppression and persecution by the authorities and the
police, of a nature unparalleled even in Russia.

A handful of rich farmsteaders are represented as masses of thriving
peasants! The official lie about the kulaks is represented as the truth
about the countryside! But the government will not succeed in concealing
the truth. The attempts of the government to conceal the truth about the
ruined and starving countryside only call forth legitimate anger
and indignation among the peasants. The fact that tens of millions
of peasants are starving, as was the case last year and the year before, reveals better than any lengthy
argumentation the mendacity and hypocrisy of the tales about the beneficial
influence of the farmsteads. This fact shows most clearly that even after the change in the government’s agrarian policy, and after the notorious Stolypin
reforms, [4] the Russian countryside is just as much overwhelmed by
oppression, exploitation, destitution, lack of human rights as it was under
serfdom. The “ new ” agrarian policy of the Council of the United
Nobility left untouched the old serf-owners and the oppression on
their estates of thousands and tens of thousands of dessiatines. The
“new” agrarian policy enriched the old landowners and a handful
of the peasant bourgeoisie, and ruined the masses of the peasants to a
still greater extent.

“ We bank on the strong,” exclaimed the late Stolypin in explanation
and justification of his agrarian policy. These words are well worth noting
and remembering as extraordinarily truthful, exceptionally truthful words
for a minister. The peasants have fully understood and learned through
their own bitter experience the truthfulness of these words, which mean
that the new laws and the new agrarian policy are laws for the rich and made by the rich , a policy for the
rich and carried out by the rich . The peas ants have understood the “ simple ” game, that the Duma of the master class
makes laws for the master class—that the government is the instrument of
the will of the feudal landowners and of their rule over Russia.

If Stolypin wanted to teach this to the peasants by means of
his “famous” (shamefully famous) dictum, “we bank on the strong”, we
are sure he has found and will find apt pupils among the masses of the
ruined and embittered who, having learned on whom the government
banks, will understand so much the better on whom they themselves
should bank—on the working class and on its struggle for freedom.

In order not to make unsupported statements, I shall quote a few
examples drawn from real life by so able an observer, one so boundlessly
devoted to his work, as Ivan Andreyevich Konovalov. (Ivan Konovalov,
Sketches of the Modern Village , St. Petersburg, 1913. Price 1
ruble 50 kopeks. In the quotations the pages are indicated.)

In Livny Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, four estates have been divided into farmsteads: that of Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich—5,000
dessiatines, of Polyakov—900 dessiatines, of Nabokov—400 dessiatines,
of Korf—600 dessiatines. The total is about 7,000 dessiatines. The size
of the farmsteads is fixed at 9 dessiatines each and only in exceptional
cases at 12 dessiatines. Thus, there are in all a little over 600
farmsteads.

In order to explain the significance of these figures more graphically,
I shall quote the official statistics of 1905 for Orel
Gubernia. Five nobles in this gubernia owned 143,446 dessiatines, i.e., an average of 28,000 dessiatines each. It is
obvious that such monstrously big estates are not wholly cultivated by the
owners; they only serve for oppression and enslavement of the peasants. The
number of former serfs of landowners in Orel Gubernia in 1905 with holdings
not exceeding 5 dessiatines per farm was 44,500, owning a total of 173,000
dessiatines of land. The landowner has 28,000 dessiatines and the
“ landowner’s ” muzhik of the poorer class— 4 dessiatines .

In 1905, the number of nobles in Orel Gubernia owning 500 dessiatines
of land and over was 378 , the total amount of land in their
possession being 592,000 dessiatines, i.e., an average of over
1,500 dessiatines each; while the number of “ former serfs of landowners ” in Orel Gubernia having up to 7 dessiatines per household
was 124,000 giving them a total of 647,000 dessiatines, i.e., an
average of 5 dessiatines per household.

One may judge by this to what extent the Orel peasants are oppressed by
the feudal estates and what a drop in the ocean of misery and destitution
were the four estates in Livny Uyezd that were divided into
farmsteads. But how do the farmstead peasants live on their 9 dessiatine
plots?

The land has been valued at 220 rubles per dessiatine. They have to pay
118 rubles and 80 kopeks per annum (i.e., about 20 rubles per dessiatine of
sown area). A poor peasant is incapable of paying so much. He lets a part
of the land cheaply just to get some ready cash. He sells all his grain to
pay the instalment due to the bank. He has nothing left, either for seed or
for food. He borrows, enslaves himself again. He has only one horse, he has
sold his cow. His implements are old. Improving the farm is out of the
question.

“The kids have simply forgotten the colour, let alone the taste, of milk”
(p. 198). This sort of farmer falls into arrears with his instalments and
is driven off his plot; his ruin is then complete.

In his explanatory memorandum, the Minister of Finance complacently
tried to gloss over this ruin of the peasants by the new land settlement,
or rather land unsettlement.

On page 57 of the second part of the explanatory memorandum the
Minister gives official figures for the number of peasants who had sold
their land by the end of 1911. The number is 386,407 families .

And the Minister “ consoles ” us by saying: the number of
buyers (362,840) “ is very close to the number of sellers ”
(385,407). For each seller we get on an average 3.9 dessiatines, for each
buyer—4.2 dessiatines (p. 58 of the explanatory memorandum).

What is consoling in this? In the first place, even these official
figures show that the number of buyers is less than the number of
sellers. This means that the ruin and destitution of the countryside is
increasing. And secondly, who does not know that the buyers of allotments
evade the law, which forbids the purchase of land above a small number of
dessiatines, by buying in the name of wife, relations, or of some other
person? Who does not know that the selling of land under the guise of
various other transactions, such as a lease, etc., is very widely practised
by the peasants out of sheer necessity? Read, for instance, the works of
the semi Cadet, semi-Octobrist Prince Obolensky in Russkaya Mysl ,
and you will see that even this landowner, who is thoroughly imbued with
the views of his class, admits the fact that the allotments are bought up
to an enormous extent by the rich, and that these purchases are
masked by means of evasions of the law in thousands of different
ways!

