The Landed Property Statistics for 1905, published by the Central Statistical Committee in 1907, enables us to ascertain precisely the comparative size of the peasant and landlord holdings in the fifty gubernias in European Russia. First of all we will give the general data. The whole territory of European Russia (50 gubernias) is given (see census of January 28, 1897) as 4,230,500 square versts, i.e., 440,800,000 dessiatins. The landed property statistics for 1905 register a total of 395,200,000 dessiatins under the following three main headings:

    From these general figures it is necessary to deduct, first of all, state lands situated in the far north and consisting partly of tundra and partly of such forest land as cannot be expected to be used for agriculture in the near future. There are 107,900,000 dessiatins of such land in the "north-

page 221

page 222

societies and associations, which means that on the whole they are small holdings, unfortunately not classified according to size. Further, 3,700,000 dessiatins belong to "industrial and commercial, manufacturing and other" associations, of which there are 1,042. Of these, 272 own more than 1,000 dessiatins each, the total for the 272 being 3,600,000 dessiatins. These are, evidently, landlord latifundia. The bulk of this land is concentrated in Perm Gubernia, where nine such associations own 1,448,902 dessiatins! It is known that the Urals factories own many thousand dessiatins of land -- a direct survival in bourgeois Russia of the feudal, seigniorial latifundia.

    We therefore single out 3,600,000 dessiatins from the land owned by societies and associations as the biggest landed estates. The remainder has not been classified, but generally it consists of small holdings.

    The Landed Property Statistics for 1905, published by the Central Statistical Committee in 1907, enables us to ascertain precisely the comparative size of the peasant and landlord holdings in the fifty gubernias in European Russia. First of all we will give the general data. The whole territory of European Russia (50 gubernias) is given (see census of January 28, 1897) as 4,230,500 square versts, i.e., 440,800,000 dessiatins. The landed property statistics for 1905 register a total of 395,200,000 dessiatins under the following three main headings:

    From these general figures it is necessary to deduct, first of all, state lands situated in the far north and consisting partly of tundra and partly of such forest land as cannot be expected to be used for agriculture in the near future. There are 107,900,000 dessiatins of such land in the "north-

page 221

page 222

societies and associations, which means that on the whole they are small holdings, unfortunately not classified according to size. Further, 3,700,000 dessiatins belong to "industrial and commercial, manufacturing and other" associations, of which there are 1,042. Of these, 272 own more than 1,000 dessiatins each, the total for the 272 being 3,600,000 dessiatins. These are, evidently, landlord latifundia. The bulk of this land is concentrated in Perm Gubernia, where nine such associations own 1,448,902 dessiatins! It is known that the Urals factories own many thousand dessiatins of land -- a direct survival in bourgeois Russia of the feudal, seigniorial latifundia.

    We therefore single out 3,600,000 dessiatins from the land owned by societies and associations as the biggest landed estates. The remainder has not been classified, but generally it consists of small holdings.

    The main conclusions about the character and essence of the change are identical in either case.

page 232

of the matter by hollow pretensions to a "state" point of view. The second places the chief emphasis on the class struggle, on the class interests of a definite landowning stratum which largely represents feudal tendencies.

    We shall revert to the question of "norms" elsewhere. Here we want to mention one "happy" exception among the Trudoviks, and one typical Cadet writer.

    In the Second Duma, the Popular Socialist Delarov referred to the percentage of landowners who would be affected by the alienation of land (47th sitting, May 26, 1907). Delarov spoke of alienation (compulsory), without raising the question of confiscation, and apparently accepted the same norm of alienation which I have taken hypothetically in my table, namely, 500 dessiatins. Unfortunately, in the stenographic records of the Second Duma this particular passage in Delarov's speech (p. 1217) is distorted, unless Mr. Delarov himself made a mistake. The record says that compulsory alienation would affect 32 per cent of the private estates and 96 per cent of their total area of land; the rest, 68 per cent of the landowners, it is claimed, have only 4 per cent of the private land. Actually, the figure should be not 32 per cent, but 3.7 per cent, because 27,833 out of 752,881 landowners constitute 3.7 per cent, whereas the area of land aflected -- 62,000,000 dessiatins out of a total of 85,800,000 dessiatins -- amounts to 72.3 per cent. It is not clear whether this was a slip on Mr. Delarov's part, or whether he got hold of the wrong figures. At all events, of the numerous speakers in the Duma, he, if we are not mistaken, was the only one who approached the real issue of the struggle in the most direct and concrete way.

    A Cadet writer whose "works" one must mention when dealing with this question is Mr. S. Prokopovich. True, he is, strictly speaking, a member of the Bez Zaglaviya group, who, like the majority of the contributors to the bourgeois newspaper Tovarishch, at one moment poses as a Cadet and at another as a Menshevik Social-Democrat. He is a typical representative of the handful of consistent Bernsteinians among the Russian bourgeois intellectuals who waver between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats, who (in most cases) join no party, and in the liberal press

page 233

pursue a line slightly to the right of Plekhanov. Mr. Prokopovich must be mentioned here because he was one of the first to quote in the press figures from the 1905 landed property statistics, and in so doing actually adopted the Cadet position on agrarian reform. In two articles which he wrote for Tovarishch (No. 214 of March 13, 1907, and No. 238 of April 10, 1907), Mr. Prokopovich argues against General Zolotaryov, the compiler of the official statistics, who tries to prove that the government can tackle the land reform quite easily without any compulsory alienation, and that 5 dessiatins per household are quite sufficient for the peasant to conduct his husbandry! Mr. Prokopovich is more liberal : he puts the figure at 8 dessiatins per household. He repeatedly makes the reservation, however, that this amount of land is "quite inadequate", that this is a "very modest" calculation, and so forth; nevertheless, he accepts this figure in order to determine the "degree of the land shortage" (the title of the first of Mr. Prokopovich's articles mentioned above). He explains that he takes this figure "to avoid unnecessary disputes " -- presumably with the Zolotaryovs. Calculating thus the number of "obviously land poor" peasant households at one half the total, Mr. Prokopovich correctly estimates that in order to bring the peasants' holdings up to 8 dessiatins, 18,600,000 dessiatins will be required, and since the government's total land reserve is alleged to be not more than 9,000,000 dessiatins, "it will be impossible to avoid compulsory alienation".

    Both in his calculations and in his arguments, this Menshevik-minded Cadet, or Cadet-minded Menshevik, admirably expresses the spirit and meaning of the liberal agrarian programme. The questions of the semi-feudal latifundia, and of latifundia in general, is quite glossed over. Mr. Prokopovich quoted the figures only for private holdings of more than 50 dessiatins. Thus, the actual issue of this struggle is obscured. The class interests of a handful, literally a handful, of landlords are concealed behind a veil. Instead of an exposure of those interests, we are given the "state point of view": the state lands "will not suffice ". Hence, if they did suffice, Mr. Prokopovich, to judge from his argument, would be quite willing to leave the feudal latifundia intact. . . .

page 234

    The peasant's allotment scale that he takes (8 dessiatins) is a starvation scale. The amount of land to be "compulsorily alienated" from the landlords that he allows for is insignificant (18 - 9 = 9 million dessiatins out of 62,000,000 in estates of over 500 dessiatins!). To carry out that kind of "compulsory alienation", the landlords will have to use compulsion on the peasants, as in 1861!

    Whether he meant to or not, wittingly or unwittingly, Mr. Prokopovich has correctly expressed the landlord nature of the Cadet agrarian programme. But the Cadets are cautious and sly: they prefer to say nothing at all about how much land they are inclined to expropriate from the landlords.

    We have seen that the essence of the revolution now in progress amounts to the break-up of the feudal latifundia and to the creation of a free and (as far as this is possible under present circumstances) well-to-do peasantry capable not only of toiling in misery on the land, but of developing the productive forces and promoting the progress of agriculture. This revolution does not and cannot in any way affect the system of small production in agriculture, the domination of the market over the producer and, consequently, the domination also of commodity production, since the struggle for the redistribution of the land cannot alter the relations of production in the farming of this land. And we have seen that a feature of this struggle is the strong development of small-scale farming on the feudal latifundia.

    The ideological cloak of the struggle now in progress is furnished by the theories of the Narodniks. The fact that in the First and Second Dumas the peasant representatives from all over Russia openly came out with agrarian programmes has definitely proved that the theories and programmes of the Narodniks do indeed constitute the ideological cloak of the peasants' struggle for land.

    We have shown that the basic and chief component of the distributable land for which the peasants are fighting

page 235

are the big feudal estates. We have taken a very high norm of expropriation -- 500 dessiatins. But it can easily be seen that our conclusions hold good however much this norm is reduced, let us say to 100 or to 50 dessiatins. Let us divide group (c) -- 20-500 dessiatins, into three subgroups: (aa) 20-50 dessiatins, (bb) 50-100, and (cc) 100-500, and see what the size of the peasant allotments and private holdings is within these subdivisions:

    Hence it follows, first, that the confiscation of estates of over 100 dessiatins will increase the distributable land, as already stated above, by nine to ten million dessiatins, whereas the confiscation of estates of over 50 dessiatins, as assumed by Chizhevsky, a member of the First Duma, will increase this land by eighteen and a half million dessiatins. Consequently, in this case also, the feudal latifundia will form the basis of the distributable land area. That is the crux of the present-day agrarian problem. Moreover, the connection that exists between these big estates and the higher bureaucracy is also quite well known: G. A. Alexinsky in the Second Duma quoted Mr. Rubakin's data on the size of the estates owned by higher officials in Russia. Secondly, it is seen from these data that even after deducting the peasant allotments and the estates of over 100 dessiatins, the size of the bigger allotments (and the small estates) still varies considerably. The revolution already finds the peasants differentiated in regard to size

page 236

of holdings, and still more in the amount of capital, number of livestock, the quantity and quality of implements, etc. That the differentiation in the sphere of non-allotment property, so to speak, is far more considerable than in the sphere of allotment landownership has been sufficiently proved in our economic literature.

    What, then, is the significance of the Narodnik theories, which more or less accurately reflect the views of the peasants on their struggle for land? The substance of these Narodnik theories is contained in two "principles": the "labour principle" and "equalisation". The petty-bourgeois nature of those principles is so manifest and has been so often and so fully demonstrated in Marxist literature that there is no need to dwell on it here. It is important, however, to note a feature of these "principles" that has not yet been properly appreciated by Russian Social-Democrats. In a vague form those principles do express something real and progressive at the present historical moment. Namely, they express the struggle for the break-up of the feudal latifundia.

    Look at the outline given above of the evolution of our agrarian system from the present stage to the "ultimate point" of the present, bourgeois revolution. You will clearly see that the future "then" is distinguished from the present "now" by an incomparably greater "equalisation" in ownership, that the new distribution of the land conforms far more to the "labour principle". And that is not accidental. It cannot be otherwise in a peasant country, the bourgeois development of which emancipates it from serfdom. In such a country, the break-up of the feudal latifundia is undoubtedly a condition for the development of capitalism. But as long as small-scale farming predominates in agriculture, the break-up of the feudal latifundia inevitably implies greater "equalisation" in landownership. In break ing up the medieval latifundia, capitalism begins with a more "equalised" landownership, aud out of that creates large-scale farming on a new basis, on the basis of wage labour, machinery and superior agricultural technique, and not on the basis of labour rent and bondage.

    The mistake all the Narodniks make is that by confining themselves to the narrow outlook of the small husbandman,

page 237

they fail to perceive the bourgeois nature of the social relations into which the peasant enters on coming out of the fetters of serfdom. They convert the "labour principle" of petty-bourgeois agriculture and "equalisation", which are their slogans for breaking up the feudal latifundia, into something absolute, self-sufficing, into something implying a special, non-bourgeois order.

page 238

ently clear the way for capitalism, will most resolutely eradicate serfdom. The outline which I have drawn above indicates precisely the maximum to be achieved in the abolition of serfdom and the maximum of "equalisation" to be attained thereby. The Narodnik imagines that this "equalisation" eliminates the bourgeois element, whereas, in reality, it expresses the aspirations of the most radical bourgeoisie. And whatever else there is in "equalisation" over and above that is nothing but ideological smoke, a petty-bourgeois illusion.

