The present work was written at the end of 1907. In 1908 it was printed in Petersburg, but tsarist censorship seized and destroyed it. Only a single copy survived, which lacked an ending (after page 269 of the present edition), so that ending has now been supplied.

At the present time the revolution has posed the agrarian question in Russia immeasurably more broadly, deeply, and acutely than in 1905–1907. Acquaintance with the history of our party program during the first revolution will help, I hope, to understand more correctly the tasks of the present revolution.

The following must be especially emphasized. War has inflicted such unprecedented calamities upon the warring countries, and at the same time it has so gigantically accelerated the development of capitalism, transforming monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, that neither the proletariat nor revolutionary petty-bourgeois democracy can confine themselves within the framework of capitalism.

Life has already gone beyond these bounds, placing on the order of the day the regulation of production and distribution on a state-wide scale, universal labor conscription, compulsory syndication (combination into unions), and so forth.

In such a situation, the nationalization of land in the agrarian program inevitably acquires a different formulation. Namely: the nationalization of land is not only the "last word" of bourgeois revolution, but also a step toward socialism. One cannot struggle against the calamities of war without taking such steps.

The proletariat, leading the poorest peasantry, is forced, on the one hand, to shift the center of gravity from the Soviets of peasant deputies to the Soviets of deputies from rural workers, and, on the other hand, to demand the nationalization of the inventory of landowners' estates, as well as the formation of model farms from them under the control of these latter Soviets.

I cannot, of course, dwell at length here on these most important questions and must refer the interested reader to current Bolshevik literature and to my pamphlets: "Letters on Tactics"{136} and "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (A Draft Platform of the Proletarian Party)"{137}.

28 September 1917