V. I.

Lenin

The Estimates of the Ministry of Agriculture [2]

Our government considers its new agrarian policy—that of
stepping up the destruction of the village communes by means of the rural
superintendents [3] and of encouraging the otrub system—a
highly effective weapon in its struggle against the revolution. Already in
1906, soon after the revolution, the Council of the United
Nobility [4] called upon the government to introduce private
landownership among the peasantry so as to create, as quickly as possible,
a class of rich peasants that would side with the landlords against the
peasant masses. Stolypin immediately adopted the policy recommended by the
Council of the United Nobility. The landlord parties in the Third Duma, the
Rights and the Octobrists, whole-heartedly supported this new agrarian
policy, which they regarded, not only as an effective means of combating
the revolution, but as a great advance towards the European economic
system, a step towards eliminating the survivals of serfdom.

As is known, the praises of the new agrarian policy, which is
represented as an instrument of “emancipation”, have been sung in a
thousand different keys in the governmental, Right, and Octobrist press.

It is from this standpoint that I wish, in my speech, to deal with the
principles underlying the government’s policy on the agrarian
question. We are told on every hand that the number of land plots
“registered” as private property and the number of otrubs are
increasing. But nothing is said about the extent to which bondage and
feudal relations still exist in our rural districts. Yet that is the crux
of the matter. We are promised a “European” reform of our backward
agriculture, with the class of the feudalist Purishkeviches retaining full economic and political power. The promises remain promises,
but what is the state of affairs in the countryside today, after
all the progress the government boasts of? To what extent are the peasant
masses still borne down by bondage and feudalist oppression?

To answer this question I shall call to witness a journal whose editor
recently won well-merited and enthusiastic praise from Anthony, Bishop of Volhynia himself , and, of course, from writers like Rozanov of
Novoye Vremya , who are notoriously reactionary and notoriously
ready to serve the government. This is not a “Left” journal, God forbid!
It is a journal run by people who have echoed all the abuse and
vituperation the reactionaries heap on the revolution. It is a journal
which stands up stoutly for clericalism and the sanctity of landlord
property. You probably guess that I am referring to Russkaya Mysl .

This journal, by way of exception, spoke the truth and quoted figures,
precise figures, showing the extent to which things like
métayage and winter hiring are practised in
Russia. Everybody knows that these are common everyday features in our
countryside. But “everybody” prefers to speak about everything under the
sun except these everyday features.

“ Winter hiring,” writes this journal, “is this not absurd in our age, the age of electricity and aeroplanes? And yet this form
of slavery and bondage continues to flourish to this day, like a leech on
the body of the nation.... Winter hiring has preserved in all its freshness
the feudal term of ‘bonded’ peasants.”

This appraisal of winter hiring is not mine, but that of a journal
notorious for its hatred of revolution. Slavery, bondage, serfdom—this is
what quite “loyal” people are compelled to call “the order of
things” existing in our countryside.

In winter hiring:

“ the peasant accepts the hardest conditions, as little
as a half and a third of the pay he usually receives in spring and summer
hiring. In winter he gets paid as much per dessiatine for ploughing (three
times), sowing, reaping or mowing, binding, and carting to the threshing
shed as he does in summer only for harvesting (reaping and binding).”

How many peasants abide in this state of serfdom, bondage and slavery?

“ According to local reports, in the spring of 1913 the number of ‘bonded’ households in some villages of the
South-West was as much as 48 per cent of the total, in Mogilev Gubernia 52
per cent, and in Chernigov Gubernia 56 per cent.”

And this, mind you, refers to the spring of 1913! This is after the
harvest of 1912! This was during the alleged sensational successes of the
so-called “land organisation”, which the government is boasting of and
proclaiming from the house-tops!

What else, after that, can you call this notorious “land
organisation” but a whited sepulchre, which masks the same old serfdom?

Half the peasant households are “bonded”, enslaved through dire
poverty. Hunger, hunger even during a good crop year, makes the peasants
give their labour in thrall to the landlord in winter for a third of the
pay. In practice, this amounts to a continuation of the corvée, of
serfdom, because the very essence of serfdom is preserved in the shape of a
pauperised, starving, ruined peasant, who, even in the best year, is
compelled to till the landlord’s land with his poor implements and
half-starved animals on terms of “winter hiring”.

Let the number of plots registered as private property increase. This
may even be a useful measure in regard to those proletarians who will rid
themselves of a burden and be freer to fight for liberty and socialism.

But, obviously, no “registrations”, no “blessings” of private
ownership can help those millions of households, those tens of millions of
peasants, who have nowhere to go to from the village and are
compelled to give themselves in winter in thrall to the landlords.

These peasants are bound to strive towards a transfer of all the landed
estates into their hands without payment, for this is the only way
out for them, the only escape from hopeless enslavement. Communal
landownership has nothing to do with it. Both the homesteader and the
fullest “individual proprietor” will, like the commune peasant, remain
for ever downtrodden slaves if they are unable to make their crop last
longer than St. Nicholas Day [1] and are compelled to borrow from the landlord on usurious terms.