    The short-sighted and unhistorical judgement of some Russian Marxists on the significance of Narodnik theories in the Russian bourgeois revolution is to be explained by the fact that they have not reflected on the significance of the "confiscation" of the landlord estates which the Narodniks advocate. One has only to visualise clearly the economic basis of this revolution under the present conditions .of landownership in our country in order to grasp not only the illusory nature of the Narodnik theories, but also the truth of the struggle, restricted to a definite historical task, the truth of the struggle against serfdom, which represents the real content of those illusory theories.

    To proceed. We have shown that the Narodnik theories, while absurd and reactionary from the standpoint of the struggle for socialism against the bourgeoisie, turn out to be "rational" (in the sense of being a specific historic task) and progressive in the bourgeois struggle against serfdom. The question now arises: when we say that serfdom must inevitably die out in Russian landownership and in the whole social system in Russia, when we say that a bourgeois-democratic agrarian revolution is inevitable, does that mean that this can take place only in one definite form? Or is it possible in various forms?

    That question is of cardinal importance for arriving at correct views on our revolution and on the Social-Democratic agrarian programme. And solve this question we must, starting out from the data given above concerning the economic basis of the revolution.

page 239

    The pivot of the struggle is the feudal latifundia which are the most conspicuous embodiment and the strongest mainstay of the survivals of serfdom in Russia. The development of commodity production and capitalism will certainly and inevitably put an end to those survivals. In that respect Russia has only one path before her, that of bourgeois development.

    But there may be two forms of that development. The survivals of serfdom may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i.e., either by reform or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed by having big landlord economies at the head, which will gradually become more and more bourgeois and gradually substitute bourgeois for feudal methods of exploitation. It may also proceed by having small peasant economies at the head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the "excrescence" of the feudal latifundia from the social organism and then freely develop without them along the path of capitalist economy.

    Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern ("big peasants") arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of the feudal landlords -- Junkers. In the second case the main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a bourgeois farmer.

    In the economic history of Russia both these types of evolution are clearly in evidence. Take the epoch of the fall of serfdom. A struggle went on between the landlords and the peasants over the method of carrying out the reform.

page 240

Both stood for conditions of bourgeois economic development (without being aware of it), but the former wanted a development that would preserve to the utmost the landlord economies, the landlord revenues, and the landlord (bondage) methods of exploitation. The latter wanted a development that would secure for the peasants the greatest degree of prosperity possible with the existing level of agriculture, the abolition of the landlord latifundia, the abolition of all serf and bondage methods of exploitation, and the expansion of free peasant landownership. Needless to say, in the second case the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive forces would have been wider and more rapid than by peasant reform, carried out in the landlords' way.* Only caricature Marxists, as the Narodniks, the opponents of Marxism, tried to depict them, could have believed that the divorcement of the peasantry from the land in 1861 guaranteed the development of capitalism. On the contrary, it would have been a guarantee -- and so in fact it turned out to be -- a guarantee of bondage, i.e., semi-serf tenant farming and labour rent, i.e., corvée economy, which exceedingly retarded the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive forces in Russian agriculture. The conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords was not a struggle waged by "people's production" or the "labour principle" against the bour-

page 242

classes of capitalist agriculture. Consequently, we see two streams of agrarian evolution everywhere. The conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords which runs like a scarlet thread through the whole history of post-Reform Russia and constitutes the most important economic basis of our revolution, is a struggle for one or the other type of bourgeois agrarian evolution.

    Only by clearly understanding the difference between these two types and the bourgeois character of both, can we correctly explain the agrarian question in the Russian revolution and grasp the class significance of the various agrarian programmes put forward by the different parties.* The pivot of the struggle, we repeat, is the feudal latifundia. The capitalist evolution of these is beyond all dispute, but it is possible in two forms: either they will be abolished, eliminated in a revolutionary manner by peasant farmers, or they will be gradually transformed into Junker estates (and correspondingly, the enthralled muzhik will be transformed into an enthralled Knecht ).

page 243

    If we now compare the agrarian programmes put forward by the different classes in the course of the revolution with the economic basis outlined above, we shall at once perceive two lines in these programmes, corresponding to the two types of agrarian evolution which we have indicated.

    Let us take the Stolypin programme, which is supported by the Right landlords and the Octobrists. It is avowedly a landlords' programme. But can it be said that it is reactionary in the economic sense, i.e., that it precludes, or seeks to preclude, the development of capitalism, to prevent a bourgeois agrarian evolution? Not at all. On the contrary, the famous agrarian legislation introduced by Stolypin under Article 87 is permeated through and through with the purely bourgeois spirit. There can be no doubt that it follows the line of capitalist evolution, facilitates and pushes forward that evolution, hastens the expropriation of the peasantry, the break-up of the village commune, and the creation of a peasant bourgeoisie. Without a doubt, that legislation is progressive in the scientific-economic sense.

    But does that mean that Social-Democrats should "support" it? It does not. Only vulgar Marxism can reason in that way, a Marxism whose seeds Plekhanov and the Mensheviks are so persistently sowing when they sing, shout, plead, and proclaim: we must support the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the old order of things. No. To facilitate the development of the productive forces (this highest criterion of social progress) we must support not bourgeois evolution of the landlord type, but bourgeois evolution of the peasant type. The former implies the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (remodelled on bourgeois lines), the least rapid development of the productive forces, and the retarded development of capitalism; it implies infinitely greater misery and suffering, exploitation and oppression for the broad mass of the peasantry and, consequently, also for the proletariat. The second type implies the most rapid development of the productive forces and

page 244

the best possible (under commodity production) conditions of existence for the mass of the peasantry. The tactics of Social-Democracy in the Russian bourgeois revolution are determilled not by the task of supporting the liberal bourgeoisie, as the opportullists think, but by the task of supporting the fighting peasantry.

    Let us take the programme of the liberal bourgeoisie, i.e., the Cadet programme. True to the motto: "at your service" (i.e., at the service of the landlords), they proposed one programme in the First Duma and another in the Second. They can change their programme as easily and imperceptibly as all the European unprincipled bourgeois careerists do. In the First Duma the revolution appeared to be strong, and so the liberal programme borrowed from it a bit of nationalisation (the "state land available for distribution"). In the Second Duma the counter-revolution appeared to be strong, and so the liberal programme threw the state land available for distribution overboard, swung round to the Stolypin idea of stable peasant property, strengthened and enlarged the scope of exemptions from the general rule of compulsory alienation of the landlords' land. But we note this two-faced attitude of the liberals only in passing. The important thing to note here is something else, viz., the principle which is common to both "faces " of the liberal agrarian programme. That common principle consists of: (1) redemption payments; (2) preservation of the landlords' estates; (3) preservation of the landlords' privileges when carrying out the reform.

    Redemption payment is tribute imposed upon social development, tribute paid to the owners of the feudal latifundia. Redemption payment is the realisation, ensured by bureaucratic, police measures, of the feudal methods of exploitation in the shape of the bourgeois "universal equivalent". Further, preservation of the landlords' estates is seen in one or another degree in both Cadet programmes, no matter how the bourgeois politicians may try to conceal that fact from the people. The third point -- the preservation of the landlords' privileges when carrying out the reform -- is quite definitely expressed in the Cadets' attitude to the election of local land committees on the basis of universal, direct, and equal suffrage by secret bal-

page 245

page 246

the Mensheviks, regard the Cadet agrarian policy as being more progressive than the Narodnik policy.

page 247

and the Cadets, as is frequently and mistakenly assumed by the Mensheviks (who allow themselves to be taken in by the sound of "constitutional-democratic" words and substitute analysis of the respective titles of the parties for a class analysis). The dividing line runs between the Cadets and the Trudoviks. That line is determined by the interests of the two principal classes in Russian society which are fighting for the land, viz., the landlords and the peasantry. The Cadets stand for the preservation of landlordism and for a civilised, European, but landlord bourgeois evolution of agriculture. The Trudoviks (and the Social-Democratic workers' deputies), i.e., the representatives of the peasantry aad the representatives of the proletariat, advocate a peasant bourgeois evolution of agriculture.

    A strict distinction must be drawn between the ideological cloak of the agrarian programmes, their different political details, etc., and the economic basis of those programmes. The present difficulty does not lie in understanding the bourgeois character of the agrarian demands and programmes of both the landlords and the peasants : that was already explained by the Marxists before the revolution, and the revolution has confirmed the correctness of their explanation. The difficulty lies in understanding fully the basis of the struggle between the two classes within the framework of bourgeois society and bourgeois evolution. The fact that this struggle is a normal social phenomenon will not be understood unless it is seen as part and parcel of the objective tendencies of the economic development of capitalist Russia.

    Now, having shown the connection between the two types of agrarian programmes in the Russian revolution and the two types of bourgeois agrarian evolution, we must pass on to the examination of a new, extremely important aspect of the question.

    We have pointed out above that on the question of capitalism in Russia the economic analysis compels us to distinguish between the central agricultural provinces with

page 248

their plentiful survivals of serfdom, and the borderlands where those survivals are absent, or weak, and which bear the features of free-peasant capitalist evolution.

    What do we mean by the borderlands? Obviously, lands which are unpopulated, or sparsely populated, and which have not been completely drawn into agriculture. And we must now pass from European Russia to the whole of the Russian Empire in order to form an exact idea of these "borderlands" and of their economic significance.

    In the pamphlet written by Prokopovich and Mertvago, How Much Land There Is in Russia and How We Use It (Moscow, 1907), the latter of those authors tries to summarise all the statistical data available in our literature on the amount of land in the whole of Russia and the economic use to which the known amount of land is put. For the sake of clarity, we shall quote Mr. Mertvago's figures in the form of a table, and add the statistics of the population according to the census of 1897.

    These figures plainly show how vast is the land area of Russia and how little we know about the borderlands and their economic importance. Of course, it would be absolutely wrong to regard those lands at the present time, and in their present state, as being suitable for satisfying the land needs of the Russian peasantry. All calculations of that kind, frequently made by reactionary writers,* are of no scientific value whatever. In this respect Mr. A. A. Kaufman is quite right when he ridicules the search for vacant lands for colonisation on the basis of statistics of square versts. Undoubtedly he is also right when he points out how little land is suitable for colonisation in the border lands of Russia at the present time, and how wrong it is

page 249

page 250

page 251

page 252

was the opinion expressed in 1845 by such authoritative observers of nature as Academicians Beer and Helmersen. At that time the population of Taurida Gubernia, a half of what it is now, produced 1,800,000 chetverts of grain of all kinds. . . . Now, after a lapse of 60 years, the population has doubled, and in 1903, it produced 17,600,000 chetverts, i.e., nearly ten times as much" (p. 24).

page 253

    This aspect of the matter is overlooked by many students of the agrarian problem in Russia. The prerequisite for the wide utilisation of the vast Russian lands available for colonisation is the creation in European Russia of a really free peasantry, completely liberated from the oppression of feudal relations. A considerable portion of these lands is unsuitable at the present time, not so much because of the natural properties of this or that borderland, but because of the social conditions of agriculture in Russia proper, which doom technical methods to stagnation and the population to a rightless status, downtroddenness, ignorance, and helplessness.

    It is this exceedingly important aspect of the matter that Mr. Kaufman overlooks when he declares: "I say in advance: I do not know whether it will be possible to settle one, three, or ten million on those lands" (ibid., p. 128). He goes on to point out that the term unsuitable land is only relative: "The alkali soils, far from being absolutely hopeless, can, with the application of certain technical methods, be made very fertile" (ibid., p. 129). In Turkestan, with a population density of 3.6 to the square verst, "vast areas are still uninhabited" (ibid., p. 137). "The soil of many of the 'hungry deserts' of Turkestan consists of the famous Central Asiatic loess which becomes highly fertile if sufficiently irrigated. . . . The existence of irrigable lands is a question that is not even worth while discussing: it is sufficient to cross the country in any direction to see the ruins of numerous villages and towns, abandoned centuries ago, frequently surrounded for scores of square versts by networks of ancient irrigation canals and ditches. The total area of loess desert awaiting irrigation undoubtedly amounts to many millions of dessiatins" (ibid., p. 137).

