## 1. Protocol Record

Comrades, the agrarian question has been discussed by our party so thoroughly already during the first revolution that, I believe, we now have sufficient preparation for it, and indirect confirmation of this is the fact that the conference section, composed of comrades well acquainted with this question and interested in it, arrived at agreement on the proposed draft resolution without fundamental amendments. I therefore confine myself to the briefest remarks. Since the draft, distributed as proof sheets, is in the possession of all members, there is no need to read it in full.

The growth of the agrarian movement throughout Russia is now the most evident and undisputed fact for everyone. The program of our party, adopted at the Stockholm Congress in 1908 and proposed by the Mensheviks, was refuted already by the course of the first Russian revolution. At that congress, the Mensheviks pushed through their municipalization, the essence of which amounts to the following: peasant lands, communal and individual, remain in the possession of the peasants. Landowner lands pass from the hands of their owners into the hands of organs of local self-government. One of the main arguments of the Mensheviks in favor of such a program was that peasants would never understand the transfer of peasant land into the hands of anyone other than the peasantry itself. Whoever studied the protocols of the Stockholm Congress will recall that this argument was especially emphasized by both the rapporteur Maslov and Kostrov. One must not forget—and this is often forgotten now—that this occurred before the First Duma, when there were no objective facts about the character of peasant movement and its strength. Everyone knew that Russia was burning with the fire of an agrarian revolution, but how the agrarian movement would be organized, what character the peasant revolution would take—no one knew. It was impossible to verify how much this congress represented the serious, practical opinion of the peasants themselves, and this is why these Menshevik arguments played such a role. Soon after our Stockholm Congress we received for the first time impressive confirmation of how the peasant masses viewed this question. In both the First and Second Dumas, the peasants themselves put forward the labor "project of the 104." I studied specially the signatures under this project, became intimately acquainted with the opinions of the deputies and what class they belonged to, to what extent they could be called peasants. With full categoricity I asserted in that book, which the tsar's censorship burned and which I shall nevertheless republish, that the overwhelming majority of these 104 signatures were the signatures of peasants themselves. This project demanded the nationalization of land. The peasants said that all land would pass into the hands of the state.

The question thus consists in how to explain that in the Dumas, convened twice, representatives of peasants from all over Russia preferred nationalization to the measure that the Mensheviks proposed in both Dumas from the perspective of peasant interests. The Mensheviks proposed that the peasants keep their lands in their own possession and only landowner land should be given into the hands of the people, but the peasants said that they would hand over all land into the hands of the people. How is this to be explained? The Socialist-Revolutionaries explain it by the fact that Russian peasants, by virtue of their communal nature, sympathize with socialization, with the labor principle. There is not the slightest common sense in all this phraseology—it is merely phrases. But how is this to be explained? I think that the peasants arrived at this conclusion because all Russian landownership, both peasant and landowner, both communal and individual, is thoroughly permeated with the conditions of the old semi-serfdom, and the peasants, from the perspective of market conditions, had to demand the transfer of land into the hands of all the people. The peasants say that the tangle of the old agrarian life can be untangled only through nationalization. Their view is bourgeois: equitable land-use they understand as taking land from the landowners, but not as the equalization of individual households. Nationalization means—to put all lands under a new redistribution. This is the greatest bourgeois project. Not a single peasant spoke of equalization and socialization, but all said that it is impossible to wait any longer, that all land must be unbarred, that is, it is impossible in the conditions of the twentieth century to conduct agriculture in the old way. The Stolypin reform has since then entangled the land question even more. This is what the peasants want to say with their demand for nationalization. It means—to put all lands generally under a new redistribution. There should be no diverse forms of landownership. There is absolutely no socialization here. This demand of the peasants is called equitable because, as brief statistical evidence from the landownership census of 1905 shows—for every 300 peasant families and one landowner, there is 2,000 desyatins of land; in this sense it is, of course, equitable, but from this it does not follow that this means to equalize all small households among themselves. The Project of the 104 says the opposite.

This is the fundamental point that must be stated in order to give scientific basis to the view that nationalization in Russia, from the perspective of bourgeois-democracy, is necessary. But it is necessary also because it is a gigantic blow against private property in means of production. To think that after the abolition of private property in land in Russia everything will remain as before—this is simply absurd.

Further, in the draft resolution practical conclusions and demands are made. Among minor amendments, I note the following: in the first point it says: "The party of the proletariat supports with all its strength the immediate and complete confiscation of all landowner lands…"—instead of "supports" we should put "struggles for…" We do not look at it so that peasants have too little land and need more. This is a common view; we say that landowner landownership is the basis of the oppression that crushes the peasantry and makes it backward. It is not a question of whether peasants have little land or not; down with serfdom—that is the formulation of the question from the perspective of revolutionary class struggle, not from that of those officials who reason about how much land they have and by what norms it needs to be distributed. I propose that points 2 and 3 be reversed, because for us revolutionary initiative is important, and law should be its result. If you wait for law to be written while you yourselves do not develop revolutionary energy, then you will have neither law nor land.

Very often objections are raised against nationalization, saying that it presupposes a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus. This is true, but state property means that every peasant is a tenant of land from the state. The subletting of the lease is forbidden. But to what extent the peasant leases, what land he takes—this is entirely decided by the corresponding democratic organ, not a bureaucratic one.

