V. I.

Lenin

A few days ago the official newspaper Rossiya published the results of an investigation carried out by the Ministry of
the Interior in the summer of 1912 on the question of the mobilisation of
allotment lands, that is, their sale and purchase, their transfer from one
owner to another.

The Ministry of the Interior selected four gubernias for its
investigation—Vitebsk, Perm, Stavropol and Samara (Nikolayev Uyezd). It
is typical that the gubernias of the Great-Russian agricultural “centre”
of European Russia, the gubernias where the traces of serfdom are the
strongest and where the condition of the peasants is worst and the
oppression by the feudal landowners is greatest, were not included
in the investigation! It is obvious that the Ministry did not wish so much
to investigate as to deceive , did not wish so much to study the matter as to distort it .

The statistics collected by the Ministry of the Interior and summarised
in Rossiya are remarkably slipshod, haphazard and primitive; we
have before us the usual “official work” produced by Russian civil
servants, who can be relied on to bungle the simplest task. For the whole
of Russia they examined something like a hundred thousand households but
they could not devise a comprehensive programme, or engage competent
statisticians, or ensure the uniform application of even a partial
consistent programme to all areas!

The general results of the investigation are the following. In the four
gubernias mentioned, on January 1, 1912, a total of 108,095 peasant
households had left the communes and had acquired titles to their
land. This means that of the total number of title-holding households,
which now probably amounts to 2,000,000 in the whole of Russia (out of a total of 12,000,000–13,000,000 households), something like
one-twentieth have been investigated. Even such an investigation would, of
course, be valuable if it were done conscientiously, that is, if it were
done not by Russian civil servants and not under Russian political
conditions.

Of the hundred thousand or so households holding titles,
27,588, i.e., more than a quarter (25.5 per cent) sold land. This
huge number of sales by peasant owners shows straight away that in Russia
the notorious “private ownership” of land is primarily a means of
liberating the peasants from the land. In fact, over ten thousand (10,380) households out of those that sold land were not engaged in farming at all. They had been artificially bound to the
soil by the old, semi-medieval commune. The demand made by the
Social-Democrats—to grant the right of free exit from the commune—was
the only correct one; that alone could have given the peasants without any
interference on the part of the police, rural superintendents [1] and similar kindly “authorities” what life in
capitalist society insistently demands. You cannot keep anyone on the land
who cannot farm it, and to try to do so is absurd.

If the number of title-holding households in the whole of Russia
amounts to two million, the above data lead one to suppose that about 200,000 of them did not engage in farming and immediately sold their
land. “Private owner ship” immediately threw hundreds of thousands of
fictitious farmers out of the countryside! The Ministry of the Interior
statistics do not say a word about the price (probably a nominal one) at
which these poor people sold their land. Pitiful statistics!

What caused these farmers to sell land to which they had obtained the
title? Out of 17,260 such peasants only 1,791, i.e., a tiny minority, sold
land in order to improve their farms or to buy new lots. The remaining mass
of peasants sold land because they could not remain on it—4,117
house holds sold out to migrate to Siberia; 768 because they were going
over to other types of employment; 5,614 from necessity, “drunkenness”
(as the official statisticians say!) and bad harvests; 2,498 because of
illness, old age and lack of family help; 2,472 for “other” reasons.

These unscrupulous statisticians try to make it seem that only 5,614
households “have actually lost their land”! This, of course, is the
despicable kind of trick people who have been ordered to raise a cheer
would use. As we have seen, the vast majority of those who sell land are
ruined and become landless. It is not for nothing that the peasants who
sell out are mostly those owning small plots; even official statistics
recognise this fact although, needless to say, they avoid giving any
precise and complete figures. Pitiful statistics....

Of the 27,588 title-holders who sold out, more than a half (14,182)
sold all their land, the remainder selling only part of
it. Purchasers of land numbered 19,472. A comparison of the number of
purchasers with the number of sellers clearly shows that a concentration of
land is taking place, that it is being concentrated in the hands of a
smaller number of owners. The poor sell land and the rich buy
it. Despite their efforts, official scribblers are powerless to minimise
the significance of this fact.

In Stavropol Gubernia, 14,282 title-holders sold land to 7,489
purchasers. Of the latter, 3,290 bought more than 15 dessiatines —580 bought from 50 to 100 dessiatines, 85 bought from
100 to 500 dessiatines and 7 bought from 500 to 1,000 dessiatines. In
Nikolayev Uyezd of Samara Gubernia, 142 purchasers bought from 50 to 100
dessiatines, 102 from 100 to 500 dessiatines and 2 from 500 to 1,000
dessiatines.

In Perm Gubernia, 201 purchasers bought two or more lots of land; in
Stavropol Gubernia, 2,957 purchasers bought more than two; of these, 562
bought from 5 to 9 lots, and 168 even ten or more !

The concentration of land is taking place on a grand scale. We can see
clearly how pitiful, senseless and reactionary are the attempts to
curtail the mobilisation of the land made by the Third Duma and
the government and defended by “liberal” civil servants
through the Cadet Party. There is nothing that reveals the retrograde
nature of the Cadets and their civil-service stupidity so much as their
defence of “measures” against the mobilisation of peasant lands.

The peasant does not sell his land except from dire need. Attempts to
limit this right are despicable hypocrisy and worsen the selling
conditions for the peasant, because in reality such limitations are evaded
in thousands of ways.

The Narodniks, who do not understand the inevitability of land
mobilisation under capitalism, hold a much more democratic view when they
demand the abolition of private property in land. But only an ignoramus
could call such abolition a socialist measure. There is absolutely nothing
socialist in it. In England, one of the most developed capitalist
countries, the farmers (capitalist tenant farmers) farm land belonging to
landlords (big landowners). If this land belonged to the state, capitalism
would develop more freely and extensively in agriculture. There would be no
hindrances from the landowners. There would be no need to withdraw capital
from production to invest in land purchases. The mobilisation of the land,
drawing it into circulation, would be still easier because the
transfer of the land from one person to another would take place more
freely, simply and cheaply.

The poorer a country is, and the more it is crushed and stifled under
the yoke of feudal landed proprietorship, the more urgent (from the
standpoint of the development of capitalism and the growth of the
productive forces) is the abolition of private property in land, complete
freedom for its mobilisation, and the break-down of the old spirit of
routine and stagnation in agriculture.

Our Stolypin land legislation, however, far from delivering the peasant
from ruin and his land from mobilisation, makes that ruin a hundred times
more acute and worsens (to a far greater extent than the “general”
capitalist standard) the condition of the peasant, compelling him to accept
worse conditions when selling his land.