    All these millions of dessiatins in Turkestan, as well as in many other parts of Russia, are "awaiting" not only irrigation and reclamation of every kind. They are also "awaiting" the emancipation of the Russian agricultural population from the survivals of serfdom, from the yoke of the nobility's latifundia, and from the Black-Hundred dictatorship in the state.

    It is idle to speculate on the actual amount of land in Russia that could be converted from "unsuitable" into suit-

page 254

able land. But it is necessary clearly to appreciate the fact, which is demonstrated by the whole economic history of Russia, and which is an outstanding feature of the bourgeois revolution in Russia, viz., that Russia possesses a gigantic amount of land available for colonisation, which will be rendered accessible to the population and accessible to culture, not only by every technical advance of agriculture, but also by every advance in the emancipation of the Russian peasantry from the yoke of serfdom.

    This forms the economic basis for the bourgeois evolution of Russian agriculture on the American model. In the countries of Western Europe, which our Marxists so often draw upon for thoughtless and stereotyped comparisons, all the land was already occupied in the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The only new thing brought about by every technical advance in agriculture was that it became possible to invest more labour and capital in the land. In Russia, the bourgeois-democratic revolution is taking place under conditions in which every technical advance in agriculture, and every advance in the development of real liberty for the population, not only creates the possibility for additional investment of labour and capital in old lands, but also the possibility for utilising "boundless" tracts of adjacent new lands.

    Let us sum up the economic deductions which are to serve as an introduction to the re-examination of the question of the Social-Democratic agrarian programme.

    We have seen that the "pivot" of the agrarian struggle in our revolution is the feudal latifundia. The peasants' struggle for the land is, first and foremost, a struggle for the abolition of these latifundia. Their abolition and their complete transfer to the peasantry undoubtedly coincide with the line of the capitalist evolution of Russian agriculture. Such a path of this evolution would mean the most rapid development of productive forces, the best conditions of labour for the mass of the population, and the most rapid development of capitalism, with the conversion of

page 255

the free peasants into farmers. But another path of bourgeois evolution of agriculture is possible, viz., the preservation of the landlord farms and latifundia and their slow conversion from farms based on serfdom and bondage into Junker farms. It is these two types of possible bourgeois evolution that form the basis of the two types of agrarian programmes proposed by different classes in the Russian revolution. Moreover, a special feature of Russia, a feature that is one of the economic foundations for the possibility of the "American" evolution, is the existence of vast lands available for colonisation. While entirely unsuitable for emancipating the Russian peasantry from the yoke of serfdom in European Russia, these lands will become more extensive and more accessible in proportion to the freedom enjoyed by the peasantry in Russia proper, and to the scope of development of the productive forces.

page 256

ments and to leave the commune to be granted to those peasants who may find it advantageous to do so, etc."

    That is all. The error of that programme is not that its principles or partial demands were wrong. No. Its principles are correct, while the only partial demand it puts forward (the right to refuse allotments) is so incontestable that it has now been carried out by Stolypin's peculiar legislation. The error of that progromme is its abstract character, the absence of any concrete view of the subject. Properly speaking, it is not a programme, but a Marxist declaration in the most general terms. Of course, it would be absurd to put the blame for this mistake on the authors of the programme, who for the first time laid down certain principles long before the formation of a workers' party. On the contrary, it should be particularly emphasised that in that programme the inevitability of a "radical revision" of the Peasant Reform was recognised twenty years before the Russian revolution.

    Theoretically that programme should have been developed by clarifying the economic basis of our agrarian programme, the facts upon which the demand for a radical revision, as distinct from a non-radical, reformist revision can and should be based, and finally, by concretely defining the nature of this revision from the standpoint of the proletariat (which differs essentially from the general radical standpoint). Practically the programme should have been developed by taking into account the experience of the peasant movement. Without the experience of a mass -- indeed, more than that -- of a nation-wide peasant movement, the programme of the Social-Democratic Labour Party could not become concrete; for it would have been too difficult, if not impossible, on the basis of theoretical reasoning alone, to define the degree to which capitalist disintegration had taken place among our peasantry, and to what extent the latter was capable of bringing about a revolutionary-democratic change.

    In 1903, when the Second Congress of our Party adopted the first agrarian programme of the R.S.D.L.P., we did not yet have such expericnce as would enable us to judge the character, breadth, and depth of the peasant movement. The peasant risings in South Russia in the spring of 1902 remained

page 257

sporadic outbursts. One can therefore understand the restraint shown by the Social-Democrats in drafting the agrarian programme: it is not the proletariat's business to "devise" such a programme for bourgeois society, and the extent to which the peasant movement against the survivals of serfdom, a movement worthy of proletarian support, was likely to develop was still unknown.

    The 1903 programme attempts to define concretely the nature and terms of the "revision" about which the Social-Democrats in 1885 spoke only in a general way. That attempt -- in the main item of the programme, dealing with the cut-off lands -- was based upon a tentative distinction between lands which serve for exploitation by means of serfdom and bondage ("lands 'cut off' in 1861") and lands which are exploited in a capitalist manner. Such a tentative distinction was quite fallacious, because, in practice, the peasant mass movement could not be directed against particular categories of landlord estates, but only against landlordism in general. The programme of 1903 raised a question which had not yet been raised in 1885, namely, the question of the conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords at the moment of the revision of agrarian relations, which all Social-Democrats regarded as inevitable. But the solution given to this question in the programme of 1903 is not correct, for, instead of contraposing the consistently peasant to the consistentIy Junker method of carrying out the bourgeois revolution, the programme artificially sets up something intermediate. Here, too, we must make allowance for the fact that the absence of an open mass movement at that time made it impossible to solve this question on the basis of precise data, and not on the basis of phrases, or innocent wishes, or petty-bourgeois utopias, as the Socialist-Revolutionaries did. No one could say in advance with certainty to what extent disintegration among the peasantry had progressed as a result of the partial transition of the landlords from the labour-service system to wage-labour. No one could estimate how large was the stratum of agricultural labourers which had arisen after the Reform of 1861 and to what extent their interests had become separated from those of the ruined peasant masses.

page 258

    At all events, the fundamental mistake in the agrarian programme of 1903 was the absence of a clear idea of the issue around which the agrarian struggle could and should develop in the process of the bourgeois revolution in Russia -- a clear idea of the types of capitalist agrarian evolution that were objectively possible as the result of the victory of one or other of the social forces engaged in this struggle.

page 259

only from the standpoint of the peasant agrarian revolution in Russia. Of course, it is not a question of Social-Democracy refraining from independently defining the interests of the proletariat, as a separate class, in this peasant revolution. No. It is a question of having a clear idea of the character and significance of the peasant agrarian revolution as one of the forms of the bourgeois revolution in general. We cannot "invent" any particular reform "project". We must study the objective conditions of the peasant agrarian revolution in capitalistically developing Russia; on the basis of this objective analysis, we must separate the erroneous ideology of the different classes from the real content of the economic changes, and determine what, on the basis of those real economic changes, is required for the development of the productive forces and for the proletarian class struggle.

    The present agrarian programme of the R.S.D.L.P. recognises (in a special form) the conversion of the confiscated lands into public property (nationalisation of forests, waters and lands for colonisation, and municipalisation of privately owned lands), at any rate in the event of the "victorious development of the revolution". In the event of "unfavourable conditions", the principle of dividing the landlords' lands among the peasants as private property is adopted. In all cases, the property rights of the peasants and small landowners generally to their present holdings are recognised. Consequently, the programme provides for a dual system of land tenure in a renovated bourgeois Russia: private ownership of land, and (at least in the event of the victorious development of the revolution) public ownership in the form of municipalisation and nationalisation.

    How did the authors of the programme account for this duality? First of all, and above all, by the interests and demands of the peasantry, by the fear of drifting apart from the peasantry, the fear of setting the peasantry against the proletariat and against the revolution. By advancing such an argument the authors and the supporters of the programme took the stand of recognising the peasant agrarian revolution, the stand of proletarian support for definite peasant demands. And that argument was advanced by the most influential supporters of the programme, headed

page 260

by Comrade John! To become convinced of this, it is sufficient to glance at the Minutes of the Stockholm Congress.

page 261

    But was not the Congress wrong in believing them?

    In view of the importance of the question of an all-Russian Vendée against nationalisation, a brief reference to history will not be out of place.

page 262

with the spokesmen of the government, defended private ownership of the land and were opposed to any form of public ownership of land, whether by municipalisation, nationalisation, or socialisation. In both Dumas it was the peasant deputies from all parts of Russia who declared for nationalisation.

    Comrade Maslov wrote in 1905: "Nationalisation of the land as a means of solving [?] the agrarian problem in Russia at the present time cannot be accepted, first of all [note this "first of all"] because it is hopelessly utopian. Nationalisation of the land presupposes the transfer of all the land to the state. But will the peasants, and particularly the homestead peasants, voluntarily agree to transfer their land to anyone?" (P. Maslov, A Critique of Agrarian Programmes, Moscow, 1905, p. 20.)

    Thus, in 1905, nationalisation was "first of all" hopelessly utopian because the peasants would not agree to it.

    In 1907, in March, the same Maslov wrote: "All the Narodnik groups [the Trudoviks, the Popular Socialists, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries] are advocating nationalisation of the land in one form or another." (Obrazovaniye, 1907, No. 3, p. 100.)

    There's your new Vendée! There's your all-Russian revolt of the peasants against nationalisation!

    But instead of pondering over the ridiculous position in which the people who spoke and wrote about a peasant Vendée against nationalisation now find themselves, in the light of the experience of the two Dumas, instead of trying to explain the mistake which he made in 1905, P. Maslov behaved like Ivan the Forgetful. He preferred to forget the words I have just quoted, and the speeches at the Stockholm Congress! Moreover, with the same light-heartedness with which he, in 1905, asserted that the peasants would not agree, he now asserts the opposite. Listen:

    . . . "The Narodniks, reflecting the interests and hopes of the small proprietors [listen to this!], had to declare in favour of nationalisation" (ibid.).

    There you have a sample of the scientific scrupulousness of our municipalisers! In solving a difficult problem before the elected representatives of the peasants from the whole of Russia made their political declarations, the

page263

municipalisers, on behalf of the small proprietors, asserted one thing; and after those declarations in the two Dumas they assert, on behalf of the very same "small proprietors", the very opposite.

    It shouId be mentioned, as a particular curiosity, that Maslov explains this tendency towards nationalisation on the part of the Russian peasants as being due not to any special conditions of the peasant agrarian revolution, but to the general characteristics of the small proprietor in capitalist society. That is incredible, but it is a fact:

    "The small proprietor," Maslov announces, "is most of all afraid of the competition and domination of the big proprietor, of the domination of capital". . . . You are mixing things up, Mr. Maslov. To put the big (feudal ) landowner on a par with the owner of capital means repeating the prejudices of the petty bourgeoisie. The peasant is fighting so energetically against the feudal latifundia precisely because at the present historical moment he represents the free, capitalist evolution of agriculture.

    . . . "Being unable to contend with capital in the economic field the small proprietor puts his faith in government authority which should come to the aid of the small proprietor against the big one. . . . The reason the Russian peasant has hoped for centuries to be protected from the landlords and government officials by the central authority, the reason Napoleon in France relying for support on the peasants, was able to crush the Republic was the hope the peasants entertained of receiving aid from the central authority." (Obrazovaniye, p. 100 )

    How magnificently Pyotr Maslov argues! In the first place, what has nationalisation of the land to do with the fact that at the present historical moment the Russian peassant is displaying the same characteristics as the French peasant under Napoleon? The French peasant under Napoleon was not and could not be in favour of nationalisation. You are rather incoherent, Mr. Maslov!