Instead of "agricultural laborers" [*batrak*] we insert "agricultural workers." Several comrades stated that the word "batrak" [*batra'chskiy*] is offensive, and objections were raised against this word. It must be eliminated.

To speak now of proletarian-peasant committees or Soviets in the decision of the land question is not fitting, because, as we see, the peasants have created Soviets of soldiers' deputies and thus a division of the proletariat and peasantry has already appeared.

As is known, the petty-bourgeois defensist parties stand for waiting with the land question until the Constituent Assembly. We declare ourselves for the immediate transfer of land to the peasants with maximum organization. We are absolutely against anarchic seizures. You propose that peasants agree with the landowners; we say that land must be taken right now and sown to combat famine, in order to save the country from the collapse that is bearing down upon it with colossal speed. One cannot now accept the recipes of Shingaryev and the Cadets, who propose to wait until the Constituent Assembly, the term of which is unknown, or to agree with the landowners about rent. The peasants are already seizing land without compensation or paying one-quarter of the rent.

A comrade brought a resolution from the locality, from Penza province, in which it is stated that peasants are taking landowner implements, but do not divide them by households; instead they convert them into public property. They establish a certain order, a rule, so that with these implements all lands are worked. Resorting to these measures, they are guided by the interests of raising agricultural production. This fact has gigantic principled significance, contrary to the landowners and capitalists shouting that this is anarchy. If you babble and shout that this is anarchy while the peasants wait, then that will be real anarchy. The peasants show that they understand economic conditions and public control better than officials, and apply it a hundredfold better. Such a measure, which, of course, in a small village is easily accomplished, inevitably pushes toward a transition to broader measures. If the peasant learns this, and he has begun to learn it, then there is no need for the skill of bourgeois professors; they themselves will arrive at the conclusion of the necessity for implements to be used not only for small households but for the working of all land. How they do this is not important: whether they unite plots for common plowing and seeding—we do not know this, and it is not important if they do it in different ways. What is important only is that they do not have, fortunately, before them that great quantity of petty-bourgeois intellectuals who call themselves Marxists, social-democrats and with a self-important air teach the people that the time for socialist revolution has not yet come and therefore it is impossible for peasants to take land now. Fortunately, there are few such gentlemen in Russian villages. If peasants limited themselves to taking land by agreement with the landowners but did not apply their experience collectively, then collapse would be inevitable, and then peasant committees would turn out to be a toy, a game ending in a draw. This is why we propose to add point 8 to the draft resolution.[66]

Since we know that the local peasants themselves have taken this initiative, our obligation, our duty is to say that we support this initiative and recommend it. Only in this lies the guarantee that the revolution will not be limited to measures of a formal character, that the struggle with the crisis will not remain a matter for discussion in offices and the scribblings of Shingaryevs, but that in reality they will proceed in an organized way forward in the struggle against famine and for the raising of production.

First published in 1921 in the Collected Works of N. Lenin (V. Ulyanov), vol. XIV, pt. II

Printed from the typewritten copy of the protocol record

## 2. Newspaper Report

Comrade Lenin pointed out, as the main cause of the preservation of serf-like relations of dependence in the village, landowner landownership, the incredible interspersion of fields, engendered by the disorderly management—first of stewards, then of peace mediators of 1861, and finally of Stolypin officials—on peasant land.

Hence—the natural striving of peasants to "unbar the land," to put all land under a new redistribution; this striving is expressed in the words that "all land is God's." The peasant proprietor cannot reconcile himself with those obstacles which, under the new conditions of capitalist commodity circulation, have become unbearable for him. This is proved by the project of the 104 peasant deputies in the First and Second Dumas.

By admission of the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves, in this project "petty-household ideology" won out over "equitable principles." The peasant needs land in ownership, but distributed in accordance with the new demands of commodity agriculture. If individual peasants, as it were, accept the principle of equitable land-use, then under it peasants understand something different from what S.-R. intellectuals understand. The statistical result of the distribution of landowner and peasant landownership in Russia amounts to the following figures: 300 peasant families own 2,000 desyatins, to each landowner falls the same amount. It is clear that the demand for "equalization" contains for them the thought of equalization in rights of 300 and one.

The necessity of the nationalization of land, as a fully bourgeois measure and in the highest degree progressive, has been prepared by all the preceding development of land economy in Russia and by the development of the world market. War has sharpened all contradictions. And now the immediate transfer of lands into the hands of peasants—a demand powerfully dictated by the needs of wartime. The Shingaryevs and Company, proposing that peasants wait for the Constituent Assembly (but they need to sow now), in fact increase the crisis, threatening to turn famine into actual starvation. They are imposing by force upon the peasants the bureaucratic-bourgeois solution of the agrarian question. Meanwhile, one cannot wait for the legalization of ownership of lands, since the crisis is bearing down with gigantic strides. The peasants have already taken revolutionary initiative upon themselves—in Penza province they are taking from the landowners both live and dead implements for public use. Our party, of course, stands only for organized seizure of lands and implements, since this is necessary for the increase of production; any spoilage of implements, on the other hand, harms first of all the peasants and workers themselves.

On the other hand, we stand for the separate organization of agricultural workers.

*Pravda* no. 45, May 13 (April 30), 1917

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*