And so, gentlemen, the “new” agrarian policy of the government and
the nobles was all the honourable nobles could produce, leaving
their property and their revenues intact (often they even
increased their revenues by inflating the price of the land for sale and by means of the thousands of favours the Peasant Bank
extends to the nobility).

And the “ all ” of these nobles proved to be nothing . The countryside is even more destitute, even more
angered .

Terrible anger reigns in the villages. What is called hooliganism is due
mainly to the incredible anger of the peasants, and is their
primitive form of protest . No persecution, no increasing
of punishments will allay this anger and stop this protest by millions of
hungry peasants who are flow being ruined by the “redistribution” of the
land with unprecedented rapidity, roughness and brutality.

No, the nobles’ or Stolypin’s agrarian policy is not the way out; it is
only a very painful approach towards a new solution of the agrarian problem in Russia. What this solution should be is shown
indirectly even by the fate of Ireland where, in spite of a thousand
delays, hindrances and obstacles placed in the way by the landowners, the
land has after all passed into the hands of the farmers.

The essence of the agrarian problem in Russia is most strikingly
revealed by the figures for the big landed estates. These figures are given
in the official government statistics of 1905, and anyone who is seriously
concerned about the fate of the Russian peasantry and the state of affairs
in the entire field of politics of our country should study them with great
attention.

Let us consider the big landed estates in European Russia:
27,833 landowners own over 500 dessiatines each, giving them a
total of 62,000,000 dessiatines of land ! Adding to these the land
owned I)y the imperial family and the enormous estates of the manufacturers
in the Urals, we get 70,000,000 dessiatines owned by less than
30,000 land owners. This gives on an average over 2,000
dessiatines to each big landed proprietor. The size the biggest estates
attain in Russia is seen from the fact that 699 proprietors own more than
10,000 dessiatines each, giving them a total of 20,798,504
dessiatines. On an average these magnates possess almost 30,000
(29,754) dessiatines each!

It is not easy to find in Europe, or even in the entire world, another
country where big feudal landownership has been preserved on such a
monstrous scale.

And the most important point is that capitalist farming, i.e., the
cultivation of the soil by hired labourers with the implements and tools of
the owners, is being conducted only on a part of these lands. For the most
part, farming is being conducted on feudal lines, i.e., the
landowners enslave the peasants as they did one hundred, three hundred, and five hundred years
ago, forcing the peasants to cultivate the estate land with their own horses, with their own implements .

This is not capitalism. This is not the European method of farming,
gentlemen of the Right and Octobrists; take note of this, you who are
boasting of your desire to “Europeanise” (i.e., refashion in the European
way) agriculture in Russia! No, this is not European at all. This is the
old Chinese way . This is the Turkish way . This is the
feudal way .

This is not up-to-date farming, it is land usury. It is the old, old
enslavement. The poor peasant, who even in the best year remains a pauper
and is half-starved, who owns a weak, scrawny nag and old, miserable,
wretched implements, is becoming the slave of the landowner, of the
“ master ”, because he, the muzhik, has no alternative.

The “master” will neither lease his land, nor give right of way, nor
watering-places for animals, nor meadows, nor timber, unless the peasant
enslaves himself. If a peasant is caught “illegally” felling wood in the
forests, what happens? He is beaten up by the foresters, Circassians, etc.,
and then the “ master ”, who in the Duma delivers fervent speeches
on the progress of our agriculture and on the necessity of copying
Europe—this same master offers the following alternative to the beaten
muzhik: either go to prison or cultivate, plough, sow and harvest two or
three dessiatines! The same thing happens when the peasants’ cattle
trespass on the landowners’ estates. The same for the winter loan of
grain. The same for the use of meadows and pastures, and so on without end.

This is not big landowner farming. It is the enslavement of
the muzhik. It is feudal exploitation of millions of impoverished
peasants-by means of estates of thousands of dessiatines, the estates of
the landowners who have been squeezing and stifling the muzhik in all
directions.

The farmsteads are helping out a handful of rich peasants. But the
masses continue to starve as before. Why is it, you landowning gentlemen,
that Europe has not known famine for a long time? Why is it that terrible
famines, such as that which raged in our country in 1910–11, occurred in
Europe only under serfdom?

Because in Europe there is no serf bondage. There are rich and middle
peasants and there are labourers in Europe, but not millions of ruined,
destitute peasants, driven to despair by perennial suffering and hard
labour, disfranchised, downtrodden, dependent on the “master”.

What is to be done? What is the way out?

There is only one way out: the liberation of the country side from the
oppression of these feudal latifundia, the transfer of these seventy million dessiatines of land from the land ed proprietors to the
peasants, a transfer that must be effected without any compensation.

Only such a solution can make Russia really resemble a European
country. Only such a solution will enable the millions of Russian peasants
to breathe freely and recover. Only such a solution will make it possible
to transform Russia from a country of perennially starving, destitute
peasants, crushed by bondage to the landowner, into a country of “European
progress”, from a country of illiterate people into a literate country,
from a country of backwardness and hopeless stagnation into a country
capable of developing and going forward, from a disfranchised country, a
country of slaves, into a free country.

And the party of the working class, knowing that without free,
democratic institutions there is not and cannot be a road to socialism,
points, as a way out of the blind alley into which the government with its
agrarian policy has again led Russia, to the free transfer of all the
landed estates to the peasants, to the winning of full political liberty by
a new revolution.