    Secondly, what has the struggle against capital to do with it? We are comparing peasant ownership of land with the nationalisation of all the land, including that of the peasants. The French peasant under Napoleon clung fanatically to the small property as a barrier against capital, but the Russian peasant. . . . Once again, my dear fellow,

page 264

where is the connection between the beginning and the end of your argument?

    Thirdly, in speaking about the hopes placed in government authority, Maslov makes it appear that the peasants do not understand the harmfulness of bureaucracy, do not understand the importance of local self-government, whereas he, the progressive Pyotr Maslov, does appreciate all this. This criticism of the Narodniks is much too simplified. A reference to the famous Land Bill (the Bill of the 104), which the Trudoviks introduced in the First and Second Dumas, will suffice to show the falsity of Maslov's argument (or hint?). The facts show, on the contrary, that the principles of local self-government and of hostility towards a bureaucratic solution of the land problem are more clearly expressed in the Trudovik Bill than in the programme of the Social-Democrats written according to Maslov! In our programme we speak only about "democratic principles" in electing local bodies, whereas the Trudovik Bill (Clause 16) distinctly and directly provides for the election of local self-governing bodies on the basis of "universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot". Moreover, the Bill provides for local land committees -- which, as is known, the Social-Democrats support -- to be elected in the same. way, and which are to organise the discussion on the land reform and make preparations for carrying it out (Clauses 17-20). The bureaucratic method of carrying out the agrarian reform was advocated by the Cadets, and not by the Trudoviks, by the liberal bourgeoisie, and not by the peasants. Why did Maslov have to distort these well-known facts?

    Fourthly, in his remarkable "explanation" of why the small proprietors "had to declare in favour of nationalisation", Maslov lays stress on the peasants' hope of receiving protection from the central authority. That is the point of distinction between municipalisation and nationalisation: in the one case there are local authorities, in the other case, the central authority. That is Maslov's pet idea, the economic and political implications of which we shall deal with in greater detail further on. Here we will point out that Maslov is dodging the question put to him by the history of our revolution, namely, why the peasants are

page 265

not afraid of the nationalisation of their own land. That is the crux of the question!

    But that is not all. A particularly piquant feature of Maslov's attempt to explain the class roots of the Trudovik policy of nationalisation as against municipalisation is the following: Maslov conceals from his readers the fact that on the question of the actual disposal of the land the Narodniks were also in favour of local self-governing bodies ! Maslov's talk about the peasants placing their "hopes" in the central authority is mere intellectualist tittle-tattle about the peasants. Read Clause 16 of the Land Bill that the Trudoviks introduced in both Dumas. Here is the text of this clause:

    "The management of the national land fund must be entrusted to local self-governing bodies, elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage by secret ballot, which shall act independently within the limits laid down by the law."

    Compare this with the corresponding demand made in our programme: ". . . The R.S.D.L.P. demands: . . . (4) the confiscation of privately owned lands, except small holdings, which shall be placed at the disposal of large local self-governing bodies (comprisnig urban and rural districts, as per Point 3) to be elected on democratic principles". . . .

    What is the difference here from the point of view of the comparative rights of central and local authorities? In what way does "management" differ from "disposal"?

    Why, in speaking about the attitude of the Trudoviks towards nationalisation, did Maslov have to conceal from his readers -- and perhaps from himself too -- the contents of this Clause 16? Because it completely shatters the whole of his absurd "municipalisation" theory.

    Examine the arguments in favour of this municipalisation that Maslov advanced before the Stockholm Congress, read the Minutes of that Congress; you will find innumerable allusions to the impossibility of suppressing nationalities, of oppressing the borderlands, of ignoring the differences of local interests, etc., etc. Even prior to the Stockholm Congress, I had pointed out to Maslov (see Revision, etc., p. 18*) that all arguments of this kind are a "sheer mis-

page 266

understanding" because our programme -- I said -- already recognised the right of self-determination of nationalities as well as wide local and regional self-government. Consequently, from that aspect, there was no need, nor was it possible, to devise any additional "guarantees" against excessive centralisation, bureaucracy, and regulation, because that would be either devoid of content or would be interpreted in an anti-proletarian, federalist spirit.

    The Trudoviks have demonstrated to the municipalisers that I was right.

    Maslov must admit now that all the groups that voice the interests and the point of view of the peasantry have declared in favour of nationalisation in a form that will ensure the rights and powers of the local self-governing bodies no less than in Maslov's programme! The law defining the powers of the locaI self-governing bodies is to be passed by the central parliament. Maslov does not say that, but such ostrich-like tactics will be of no avail, because no other procedure is conceivable.

page 267

gramme. No wonder Maslov found it necessary, in talking about nationalisation, to drag in even the Napoleonic peasant in order to conceal from the public the absurd position we have put ourselves in before the representatives of bourgeois democracy by our muddled "municipalisation"!

    The only difference between the two -- a real essential difference -- is the attitude towards the peasants' allotment lands. Maslov singled these out only because he was afraid of a "Vendée". And it turned out that the peasant deputies who were sent to the First and Second Dumas laughed at the fears of the tail-ist Social-Democrats and declared in favour of the nationalisation of their own lands!

    The municipalisers should now oppose the Trudovik peasants and urge them not to nationalise their lands. The irony of history has brought the arguments of Maslov, John, Kostrov, and Co. tumbling down upon their own heads.

    We shall try to analyse the question (as to why all the political groups which reflect the interests and hopes of the small proprietors should have spoken in favour of nationalisation) in regard to which P. Maslov flounders so helplessly.

    First of all, let us see to what extent the Land Bill of the 104, i.e., of the Trudoviks in the First and Second Dumas, really expresses the demands of the peasantry of the whole of Russia. That it does is borne out by the nature of the representation in both Dumas, as well as by the nature of the political struggle on the agrarian question which developed in the "parliamentary" arena among the spokesmen of the different classes. The idea of landownership in general, and of peasant ownership in particular, far from being pushed into the background in the Duma, was, on the contrary, constantly brought to the fore by certain parties. The idea was supported by the government, in the shape of Stishinsky, Gurko, and all the ministers, as well as all the official press, addressing especially the peasant deputies. The political parties of the Right, too, beginning with the "famous" Svyatopolk-Mirsky in the Second Duma,

page 268

kept dinning into the peasants' ears about the blessings of peasant proprietorship. The actual alignment of forces on this question has been depicted by such a wealth of data that there can be no doubt as to its correctness (from the standpoint of class interests). The Cadet Party in the First Duma, when the liberals regarded the revolutionary people as a force and tried to woo them, was also swept along by the general current in the direction of land nationalisation. As is known, the Cadet Land Bill introduced in the First Duma contained a clause about a "state land reserve" to include all alienated land and from which land would be granted on long-term leases. Of course, the Cadets in the First Duma did not put that demand forward on any grounds of principle -- it would be ridiculous to speak of the Cadet Party having principles. No. That demand of the liberals sprang up as a feeble echo of the demands of the peasant masses. Already in the First Duma the peasant deputies at once began to form a separate political group, and the Land Bill of the "104" served as the chief and basic platform of the whole of the Russian peasantry, which came forward as a conscious social force. The speeches of the peasant deputies in the First and Second Dumas and the articles in the Trudovik papers (Izvestia Krestyanskikh Deputatov, Trudovaya Rossiya ) showed that the Bill of the 104 faithfully expressed the interests and hopes of the peasants. That Bill must, therefore, be dealt with in somewhat greater detail.

    It is interesting, by the way, to look at the composition of the group of deputies who signed the Bill. In the First Duma it was signed by 70 Trudoviks, 17 non-party deputies, 8 peasants who supplied no information as to their party affiliation, 5 Cadets,* 3 Social-Democrats,** and 1 Lithuanian Autonomist. In the Second Duma the Bill of the "104" had 99 signatures, and after deducting duplicates, 91 signatures, namely, 79 Trudoviks, 4 Popular Socialists, 2 Socialist-Revolutionaries, 2 deputies from the Cossack

page 269

page 270

Poland (Suvalki) and Siberia (Tobolsk). Obviously, the plight of the small peasant under the oppression of feudal landlordism, which is most forcefully and clearly demonstrated in the purely Russian agricultural centre, is felt throughout Russia, and causes the small farmers everywhere to support the struggle for the nationalisation of the land.

    The nature of that struggle bears all the earmarks of petty-bourgeois individualism. In this respect special stress inust be laid on the fact, all too frequently ignored in our socialist press, that the greatest blow to the "socialism" of the Socialist-Revolutionaries was struck by the very first entry of the peasants into the open, all-Russian political arena with an independent land programme. The Socialist-Revolutionary Land Socialisation Bill (the Bill of the "33" in the First Duma) was supported by a minority of progressive peasant deputies. The great majority were found on the side of the Land Bill of the 104, drafted by the Popular Socialists ; whose programme the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves describe as individualistic.

    For instance, in the Socialist-Revolutionary Collection of Articles (published by Nasha Mysl, St. Petersburg, 1907, No. 1) we find an article by P. Vikhlyaev entitled "The Popular Socialist Party and the Agrarian Question". The writer criticises the Popular Socialist Peshekhonov, and quotes the latter's statement that "the Bill of the 104 reflected our [the P.S.] standpoint on the way in which the land may be taken" (p. 81 of the Collection ). The Socialist-Revolutionaries declare bluntly that the Bill of the 104" leads to the negation of the root principle of communal land tenure" -- "in the same way " (sic !) as Stolypin's agrarian legislation, the law of November 9, 1906, does. (ibid., p. 86; we shall show presently how the Socialist Revolutionaries were prevented by their own prejudices from appraising the real economic difference between the two ways, i.e., the Stolypin way and the Trudovik way.) The Socialist-Revolutionaries regard Peshekhonov's programmatic views as "the manifestation of selfish individualism" (p. 89), "the pollution of the wide ideological stream with the mud of individualism" (p. 91), and "the encouragement of individualistic and selfish tendencies among the masses of the people" (ibid., p. 93).

page 271

page 272

land. Clause 9 of the Bill, which states that "priority is to be given to the local population before outsiders, and to the agricultural population before the non-agricultural", shows once more that the interests of the small proprietors come first with the Trudoviks. An "equal right to the land" is a mere phrase; state loans and grants "to persons without sufficient means to acquire the necessary agricultural equipment" (Clause 15 of the Land Bill of the 104) are pious wishes; those who will really and inevitably gain will be the ones who can become strong proprietors now, who can be transformed from enslaved tillers of the soil into free and well-to-do farmers. Of course, it is in the interests of the proletariat to support such measures as will most of all help agriculture in Russia to pass from the hands of feudal landlords and enslaved tillers of the soil, who are crushed by ignorance, poverty, and routine, into the hands of free farmers. And the Bill of the "104" is nothing but a platform of the struggle to turn the well-to-do section of the enslaved peasantry into free farmers.

    The question now arises whether there are material grounds in the economic conditions of the agrarian, bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia compelling the small proprietors to demand the nationalisation of the land, or whether this demand as well is merely a phrase, merely the pious wish of the ignorant muzhik, the vain dream of the patriarchal tiller of the soil.

page 273

    To answer this question we must first try to envisage, more concretely the conditions of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in agriculture, and then compare those conditions with the two paths of capitalist agrarian evolution that are possible in Russia, as we have outlined above.

