Comrade Lenin pointed out as the main cause of the preservation of serf-like, debt-bondage relations in the countryside: landlord land ownership, the incredible patchwork of holdings generated by the disorderly mismanagement first of stewards, then of the peace mediators of 1861, and finally of Stolypin's officials — upon peasant land.

Hence — the natural striving of the peasants to "remove the boundaries of the land," to put all the 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 exchange, have become unbearable for him. This is proven by the project of the 104 peasant deputies in the First and Second Dumas.

By the admission of the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves, in this project "small-holding ideology" won out over the "equalitarian principles." The peasant needs land in property, but redistributed in accordance with the new needs of commodity economy. If individual peasants seemingly accept the principle of equalitarian land use, peasants understand by it something different from what the S.-R. intelligentsia understand. The statistical summary of the distribution of landlord and peasant landholding in Russia amounts to the following figures: 300 peasant families own 2,000 desyatinas, while there is one landlord for every such amount. It is clear that the demand for "equalization" contains for them the thought of equalization in rights between 300 and one.

The necessity of the nationalization of land, as a fully bourgeois and in the highest degree progressive measure, has been prepared by all the preceding development of land economy in Russia and by the development of the world market. The war has sharpened all the contradictions. And now the immediate transfer of lands into the hands of the peasants — this is a demand imperiously dictated by the needs of wartime. The Shingarevs and Company, offering the peasants to wait for the Constituent Assembly (while they need to sow now), are in fact increasing the crisis, threatening to turn grain shortage into actual famine. They are imposing on the peasants by force a bureaucratic-bourgeois solution to the agrarian question. Meanwhile, one cannot wait for legalization of land as property, since the crisis is advancing by giant strides. The peasants have already taken revolutionary initiative upon themselves — in Penza Province they are taking from the landlords both live and dead inventory for public use. Our party, of course, stands only for the organized seizure of lands and inventory, since this is necessary for the increase of production; any destruction of inventory harms first and foremost the peasants and workers themselves.

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

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

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*