It is absurd, as far as these tens of millions of peasants are
concerned, to speak about the “progress” of farming, about a “rising
level of agriculture”, about improved methods of working the land, and so
forth. What improved methods can there be when dire poverty makes the
peasant hire himself out to the landlord at a third of the pay, while in
the summer his own grain is spilling because in the summer the police will
drag him away to work for the “ squire ” in payment for the
advances of grain or money he has had from him!

And the landlord, who advances grain or money for winter hiring, is
quite unlike the “European” employer, or any capitalist employer for that
matter. He is not an employer, but a usurer or a feudal lord. Improved
methods are not only unnecessary under such a “system of farming”, but
positively undesirable . They are both unnecessary and detrimental to it. A ruined, pauperised, starving peasant with
half-starved animals and wretched implements—that is what this landlord
system of farming needs , a system that is perpetuating
the backwardness of Russia and the misery of the peasants. With the bulk of
the peasant population living under such conditions of serf dependence,
these conditions would continue for decades to come, until the peasants
liberated themselves from this yoke; for the creation of a small minority
of rich “ otrub farmers”, or the establishment of private
holdings and their sale by the proletarians, would have no effect whatever
on the enslaved position of the peasant masses.

This is what the praisers of the new, Stolypin agrarian policy forget,
or rather try to forget, try to obscure and screen. They all sing in chorus
that this policy means “progress”, but what they do not say is
that this progress affects a very small minority and is proceeding at a
snail’s pace, while the majority are in the same old state of
bondage and serfdom.

The number of otrub farmers is increasing, more machines are
being imported into Russia, grass cultivation is developing, and the number
of co-operative societies in the rural districts is growing. All that is
true, defenders of the government!

But there is the reverse of the medal, which you are trying to conceal. For
all this much-vaunted progress, most of the peasants are still in a state
of feudal slavery. That is what makes all this “progress” so
meager and precarious ; that is what makes famines inevitable; that is what makes the home market so weak and wretched; that
is what enables oppression and tyranny to maintain such a firm hold, and
that is what increases the inevitability of another agrarian
revolution, because all the greater is the contradiction between an age of
aeroplanes, electricity and automobiles, and “winter hiring” or
“métayage”.

And here are the latest figures on métayage in Russia, given in the journal, approved of by Anthony of Volhynia. The peasants’
crops cultivated on the métayer system amounted to 21 per cent of
the crops on their own lands in the Central gubernias, to 42 per cent in
the Lake gubernias, and to 68 per cent in the North-Western gubernias! The
corresponding figures for grass mowing are 50 per cent in the Central
gubernias, and 110-185 per cent in the Lake, Trans-Volga and North-Western
gubernias!

Thus, métayer haymaking predominates over the peasants’
own haymaking in three vast regions of Russia!

What is the “métayer system”?

“ The peasant, using the landlord’s land but his own seeds, does all the cultivation and harvesting down to carting the sheaves
to the threshing shed, and takes only half the crop for himself. The hay
meadows are worked on a “ one-third” system, the métayer taking one haycock to every two that go to the landlord.”

But that is not all.

“ In some cases (especially in Minsk and Chernigov gubernias), the métayer, in addition to paying for the land with
half the crop, and for the hay with two-thirds of the crop, is obliged to work gratis on the owner’s farm for one or two weeks, in most cases with his own horse, or with one of his children .”

What is this if not the corvée, pure and simple? What is this if
not the ancient serf system of farming?

There is nothing new in these figures whatever. On the contrary—they
reveal to us the hoary past, which has survived in all its monstrous
aspects side by side with the “new” agrarian policy. Anyone in
touch with rural life has long been aware of the existence of this hoary
past. Statisticians and observers of country life have written dozens and hundreds of hooks
about that past. And that hoary past predominates to this day, perpetuating
the scandalous backwardness and scandalous tyranny that reign in Russia.

No laws can put a stop to this serfdom so long as the bulk of the land
remains the property of the all-powerful landlords. No “private
landownership” in place of the “communes” of downtrodden peasants can be
of any help.

According to the official statistics on landownership for 1905
published by the Ministry of the Interior less than 30,000
landlords in European Russia own seventy million dessiatines of
land.

---
Notes:
[1]

December 6 (old style).— Ed .

[2]
The Estimates of the Ministry of Agriculture —a speech drafted by Lenin for delivery in the Duma by a Bolshevik deputy. It was
made by G. I. Petrovsky on May 28 (June 10), 1914, during the debate on the
Budget Commission report on the estimates of the Department of State Landed
Properties for 1914.

The concluding part of the MS. is missing.

[3]
Rural superintendent —an office instituted by the tsarist
government in 1889 to give the landlords more power over the
peasantry. Appointed from among the local landed nobility, the rural superintendents were vested with immense powers, juridical as well as
administrative, including the right to arrest peasants, and order corporal
punishment.

[4]
Council of the United Nobility —a counter-revolutionary
organisation of the feudalist landowners, which took shape in May 1906 at
the First Congress of Representatives of Gubernia Assemblies of the
Nobility and existed until October 1917. The organisation’s main object was
to protect the autocratic system, the big landed estates, and the
privileges of the nobility. Lenin called the Council of the United Nobility
“a council of united feudalists”. The Council virtually became a
semi-government body, which dictated to the government legislative measures
aimed at protecting the interests of the feudalists. A considerable number
of its members were members of the Council of State and of the leading
centres of the Black-Hundred organisations.