    The conditions of the bourgeois revolution in agriculture from the standpoint of agrarian relations have been very strikingly dealt with by Marx in the last volume of Theories of Surplus Value (Theorien über den Mehrwert, II. Band, 2. Teil, Stuttgart, 1905).

page 274

    "secondly, nowhere in the world has capitalist production, since Henry VII, dealt so ruthlessly with the traditional relations of agriculture and so adequately moulded its conditions and made them subject to itself. England is in this respect the most revolutionary country in the world. All historically inherited relations -- not only the position of the villages, but the very villages themselves, not only the habitations of the agricultural population, but this population itself, not only the ancient economic centres, but the very economy itself -- have been ruthlessly swept away where they were in contradiction to the conditions of capitalist production in agriculture, or did not correspond to those conditions. The German, for example, finds economic relations determined by the traditional common land relations [Feldmarken ], the position of economic centres, and particular conglomerations of the population. The Englishman finds that the historical conditions of agriculture have been progressively created by capital since the fifteenth century. The technical expression customary in the United Kingdom, the 'clearing of estates', does not occur in any continental country. But what does this 'clearing of estates' mean? It means that, without regard for the local population -- which is driven away, for existing villages -- which are levelled to the ground, for farm buildings -- which are torn down, for the kind of agriculture -- which is transformed at a stroke, being converted for example from tillage to pasture, all conditions of production, instead of being accepted as they are handed down by tradition, are historically fashioned in the form necessary under the circumstances for the most profitable investment of capital. To that extent, therefore, no landed property exists ; it allows capital -- the farmer -- to manage freely, since it is only concerned about the money income. A Pomeranian landowner, his mind full of his ancestral [angestammten ] common lands, economic centres, and the agricultural collegium, etc., is quite likely, therefore, to hold up his hands in horror at Ricardo's 'unhistorical' views on the development of agricultural relations. That only shows that he naïvely confuses Pomeranian and English conditions. But it cannot be said that Ricardo, who here starts out from English conditions, is just as narrow in his view as the

page 275

Pomeranian landowner who thinks within the limits of Pomeranian conditions. The English conditions are the only ones in which modern landed property, i.e., landed property modified by capitalist production, has developed adequately (in ideal perfection). Here the English theory is the classical one for the modern, i.e., capitalist mode of production. The Pomeranian theory, on the other hand, judges the developed relations according to a historically lower (inadequate) form, which has not taken full shape" (S. 5-7).

    That is a remarkably profound argument by Marx. Have our "municipalisers" ever pondered over it?

    Look from this angle at the agrarian evolution of Russia since the second half of the nineteenth century.

page 282

can be seen most clearly in the latter's attitude towards the petty-bourgeois utopias of the Narodniks (including the Socialist-Revolutionaries). In 1846, Marx ruthlessly exposed the petty-bourgeois character of the Americall Socialist-Revolutionary Hermann Kriege, who proposed a veritable General Redistribution for America and called it "communism". Marx's dialectical and revolutionary criticism swept away the husks of petty-bourgeois doctrine and picked out the sound kernel of the "attacks on landed property" and of the "Anti-Rent movement". Our vulgar Marxists, however, in criticising "equalised redistribution", "socialisation of the land", and "equal right to the land", confine themselves to repudiating the doctrine, and thus reveal their own obtuse doctrinairism, which prevents them from seeing the vital life of the peasant revolution beneath the lifeless doctrine of Narodnik theory. Maslov and the Mensheviks have carried this obtuse doctrinairism -- expressed in our "municipalisation" programme, which perpetuates the most backward and medieval form of land ownership -- to such lengths that in the Second Duma the following truly disgraceful things could be uttered in the name of the Social-Democratic Party: . . . "While on the question of the method of land alienation we [Social-Democrats] stand much nearer to these [Narodnik] groups than to the People's Freedom group, on the question of the forms of land tenure we stand farther away from them" (47th sitting, May 26, 1907, p. 1230 of Stenographic Record).

    Indeed, in the peasant agrarian revolution the Mensheviks stand farther away from revolutionary peasant nationalisation, and closer to liberal-landlord preservation of allotment (and not only allotment) ownership. The preservation of allotment ownership is the preservation of downtroddenness, backwardness, and bondage. It is natural for a liberal landlord, who dreams of redemption payments, to stand up for allotment ownership*. . . with the preservation

page 283

of a goodly share of landlord ownership! But the Social-Democrat, led astray by the "municipalisers", does not understand that the sound of words vanishes but the deed remains. The sound of the words about equality, socialisation, etc., will vanish, because there cannot be equalisation under commodity production. But the deed will remain, i.e., the greatest break with the feudal past that can possibly be achieved under capitalism, the break with medieval allotment ownership and with all routine and tradition. When people say "nothing will come of equalised redistribution", the Marxist ought to understand that this "nothing" relates exclusively to the socialist aims, exclusively to the fact that this is not going to abolish capitalism. But from attempts to bring about such a redistribution, even from the very idea of such a redistribution, very much will come that will be of advantage to the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

    For that revolution may take place either with the predominance of the landlords over the peasants -- and that requires the preservation of the old form of ownership and the Stolypin reform of it exclusively by the power of the ruble; or it will take place as a result of the victory of the peasantry over the landlords -- and that, in view of the objective conditions of capitalist economy, is impossible without the abolition of all forms of medieval landownership, both landlord and peasant. The choice is between the Stolypin agrarian reform and peasant revolutionary nationalisation. Only these solutions are economically real. Anything intermediate, from Menshevik municipalisation to Cadet redemption payments, is petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, a stupid distortion of theory, a poor invention.

page 284

page 285

    "The allotment lands," he writes, "the part of the territory most important from the standpoint of production, are permanently assigned to a certain social-estate, and what is worse, to small groups of that estate, to separate households and villages. The result is that the peasantry, taken as a whole cannot freely settle even within the area of the allotment land. . . . The population is not properly distributed to suit the requirements of the market [note this!]. . . . The ban on the state lands must be lifted, allotment land must be freed from the fetters of property, the fences around the private estates must be removed. The land must be returned to the Russian people who wiII then settle upon it in a manner that will suit their economic requirements (A. V. Peshekhonov, The Agrarian Problem in Connection with the Peasant Movement, St. Petersburg, 1906, pp. 83, 86, 88-89. Our italics.)

    Is it not clear that the voice of this "Popular Socialist" is the voice of the free farmer who wants to stand up on his own feet? Is it not clear that it is really necessary for the farmer that the "allotment land" should be "freed from the fetters of property" in order that the population may distribute itself in a new way, in order that holdings may be redistributed in a manner to "suit the requirements of the market", i.e., the requirements of capitalist agriculture ? Mr. Peshekhonov, we repeat, is so sober-minded that he rejects any kind of socialisation, rejects any kind of adaptation to communal law -- it is not for nothing that the Socialist-Revolutionaries curse him for an individualist! -- he rejects any prohibition of hired labour on the peasant farm.

    In view of this kind of striving of the peasantry for nationalisation, the reactionary nature of support for peasant allotment ownership becomes quite obvious. A. Finn, who in his pamphlet cites some of Mr. Peshekhonov's. arguments which we have quoted, criticises him as a Narodnik and tries to prove to him that the development of capitalism out of peasant farming, and within that system of farming, is inevitable (p. 14, et seq. in the pamphlet mentioned). That criticism is unsatisfactory because A. Finn has allowed the general question of the development of capitalism to make him overlook the concrete question of the conditions for a freer development of capitalist agriculture on allotment land! A. Finn contents himself with merely posing the question of capitalism in general, thus scoring an easy victory over Narodism, which was vanquished long ago.

page 286

page287

    Thus, the peasants have clearly and emphatically declared against the old village commune in favour of free associations and individual land tenure. That this was the real voice of the peasantry as a whole there can be no doubt, since there is not a hint at the village commune even in the Land Bill of the Trudovik Group (of the 104). Yet the village commune is an association for the ownership of allotment land!

    Stolypin is forcibly abolishing the village commune for the benefit of a handful of rich persons. The peasantry wants to abolish it and replace it by free associations and tenure by "individuals" on the nationalised allotment land. But Maslov and Co., in the name of bourgeois progress, are challenging the fundamental requirement of this very progress and defending medieval landownership. God save us from that sort of "Marxism"!

page 288

page 289

false perspective is drawn. For Stolypin's agrarian reform too leads to technical progress in agriculture, and does so in a correct way from the standpoint of the lalldlords' interests. The forcible break-up of the village communes by the laws of November 9, 1906, etc., the setting up of khutors and the subsidising of otrubs, are not a mirage, as frivolous, prattling democratic journalists sometimes declare them to be; they are the realities of economic progress based on the preservation of the power and interests of the landlords. It is an incredibly slow and incredibly painful road for the broad masses of the peasantry and for the proletariat, but it is the only possible road for capitalist Russia if the peasant agrarian revolution is not victorious.

page 290

order. That is its fundamental idea. Social-Democracy must not bind itself by decisions which pledge it to support any particular form of economy. In this struggle of the new social forces against the foundations of the old order, it is necessary to cut the tangled knot with a decisive stroke" (p. 125 of the Minutes). All that is quite true and splendidly stated. And it all speaks in favour of nationalisation, because the latter alone really "breaks up" the old medieval system of landownership, really cuts the tangled knot, and allows full freedom for the new farms to develop on the nationalised land.

    Above we quoted the current formulation of the now generally recognised proposition. "All the Narodnik groups are advocating nationalisation of the land." As a matter of fact, this current formulation is very inexact and there is very little in it that is "generally recognised", if by this we mean a really identical conception of this "nationalisation" among the representatives of the various political trends. The mass of the peasantry demand the land spontaneously, for they are oppressed by the feudal latifundia and do not associate the transfer of the land to the people with any at all definite economic ideas. Among the peasantry there is only a very urgent demand, born, so to speak, from suffering and hardened by long years of oppression -- a demand for the revival, strengthening, consolidation, and expansion of small farming; a demand that the latter be made predominant, and nothing more. All that the peasant visualises is the passing of the landlord latifundia into his own hands; in this struggle the peasant clothes his hazy idea of the unity of all peasants, as a mass, in the phrase: ownership of the land by the people. The peasant is guided by the instinct of the property owner, who is hindered by the endless fragmentation of the present forms of medievaI landownership and by the impossibility of organising the cultivation of the soil in a manner that fully corresponds to "property owning" requirements if all this motley medieval system of landownership continues. The economic necessity of abolishing landlordism, of abolishing also the "fetters" of allotment landownership -- such are the negative concepts which exhaust the peasant idea of nationalisation. What forms of landownership may eventually be necessary for renovated small farming, which will have digested, so to speak, the landlord latifundia, the peasant does not think about.

    The negative aspects of the concept (or hazy ideas of nationalisation undoubtedly also predominate in Narodnik ideology, which expresses the demands and the hopes of the peasantry. The removal of the old obstacles, the clearing out of the landlord, the "unfencing" of the land, the removal of the fetters of allotment ownership, the

page 296

strengthening of small farming, the substitution of "equality, fraternity, and liberty" for "inequality" (i.e., the landlord latifundia) -- that expresses nine-tenths of Narodnik ideology. Equal right to land, equalised land tenure, socialisation -- all these are merely different forms of expression of the same ideas; and all are mainly negative concepts, for the Narodnik cannot conceive the new order as a definite system of social-economic relationships. The Narodnik regards the present agrarian revolution as a transition from serfdom, inequality, and oppression in general, to equality aud liberty, and nothing more. That is the typical narrow-mindedness of the bourgeois revolutionary who fails to see the capitalist features of the new society he is creating.

    In contrast to the naïve outlook of Narodism, Marxism investigates the new system that is arising. Even with the fullest freedom of peasant farming and with the fullest equality of small proprietors occupying the people's, or no man's, or "God's" land -- we have before us a system of commodity production. Small producers are tied aud subjected to the market. Out of the exchange of products arises the power of money; the conversion of agricultural produce into money is followed by the conversion of labour-power into money. Commodity production becomes capitalist production. And this theory is not a dogma, but a simple description, a generalisation of what is taking place in Russian peasant farming too. The freer that farming is from land congestion, landlord oppression, the pressure of medieval relations and system of landownership, bondage, and tyranny, the more strongly do capitalist relationships develop within that peasant farming. That is a fact to which the whole of the post-Reform history of Russia undoubtedly testifies

    Consequently, the concept of nationalisation of the land, in terms of economic reality, is a category of commodity and capitalist society. What is real in this concept is not what the peasants think, or what the Narodniks say, but what arises from the economic relations of present society. Nationalisation of the land under capitalist relations is neither more nor less than the transfer of rent to the state. What is rent in capitalist society? It is not income from the

page 297

land in general. It is that part of surplus value which remains after average profit on capital is deducted. Hence, rent presupposes wage-labour in agriculture, the transformation of the cultivator into a capitalist farmer, into an entrepreneur. Nationalisation (in its pure form) assumes that the state receives rent from the agricultural entrepreneur who pays wages to wage-workers and receives average profit on his capital -- average for all enterprises, agricultural and non-agricultural, in the given country or group of countries.

