One cannot but welcome the initiative of Mr. Drozdov, who has posed an extraordinarily interesting and important question in his pamphlet. The author took data on daily wages (expressed in money and in grain) and on rye yields on landowners' fields for 1902–1904, and then year-by-year data for 1905–1910 and compared these data by regions of European Russia.

The greatest increase in wages in 1905 the author found in the south-western region (an increase of 10% compared with 1902–1904). On average across Russia, the increase was 1.2% in 1905 and 12.5% in 1906. From this the author draws the conclusion that wages rose most in those regions where agricultural capitalism was most developed and where strike forms of struggle were most widespread (in contrast to the so-called "riot and timber-felling" form). Strictly speaking, the data are still insufficient for such a conclusion. For example, the Ural region ranks second among regions in wage increases in 1905 (an increase of 9.68% against 10.35% in the south-western region). If we take the average wage for the entire post-revolutionary period, i.e., for 1905–1910, we get 110.3% (compared with 1902–1904) in the south-western region and 121.7% in the Ural region. The author makes, so to speak, a "challenge" with respect to the Ural region, citing in this connection my "Development of Capitalism." But I was challenging the Ural region in my study of mass migration of workers, not wage levels in general,[26] so that the author's reference is incorrect. Scarcely satisfactory either is the reference to the insignificance of the percentage of landowners' sown area in the Urals.[27] The author should have taken more detailed, provincial data and compared the wage increases with data on the comparative force of the agrarian movement in general, both in its strike and in its "riot and timber-felling" forms, etc.

Generally speaking, across Russia money wages for agricultural workers rose most between 1905 and 1906: taking wages of 1902–1904 as 100, we have 101.2% in 1905 and 112.5% in 1906. For the subsequent four years the corresponding figures are 114.2%, 113.1%, 118.4%, and 119.6%. It is clear that amid the general rise in money wages for agricultural workers as a result of the revolution, we have the direct and predominant influence of the struggle of 1905–1906.

Referring the reader to the detailed pamphlet of Mr. Drozdov for particulars, we note that he quite wrongly declares "manifestly unattainable" those demands of the peasants which essentially amounted to "driving out the landlords" (p. 30). Equally unfounded and unthinking is the statement that in the "riot and timber-felling" region "the struggle was for equal land-use and in general for other similar, petty-bourgeois, utopian demands" (p. 38). First, the peasants fought not only for land-use but also for land-ownership ("driving out"); second, they fought not for equality but for the transfer of the landlords' lands to themselves – these are two different things; third, utopian were and remain the subjective aspirations (and "theories") of the populists concerning "equality," "socialization," "withdrawal of land from commerce," and similar nonsense, but there is nothing "utopian" in the "driving out" of the serf-owners by the petty-bourgeois masses. The author confuses the objective-historical significance of the peasants' struggle for land – a struggle which was progressive-bourgeois and radical-bourgeois – with the subjective theories and aspirations of the populists, which were and remain utopian and reactionary. Such a confusion is profoundly erroneous, undialectical, ahistorical.

The author's general conclusion, when comparing the average for 1891–1900 and for 1901–1910, is that daily money wages rose across Russia by 25.5%, while real wages, expressed in grain, rose only 3.9%, i.e., one might say, practically did not change at all. Note that in terms of the magnitude of money wage increases over the indicated decades, the regions arrange themselves in the following order: Lithuanian +39%, Volga +33%, Ural +30%, Little Russian +28%, Central Agricultural +26%, and so forth.

In conclusion, the author compares over the last two decades (1891–1900 and 1901–1910) the growth of rural workers' wages with the growth of land rent. It turns out that across Russia the average wage rose from 52.2 kopecks per day to 66.3 kopecks, i.e., by 27%. And the price of land – it is known that land price is capitalized rent – rose from 69.1 rubles per desyatina to 132.4 rubles, i.e., by 91%. In other words, wages rose by a quarter, while land rent nearly doubled!!

"And this circumstance," the author justly concludes, "means only one thing, namely: a decline in the relative living standard of agricultural workers in Russia alongside a simultaneous relative rise in the same standard of the landlord class... The social distance between the class of landowners and the class of hired workers grows ever greater and greater."

"Prosveshchenie" [Enlightenment] No. 5, May 1914. Signature: V. I.

Printed from the text of the journal "Prosveshchenie"