V. I.

Lenin

The government has drafted a new bill on peasant land tenure. It is proposed to speedily “limit the fragmentation” of
individual farmsteads and non-commune holdings. The landowners want to
“protect small landed properties” from scattering, disintegration and
fragmentation.

In essence the law prohibits the break-up of medium-sized
peasant holdings—farmsteads and non-commune properties. When such lands
are sold or inherited they must pass into the hands of a single
owner. Co-heirs are to receive a cash “indemnity”, to he assessed by
landowners’ survey commissions.

Cash, for the indemnity payments is to be advanced on especially
favourable terms by the Peasant Bank with the land as security. The size of
the average (undivided) holdings is to be determined on the basis of the
1861 feudal laws on the size of the decree allotment. [1]

The significance of this bill is obvious. The landowners want to create
privileged landed properties protected against capitalism for the peasant
bourgeoisie. Realising that their privileges and their feudal system of
land tenure are shaky, the landowners are trying to win over to their side
the richest section of the peasant bourgeoisie, insignificant in numbers as
it is. I will share a small part of my privileges with you, says the
landowner to the kulaks and rich peasants, I will help you grow richer at
the expense of the masses of peasants, who are being ruined, and you will
protect me from those masses, you will be the bulwark of law and
order. Such is the class meaning of the new bill.

Here we have absolutely perfect conformity with the general tendency of
the June Third agrarian policy, otherwise known as the Stolypin agrarian policy. It is one and the same
landowners’ policy, and the landowners as a class have not been able to
pursue any other policy in Russia since 1905. There is no other way in
which they can uphold their privileges or even their existence.

Democrats, both working-class and bourgeois (i.e., the peasantry as a
mass), must recognise this indisputable truth of class relationships and
draw from it the inevitable conclusion. There is nothing more foolish and
reactionary than the bureaucratic point of view held by the liberals and
the Narodniks, who fear the mobilisation of peasant lands, i.e.,
their free sale and purchase. Rech , for instance, in two
editorials, states in reference to the new bill that “the protection of
small landed properties is a necessity”. The trouble, you see, was that
the June Third agrarian policy was adopted “suddenly, as a sharp political
weapon”.

This is the sapient liberal, in the role of a “supra-class” civil
servant, reproaching Stolypin, the leader of the land owners, for having
used a political weapon for the benefit of the landowners! The cowardly
desire to escape the inevitable class struggle is hidden by whimpering
about the connection between the interests of a class and the politics of a
class. No wonder Stolypin only laughed at such opponents.

“ The protection of small landed properties”, that favourite formula
of the liberals (Russian) and the Narodniks, is a reactionary phrase. The
working class supports the peasantry (and guides it) only when, and only to
the extent that, its actions are democratic, that is, when they are in the
interests of social development and of capitalist development, when they
are in the interests of the country’s deliverance from the yoke of the
feudals and from their privileges. Every curtailment of the mobilisation of
peasant lands is, first, a foolish measure, incapable of halting
capitalism, a measure that can only worsen the condition of the masses,
make their life more difficult and compel them to evade the law. Secondly,
it is a measure that actually creates a small section of
privileged petty bourgeois, the most hidebound and backward
enemies of progress.

The working class does not counterpose to the class politics of the
feudal landowners phrases in the “supra-class” spirit, it counterposes the interests of the other classes that constitute
nine-tenths of the population. The peasantry, as a petty-bourgeois mass,
will for a long time waver between the consistent democracy of the
proletariat and hopes of obtaining concessions from the landowners, hopes
of sharing their privileges.

However, the conditions provided by the Russian land owners are so
burdensome for the peasants, starvation for millions is so common under
these conditions, that there can be no doubt whatsoever which side
everything that is alive, viable and politically conscious will follow.

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Notes:
[1]
Decree allotment —was fixed by the law of February 19,
1861. In the black-earth and non-black-earth regions two sizes of allotment
were fixed, a higher and a lower (the latter being one-third of the
former), but for the steppe areas, because of the abundance of land, only
one type of allotment was fixed by special decree and was known as the
“decree allotment”.