    Thus, the theoretical concept of nationalisation is inseparably bound up with the theory of rent, i.e., capitalist rent, as the special form of income of a special class (the landowning class) in capitalist society.

    Marx's theory distinguishes two forms of rent: differential rent and absolute rent. The first springs from the limited nature of land, its occupation by capitalist economies, quite irrespective of whether private ownership of land exists, or what the form of landownership is. Between the individual farms there are inevitable differences arising out of differences in soil fertility, location in regard to markets, and the productivity of additional investments of capital in the land. Briefly, those differences may be summed up (without, however, forgetting that they spring from diflerent causes) as the diflerences between better and worse soils. To proceed. The price of production of the agricultural product is determined by the conditions of production not on the average soil, but on the worst soil, because the produce from the best soil alone is insufficient to meet the demand. The difference between the individual price of production and the highest price of production is differential rent. (We remind the reader that by price of production Marx means the capital expended on the production of the product, plus average profit on capital.)

    Differential rent inevitably arises in capitalist agriculture even if the private ownership of land is completely abolished. Under the private ownership of land, this rent is appropriated by the landowner, for competition between capitals compels the tenant farmer to be satisfied with the average profit on capital. When the private ownership of land is abolished, that rent will go to the state.

page 298

That rent cannot be abolished as long as the capitalist mode of production exists.

page 300

one hand, nationalisation is a partial reform within the limits of capitalism (a change of owners of a part of surplus value), and, on the other hand, it abolishes the monopoly which hinders the development of capitalism as a whole.

    Unless a distinction is made between these two sides, i.e., the nationalisation of differential rent and of absolute rent, it is impossible to understand the economic significance of the question of nationalisation in Russia. This brings us, however, to P. Maslov's repudiation of the theory of absolute rent.

page 304

landlords introduced a clause in their leases compelling the farmers to spend not less than £12 (about 110 rubles) per acre on their farms, instead of £8, as formerly. The landlords thus took into account the progress in socially necessary agricultural technique which took place as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws.

    Pyotr Maslov thinks it is necessary. "Elaborating" his silly "theory", he tells us for our edification in Obrazovaniye :

    "If it were not for the 'fact' that the productivity of successive expenditures of labour on the same plot of land diminishes, the idyll which the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Narodniks depict could, perhaps, be realised: every peasant would use the patch of land he was entitled to and apply as much labour to it as he liked, and the land would 'reward' him for every 'application' with a corresponding quantity of products" (No. 2, 1907, p. 123).

    Thus, if Marx had not been refuted by Pyotr Maslov, the Narodniks would, perhaps, be right! Such are the pearls of wisdom that drop from the lips of our "theoretician". And we, in our simple Marxist way, had thought that the idyll of perpetuating small production is refuted not by the bourgeois-stupid "law of diminishing returns", but by the fact of commodity production, the domination of the market, the advantages of large-scale capitalist farming over small farming, etc. Maslov has changed all this! Maslov has discovered that had it not been for the bourgeois law refuted by Marx, the Narodniks would have been right!

page 308

    But that is not all. The revisionists, too, would have been right. Here is another argument advanced by our home-grown economist:

    "If I am not mistaken, I [Pyotr Maslov] happened to be the first [that's the sort of fellow I am!] to lay special emphasis on the difference between the significance of the cultivation of the soil and of technical progress for the development of farming, and, in particular, for the struggle between large-scale and small production. Whereas the intensification of agriculture and the further expenditure of labour and capital are to an equal extent less productive both in large-scale and in small farming, technical progress, which increases the productivity of labour in agriculture as it does in industry, creates enormous and exceptional advantages for large-scale production. These advantages are determined almost entirely by technical conditions." . . . You are muddling things up, my dear man: the advantages of large-scale production in commercial respects are of great importance.

    . . . "On the other hand, cultivation of the soil can usually be applied equally in large-scale and in small farming". . . . Cultivation of the soil "can" be applied.

    Evidently, our sagacious Maslov knows of a type of farming which can be conducted without the cultivation of the soil. . . . "For example, the substitution of multiple-crop rotation for the three-field system, an increase in the quantity of fertilisers, deeper ploughing, etc., can be equally applied in large-scale and small farming, and equally affect the productivity of labour. But the introduction of reaping-machines, for example, increases the productivity of labour only on the larger farms, because the small strips of grain field can be more conveniently reaped or mown by hand." . . .

    Yes, undoubtedly Maslov was the "first" to succeed in introducing such endless confusion into the question! Just imagine: a steam plough (deeper ploughing) is "cultivation of the soil", a reaping-machine is a "technical implement". Thus, according to the doctrine of our incomparable Maslov, a steam plough is not a technical implement; a reaping machine is not the further expenditure of labour and capital. Artificial fertilisers, the steam plough, grass cultivation

page 309

are "intensification". The reaping-machine and in general "most agricultural machines" represent "technical progress". Maslov "happened" to invent this nonsense because he had to find some way of wriggling out of the "law of diminishing returns", which technical progress has refuted. Bulgakov wriggled out of it by saying: technical progress is temporary, stagnation is constant. Maslov wriggles out of it by inventing a most amusing division of technical progress in agriculture into "intensification" and "technical implements".

page 310

it is the employment of cows as draught animals that is developing. Just think, great Maslov, can this signify that deep ploughing is equally applicable? Secondly, even where large and small farms use the same types of draught animals, the latter are feebler on the small farms, and therefore there cannot be equal conditions in regard to deep ploughing.

    In short, there is hardly a sentence in all Maslov's vain attempts at "theoretical" thinking which does not reveal an inexhaustible amount of the most incredible confusion and the most astonishing ignorance. But Maslov, unperturbed, concludes:

    "Whoever has clarified for himself the difference between these two aspects of the development of agriculture [improvement in cultivation and technical improvement] will easily upset all the arguments of revisionism, and of Narodism in Russia." (Obrazovaniye, 1907, No. 2, p. 125.)

    Well, well. Maslov is a non-Narodnik and a non-revisionist only because he succeeded in rising above Marx's rough notes to the point of "clarifying" for himself the decrepit prejudices of decrepit bourgeois political economy. It is the old song set to a new tune! Marx versus Marx -- exclaimed Bernstein and Struve. It is impossible to demolish revisionism without demolishing Marx -- announces Maslov.

    In conclusion, a characteristic detail. If Marx, who created the theory of absolute rent, is wrong, if rent cannot exist without the "law of diminishing returns", if the Narodniks and revisionists might be right did that law not exist, then, it would seem, Maslov's "corrections " to Marxism should serve as the corner-stone of his, Maslov's, "theory". And so they do. But Maslov prefers to conceal them. Recently the German translation of his book, The Agrarian Question in Russia, appeared. I was curious to see in what form Maslov had presented his incredible theoretical banalities to the European Social-Democrats. I found that he had not presented them at all. In facing Europeans, Maslov kept the "whole " of his theory hidden in his pocket. He omitted from his book all that he had written in repudiation of absolute rent, the law of diminishing returns, etc. I could not help recalling in this connection

page 311

the story about a stranger who was present for the first time at a discussion between ancient philosophers but remained silent all the time. One of the philosophers said to the stranger: "If you are wise, you are behaving foolishly; if you are a fool, you are behaving wisely."

    Puffed up though Maslov may be with the importance of his remarkable discoveries in the sphere of political economic theory, he, evidently, has some doubts whether any such connection exists At any rate, in the article quoted above (Obrazovaniye, No. 2, p. 120) he denies that there is any connection between municipalisation and the 'fact" of diminishing returns. That is rather odd: the "law of diminishing returns" is connected with the repudiation of absolute rent, is connected also with the fight against Narodism, but it is not connected with Maslov's agrarian programme! The fallacy of this opinion that there is no connection between general agrarian theory and Maslov's Russian agrarian programme can, however, be easily proved by direct means.

    The repudiation of absolute rent is the repudiation of the economic significance of private land ownership under capitalism. Whoever claims that only differential rent exists, inevitably arrives at the conclusion that it makes not the slightest difference to the conditions of capitalist farming and of capitalist development whether the land belongs to the state or to private persons. In both cases, from the standpoint of the theory which repudiates absolute rent, only differential rent exists. Clearly, such a theory must lead to the repudiation of the significance of nationalisation as a measure which accelerates the development of capitalism, clears the path for it, etc. For such a view of nationalisation follows from the recognition of two forms of rent: the capitalist form, i.e., the form which cannot be eliminated under capitalism even on nationalised land (differential rent), and the non-capitalist form connected with monopoly, a form which capitalism does not need and which hinders the full development of capitalism (absolute rent).

page 312

    That is why, proceeding from his "theory", Maslov inevitably arrived at the conclusion that "it makes no difference whether it [ground rent] is called absolute or differential rent" (Obrazovaniye, No. 3, p. 103); that the only question is whether that rent is to be made over to the local or to the central authorities. But such a view is the result of theoretical ignorance. Quite apart from the question of whom the rent is paid to, and the political purposes for which it will be used, there is the far more fundamental question of the changes in the general conditions of capitalist farming and of capitalist development that are brought about by the abolition of private ownership of land.

    Maslov has not even raised this purely economic question; it has not entered his mind, and it could not do so since he repudiates absolute rent. Hence the distorted one-sided, "politician's " approach, as I might call it, which reduces the question of confiscating the landlords' estates exclusively to that of who will receive the rent. Hence the distorted dualism in the programme based on the anticipation of "the victorious development of the revolution" (the expression used in the resolution on tactics which was added to Maslov's programme at the Stockholm Congress). The victorious development of the bourgeois revolution presupposes, first of all, fundamental economic changes that will really sweep away all the survivals of feudalism and medieval monopolies. In municipalisation, however, we see a real agrarian bimetallism : a combination of the oldest, most antiquated and obsolete, medieval allotment ownership with the absence of private landownership, i.e., with the most advanced, theoretically ideal system of agrarian relations in capitalist society. This agrarian bimetallism is a theoretical absurdity, an impossibility from the purely economic point of view. Here, the combination of private with public ownership of land is a purely mechanical combination "invented" by a man who sees no difference between the very system of capitalist farming under private landownership and without private landownership. The only question such a "theoretician" is concerned with is: how is the rent, "no matter what you call it, absolute or differential", to be shuffled around?

page 313

    Indeed, in a capitalist country it is impossible to leave half the land (138,000,000 dessiatins out of 280,000,000) in private hands. There are two alternatives. Either private landownership is really needed at a given stage of economic development, really corresponds to the fundamental interests of the capitalist farmer class -- in which case it is inevitable everywhere as the basis of bourgeois society which has taken shape according to a given type.

    Or private landownership is not essential for the given stage of capitalist development, does not follow inevitably from the interests of the farmer class, and even contradicts those interests -- in which case the preservation of that obsolete form of ownership is impossible.

    The preservation of monopoly in one half of the land area under cultivation, the creation of privileges for one category of small farmers, the perpetuation in a free capitalist society of the "pale of settlement ", which divides landowners from tenants of public land, is an absurdity in separably bound up with the absurdity of Maslov's economic theory.

page 314

tortion of its propagandist tasks in the revolution. The criticism of private landownership in speeches in the Duma, in propaganda and agitational literature, etc., was made only from the Narodnik, i.e., from the petty-bourgeois, quasi-socialist, point of view. The Marxists were unable to pick out the real core of this petty-bourgeois ideology, having failed to understand that their task was to introduce the historical element into the examination of the question, and to replace the point of view of the petty bourgeois (the abstract idea of equalisation, justice, etc.) by the point of view of the proletariat on the real roots of the struggle against private ownership of land in developing capitalist society. The Narodnik thinks that repudiation of private landownership is repudiation of capitalism. That is wrong. The repudiation of private landownership expresses the demands for the purest capitalist development. And we have to revive in the minds of Marxists the "forgotten words" of Marx, who criticised private landownership from the point of view of the conditions of capitalist economy.

    An interesting economic argument agalnst nationalisation was advanced by A. Finn, an advocate of division of the land. Both nationalisation and municipalisation, he says, mean transferring rent to a public body. The question is: what kind of rent? Not capitalist rent, for "usually the peasants do not obtain rent in the capitalist sense from their land" (The Agrarian Question and Social-Democracy, p. 77, cf. p. 63), but pre-capitalist money rent.

page 317

    By money rent Marx means the payment by the peasant to the landlord of the whole of the surplus product in the form of money. The original form of the peasant's economic dependence upon the landlord under the pre-capitalist modes of production was labour rent (Arbeitsrente ), i.e., corvée; then came rent in the form of produce, or rent in kind, and finally came money rent. That rent, says A. Finn, "is the most widespread form in our country even today" (p. 63).

    Undoubtedly, tenant farming based on servitude and bondage is extremely widespread in Russia, and, according to Marx's theory, the payment which the peasant makes under such a system of tenancy is largely money rent. What power makes it possible to extort that rent from the peasantry? The power of the bourgeoisie and of developing capitalism? Not at all. It is the power of the feudal latifundia. Since the latter will be broken up -- and that is the starting-point and fundamental condition of the peasant agrarian revolution -- there is no reason to speak of "money rent" in the pre-capitalist sense. Hence, the only significance of Finn's argument is that he emphasises once more the absurdity of separating the peasant allotment land from the rest of the land in the event of an agrarian revolution; since allotment lands are often surrounded by landlords' lands, and since the present conditions of demarcation of the peasant lands from the landlords' lands give rise to bondage, the preservation of this demarcation is reactionary. Unlike either division of the land or nationalisation, municipalisation preserves this demarcation.

page 319

page 320

many in 1848, but also in 1846 for America, which, as he most accurately pointed out at that time, was only just starting its "industrial" development. The experience of various capitalist countries gives us no example of the nationalisation of the land in anything like its pure form. We see something similar to it in New Zealand, a young capitalist democracy, where there is no evidence of highly developed agricultural capitalism. Something similar to it existed in America when the government passed the Homestead Act and distributed plots of land to small farmers at a nominal rent.

    No. To associate nationalisation with the epoch of highly developed capitalism means repudiating it as a measure of bourgeois progress; and such a repudiation directly contradicts economic theory. It seems to me that in the following argument in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx outlines conditions for the achievement of nationalisation other than those usually presumed.

    After pointing out that the landowner is an absolutely superfluous figure in capitalist production, that the purpose of the latter is "fully answered" if the land belongs to the state, Marx goes on to say:

    If nationalisation is regarded as a measure most likely to be achieved in the epoch of bourgeois revolution, such a view must inevitably lead to the admission that nationalisation may turn out to be a mere transition to division. The real economic need which compels the mass of the peasantry to strive for nationalisation is the need for the thorough renovation of all the old agrarian relationships, for "clearing" all the land, for readapting it to the new system of farming. That being the case, it is clear that the farmers who have adapted themselves, who have renovated the whole system of landownership, may demand that the new agrarian system be consolidated, i.e., that the holdings they have rented from the state be converted into their property.

    Yes, that is indisputable. We arrive at nationalisation not from abstract arguments, but from a concrete calculation of the concrete interests of a concrete epoch. And, of course, it would be ridiculous to regard the mass of small farmers as "idealists"; it would be ridiculous to think that they will stop at division if their interests demand it. Consequently, we must inquire: (1) whether their interests can demand division; (2) under what circumstances; and (3) how this will affect the proletarian agrarian programme.

    We have already answered the first question in the affirmative. To the second question no definite reply can yet be given. After the period of revolutionary nationalisation the demand for division may be evoked by the desire to consolidate to the greatest possible degree the new agrarian relations, which meet the requirements of capitalism. It may be evoked by the desire of the given owners of land to increase their incomes at the expense of the rest of society. Finally, it may be evoked by the desire to "quieten" (or, plainly speaking, to put down) the proletariat and the semi-proletarian strata, for whom nationalisation of the land will be an element that will "whet the appetite" for the socialisation of the whole of social production. All these three possibilities reduce themselves to a single economic basis, since the consolidation of the new system of capital-

page 324

ist landownership of the new farmers automatically creates anti-proletarian sentiments and a striving on the part of these farmers to create new privileges for themselves in the shape of right of ownership. Hence, the question reduces itself precisely to this economic consolidation. The constant factor counteracting this will be the development of capitalism, which increases the superiority of large-scale agriculture and demands constant facility for the "consolidation" of small farms into large ones. A temporary factor counteracting it will be the land available for colonisation in Russia: consolidating the new economy means raising the technical level of agriculture. And we have already shown that every step forward in agricultural technique "opens up" for Russia more and more new areas of land available for colonisation.

    Our examination of the second question leads to the following deduction: the circumstances under which the new farmers' demands for the division of the land will overcome all counteracting influences cannot be predicted with accuracy. Allowance, however, must be made for the fact that capitalist development after the bourgeois revolution will inevitably give rise to such circumstances.

    As regards the last question, that concerning the attitude of the workers' party towards the possible demand of the new farmers for the division of the land, a very definite reply can be given. The proletariat can and must support the militant bourgeoisie when the latter wages a really revolutionary struggle against feudalism. But it is not for the proletariat to support the bourgeoisie when the latter is becoming quiescent. If it is certain that a victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia is impossible without the nationalisation of the land, then it is still more certain that a subsequent turn towards the division of the land is impossible without a certain amount of "restoration", without the peasantry (or rather, from the point of view of the presumed relations: farmers) turning towards counter-revolution. The proletariat will uphold the revolutionary tradition against all such strivings and will not assist them.

    In any case, it would be a great mistake to think that, in the event of the new farmer class turning towards division of the land, nationalisation would be a transient phe-

page 325

nomenon of no serious significance. In any case, it would have tremendous material and moral significance. Material significance, in that nothing is capable of so thoroughly sweeping away the survivals of medievalism in Russia, of so thoroughly renovating the rural districts, which are in a state of Asiatic semi-decay, of so rapidly promoting agricultural progress, as nationalisation. Any other solution of the agrarian question in the revolution would create less favourable starting-points for further economic development.

    The moral significance of nationalisation in the revolutionary epoch is that the proletariat helps to strike a blow at "one form of private property" which must inevitably have its repercussions all over the world. The proletariat stands for the most consistent and most determined bourgeois revolution and the most favourable conditions for capitalist development, thereby most effectively counteracting all half-heartedness, flabbiness, spinelessness and passivity -- qualities which the bourgeoisie cannot help displaying.

    As already pointed out, it is considerations of this kind that occupy a disproportionately large place in our Party discussion on the agrarian programme. Our task is to examine these considerations as systematically and briefly as possible and to show the relation between the various political measures (and points of view) and the economic basis of the agrarian revolution.

    In my Report on the Stockholm Congress I dealt with this argument, citing the debate from memory. Now, we have before us the authentic text of the Minutes.

    "The key to my position," exclaimed Plekhanov at the Stockholm Congress, "is that I draw attention to the possi-

page 326

bility of restoration" (p. 115). Let us examine this key a little more closely. Here is the first reference to it in Plekhanov's first speech:

    "Lenin says, 'we shall make nationalisation harmless', but to make nationalisation harmless we must find a guarantee against restoration; and there is not, nor can there be, any such guarantee. Recall the history of France; recall the history of England; in each of these countries, the wide sweep of the revolution was followed by restoration. The same may happen in our country; and our programme must be such that in the event of its application, the harm that may be caused by restoration may be reduced to a minimum. Our programme must eliminate the economic basis of tsarism; but nationalisation of the land effected during the revolutionary period does not eliminate that basis. Therefore, I consider that the demand for nationalisation is an anti-revolutionary demand" (p. 44). What the "economic basis of tsarism" is, Plekhanov tells in the same speech: "The situation in our country was such that the land, together with its cultivators, was held in servitude by the state, and on the basis of that servitude Russian despotism developed. To overthrow despotism, it is necessary to do away with its economic basis. Therefore, I am opposed to nationalisation at present" (p. 44).

    First of all, let us examine the logic of this argument about restoration. First: "there is not, nor can there be, any guarantee against restoration!" Second: "the harm that may be caused by restoration must be reduced to a minimum". That is to say, we must invent a guarantee against restoration, although there cannot be any such guarantee! And on the very next page, 45 (in the same speech), Plekhanov finally invents a guarantee: "In the event of restoration," he plainly says, "it [municipalisation] will not surrender the land [listen!] to the political representatives of the old order." Thus, although "there cannot be" any such guarantee, a guarantee against restoration has been found. A very clever conjuring trick, and the Menshevik press is filled with rapture over the conjurer's skill.

    When Plekhanov speaks he is brilliant and witty, he crackles, twirls, and sparkles like a Catherine-wheel. The

page 327

trouble starts when the speech is taken down verbatim and later subjected to a logical examination.

    What is restoration? It is the reversion of state power to the political representatives of the old order. Can there be any guarantee against such a restoration? No, there cannot. Therefore, we invent such a guarantee: municipalisation, which "will not surrender the land". . . . But we ask: what obstacles does municipalisation raise to the "surrender of the land"? The only obstacle is the law passed by the revolutionary parliament declaring such and such lands (former landlord estates, etc.) to be the property of the Regional Diets. But what is a law? The expression of the will of the classes which have emerged victorious and hold the power of the state.

    Can you see now why such a law "will not surrender the land" to "the representatives of the old order" when the latter will have recaptured state power?

page 328

the political sphere, a democratic republic represents a more profound chahge than democratic local self-government; the former presupposes (and calls forth) greater revolutionary energy, intelligence, and organisation on the part of the large masses of the people; it creates traditions which it will be far more difficult to eradicate. That is why, for instance, present-day Social-Democrats attach so much value to the great fruits of the French Revolution in spite of all the restorations that have taken place, and in this they differ from the Cadets (and from Cadet-minded Social-Democrats?) who prefer democratic Zemstvos under a monarchy as a "guarantee against restoration".

    In the economic sphere, nationalisation in a bourgeois agrarian revolution is more far-reaching than anything else, because it breaks up all the medieval forms of landownership. At the present time the peasant farms his own strip of allotment land, a strip of rented allotment land, a strip of rented landlord's land, and so on. Nationalisation makes it possible to tear down all the fences of landownership to the utmost degree, and to "clear" all the land for the new system of economy suitable to the requirements of capitalism. Of course, even such a clearing affords no guarantee against a return to the old order; to promise the people such a "guarantee against restoration" would be a swindle. But such a clearing of the old system of landownership will enable the new system of economy to become so firmly rooted that a return to the old forms of landownership would be extremely difficult, because no power on earth can arrest the development of capitalism. Under municipalisation, however, a return to the old form of landownership is easier, because municipalisation perpetuates the "pale of settlement", the boundary that separates medieval landownership from the new, municipalised form. After nationalisation, restoration will have to break up millions of new, capitalist farms in order to restore the old system of landownership. After municipalisation, restoration will not have to break up any farms or to set up any new land boundaries; all it will have to do will be literally to sign a paper transferring the lands owned by the municipality X to the noble landlords Y, Z, etc., or to hand over to the landlords the rent from the "municipalised" lands.

page 329

    We must now pass from Plekhanov's logical error on the question of restoration, from the confusion of political concepts, to the economic essence of restoration. The Minutes of the Stockholm Congress fully confirm the statement made in my Report that Plekhanov impermissibly confuses the restoration which took place in France on the basis of capitalism with the restoration of "our old, semi-Asiatic order". (Minutes of the Stockhholm Congress, p. 116.) Therefore, there is no need for me to add anything to what I have already said on this question in the Report. I shall only deal with the "elimination of the economic basis of despotism". The following is the most important passage in Plekhanov's speech pertaining to this:

    "It is true that the restoration [in France] did not restore the survivals of feudalism; but the equivalent of these survivals in our own country is our old system of feudal attachment of both land and cultivator to the state, our old peculiar nationalisation of the land. It will be all the more easy for our restoration to return to that [sic! ] nationalisation because you yourselves demand the nationalisation of the land, because you leave that legacy of our old semi-Asiatic order intact" (p. 116).

page 330

tionalisation" and skipped the two forms of that system of landownership: allotments and landlordism. As a result of this juggling with words the real historical question as to what forms of medieval landownership are abolished by one or another agrarian measure is distorted. Plekhanov's fireworks display was very crude after all.

page 331

bourgeois evolution of the Prussian, Junker type, or a rapid, free evolution of the American type is possible in Russia now. Anything else is an illusion.

    The second reason for the "restoration muddle" in the heads of some of our comrades was the uncertain situation in the spring of 1906. The peasantry, as a mass, had not yet definitely shown itself. It was still possible to assume that the peasant movement and the Peasant Union were not the final expressions of the real aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the peasantry. The autocratic bureaucracy and Witte had not yet finally given up hope that "the muzhik will help us out" (a classic phrase used by Witte's organ Russkoye Gosudarstvo in the spring of 1906), i.e., that the peasants would go to the Right. Hence the strong representation allowed to the peasantry under the Law of December 11, 1905. Even at that time many Social-Democrats still thought the autocracy capable of playing some trick with the peasants' idea: "Better all the land be the tsar's than the gentry's". But the two Dumas, the Law of June 3, 1907, and Stolypin's agrarian legislation were enough to open everybody's eyes. To save what it could, the autocracy had to introduce the policy of forcibly breaking up the village communes in favour of private ownership of land, i.e., to base the counter-revolution, not on the peasants' vague talk about nationalisation (the land belongs to the "commune", and so on), but on the only possible economic basis upon which the power of the landlords could be retained, i.e., capitalist evolution on the Prussian model.

    The situation has now become quite clear, and it is high time to put away forever the vague fear of "Asiatic" restoration roused by the peasant movement against the private ownership of land.*

page 332

    . . . "In the shape of local self-government bodies which will possess the land," said Plekhanov at Stockholm, "it [municipalisation] will create a bulwark against reaction. And a very powerful bulwark it will be. Take our Cossacks for example" (p. 45). Well, we shall "take our Cossacks" and see what the reference to them is worth. But first of all, let us examine the general grounds for this opinion that local self-government is capable of being a bulwark against reaction. That view has been propounded by our municipalisers on innumerab]e occasions, and it will be sufficient to quote a passage from John's speech to supplement Plekhanov's formula. "What is the difference between nationalisation and municipalisation of the land if we admit that both are feasible and equally bound up with the democratisation of the political system? The difference is that municipalisation is better able to consolidate the gains of the revolution, the democratic system, and will serve as the basis for its further development, whereas nationalisation will merely consolidate the power of the state" (p. 112).

    The Mensheviks actually deny the possibility of guarantees against restoration, and in the very same breath produce "guarantees" and "bulwarks" like conjurers doing a trick in front of an audience. Just think a little, gentlemen! How can local self-government be a bulwark against reaction, or consolidate the gains of the revolution? There can be only one bulwark against reaction and one means of consolidating the gains of the revolution, namely, the class-consciousness and organisation of the masses of the proletariat and the peasantry. And in a capitalist state which is centralised, not by the arbitrary will of the bureaucracy, but by the inexorable demands of economic development, that organisation must find expression in a single force welded together throughout the state. Without a centralised peasant movement, without a centralised nation-wide political struggle of the peasantry led by a centralised proletariat, there can be no serious "revolutionary gains" worthy of "consolidation"; there can be no "bulwark against reaction".

page 333

    Local self-government that is at all really democratic is impossible unless landlord rule is completely overthrown and landlordism is abolished. While admitting this in words, the Mensheviks, with amazing light-mindedness, refuse to consider what it implies in deeds. In deeds, it cannot be attained unless the revolutionary classes conquer political power throughout the state; and one would have thought that two years of revolution would have taught even the most obdurate "man in the muffler" that these classes in Russia can only be the proletariat and the peasantry. To be victorious, the "peasant agrarian revolution" of which you gentlemen speak must, as such, as a peasant revolution, become the central authority throughout the state.

    The democratic self-governing bodies can be only particles of such a central authority of the democratic peasantry. Only by combating the local and regional disunity of the peasantry, only by advocating, preparing, and organising a nation-wide, all-Russian, centralised movement, can real service be rendered to the cause of "peasant agrarian revolution", and not to the encouragement of parochial backwardness and local provincial stupefaction of the peasantry. It is precisely this stupefaction that you, Mr. Plekhanov and Mr. John, are serving when you advocate the preposterous and arch-reactionary idea that local self-government can become a "bulwark against reaction", or that it can "consolidate the gains of the revolution". For the experience of the two years of the Russian revolution has plainly demonstrated that it was precisely this local and regional disunity of the peasant movement (the soldiers! movement is part of the peasant movement) that was most of all responsible for the defeat.

    To present a programme of a "peasant agrarian revolution and associate it only with the democratisation of local self-government and not of the central government, to hold the former up as a genuine "bulwark" and "consolidation", is in reality nothing but a Cadet deal with reaction.* The

page 334

Cadets lay stress on local "democratic" self-government because they do not want, or dare, to touch upon more important questions. The Mensheviks did not realise what a big word they uttered when they admitted that the "peasant agrarian revolution" is the task of the day, and in their polltical commentary to this agrarian programme they displayed the acme of provincial narrow-mindedness.

    Here is a sample of John's reasoning, if you please:

    "Comrade Lenin is afraid that the reaction will wrest the confiscated lands from the local self-government bodies; if that can be said of the lands which may pass into the hands of the state, it cannot possibly be said of municipalised lands. Even the autocratic Russian Government could not take away the land from the local government bodies of Armenia, as that called forth strong resistance on the part of the population" (p. 113).

    Superb, is it not? The whole history of the autocracy is one of wholesale grabbing of local, regional, and national lands; and our wiseacres try to reassure the people who are becoming stupefied in their provincial isolation by arguing that "even the autocracy" did not take away the land from the Armenian churches, although it had begun to do so, and was in fact prevented from doing so only by the all-Russian revolution. . . . In the centre autocracy, and in the provinces "Armenian lands" which "it dares not take away. . . . How has so much philistine stupidity penetrated our Social-Democratic movement?

    And here are Plekhanov's Cossacks:

    "Take our Cossacks. They behave like downright reactionaries; yet if the [autocratic] government dared to lay hands on their land, they would rise against it to a man. Consequently, the merit of municipaiisation lies precisely in that it will prove of use even in the event of restoration (p. 45).

page 335

    "Consequently", indeed! If the autocracy rose against the defenders of the autocracy, then the defenders af the autocracy would rise against the autocracy. What profundity! Cossack landownership, however, is of use not only in the event of restoration, but also as a means of upholding what must be overthrown before it can be restored. Speaking in opposition to Plekhanov, Schmidt called attention to this interesting aspect of municipalisation. He said:

    "Let me remind you that the autocracy had granted certain privileges to the Cossacks a month ago. Consequently, it is not afraid of municipalisation, for the Cossacks' lands even now are managed in a manner which greatly resembles municipalisation. . . . It [municipalisation] is going to play a counter-revolutiollary role" (pp. 123-24).

    Plekhanov became so excited over that speech that he interrupted the speaker (on quite an unimportant point, to ask him whether he was speaking about the Oreuburg Cossacks) and tried to upset the standing orders by demanding the floor out of his turn to make a statement. Subsequently he submitted the following written statement:

    "Comrade Schmidt misquoted my reference to the Cossacks. I made no reference to the Orenburg Cossacks at all. I said: look at the Cossacks they are behaving like arch-reactionaries: nevertheless, if the government tried to lay hands on their land, they would rise against it to a man. And so would, more or less, all the regional bodies to whom the confiscated landlords' land would be transferred by the revolution, if any such attempt were made. And such behaviour on their part would be one of the guarantees against reaction in the event of restoration" (p. 127).

    It is a brilliant plan, of course, to overthrow the autocracy without touching the autocracy: to take certain regions away from it and leave it to regain them if it can! It is almost as brilliant as the idea of expropriating capitalism through the savings-banks. But that is not the point just now. The point is that regional municipalisation, which "should" play a wonderful role after the victorious revolution, is now playing a counter-revolutionary role. And that is the point that Plekhanov evaded!

page 336

    It is the central state authority that the municipalisers dislike above all else. Before we proceed to examine their arguments, we must first ascertain what nationalisation means from the political and legal standpoint (its economic content we have ascertained above).

    Nationalisation is the transfer of all the land to the ownership of the state. State ownership means that the state is entitled to draw the rent from the land and to lay down general rules governing the possession and use of the land for the whole country. Under nationalisation such general rules certainly include prohibition of any sort of intermediary, i.e., the prohibition of sub-letting, or the transfer of land to anyone except the direct tiller, and so on. Furthermore, if the state in question is really democratic (not in the Menshevik sense à la Novosedsky), its ownership of the land does not at all preclude, but, on the contrary, requires that the land be placed at the disposal of the local and regional self-governing bodies within the limits of the laws of the country. As I have already pointed out in my pamphlet Revision, etc.,* our minimum programme directly demands this when it calls for the self-determination of nationalities, for wide regionaI self-government, and so on. Hence the detailed regulations, corresponding to local differences, the practical allotment, or distribution of land among individuals, associations, etc. -- all this inevitably passes into the hands of the local organs of the state, i.e., to the local self-governing bodies.

    Any misunderstandings on this score, if they could arise, would be due either to a failure to understand the difference between the concepts of ownership, possession, disposal and use, or to demagogical flirting with provincialism and federalism.** The basis of the difference between

page 338

municipalisation and nationalisation is not in the apportionment of rights as between the central and provincial authorities, and still less in the "bureaucracy" of the central authority -- only utter ignoramuses can think and talk like that -- the essential difference is that under municipalisation, private ownership is retained for one category of land, whereas under nationalisation it is completely abolished. The essential difference lies in the "agrarian bimetallism", which is implied in the first programme, and eliminated in the second.

    If, however, you approach the present programme from the standpoint of possible arbitrary action by the central authority, etc. (a standpoint which the vulgar advocates of municipalisation often fall back upon), you will see that the present programme is confused and vague in the extreme. It suffices to point out that the present programme transfers "to the possession of the democratic state" both the "lands required for colonisation", and "forest and water areas of national importance". Obviously, these terms are very indefinite and provide an abundant source for conflicts. Take, for instance, Mr. Kaufman's latest contribution in Volume II of The Agrarian Question, published by the Cadets ("On Norms of Supplementary Allotments"), in which a computation is made of the land reserves available in 44 gubernias for the purpose of additional allotments for the peasants at the highest norms of 1861. The "non-allotment distributable land" is first estimated with out forest land and then with forest land (over 25 per cent of forest). Who is to determine which of these forests are of "national importance"? Only the central state authority, of course. Hence, it is in the hands of this central state authority that the Menshevik programme places a gigantic

page 339

area of 57,000,000 dessiatins in 44 gubernias (according to Kaufman). Who is to determine what the lands available for "colonisation" are? Only the bourgeois central authority, of course. It alone will determine, for instance, whether the 1,500,000 dessiatins of "army lands" of the Orenburg Cossacks, or the 2,000,000 dessiatins of the Don Cossack lands can or cannot serve as "colonisation lands" for the whole country (because the Cossacks have 52.7 dessiatins per household). Clearly, the question is not as it is put by Maslov, Plekhanov, and Co. It is not a question of protecting the local regional self-governing bodies from the encroachments of the central government by means of paper resolutions; that cannot be done either with paper, or even with guns; for the trend of capitalist development is towards centralisation, towards the concentration of such a force in the hands of the central bourgeois government as the "regions" will never be able to stand up against. The point is that one and the same class should have political power both centrally and locally, that democracy should be quite consistently applied in both cases to an absolutely equal degree, a degree sufficient to ensure the complete supremacy of, let us say, the majority of the population, i.e., the peasantry. That alone can serve as a real guarantee against "excessive" encroachments of the centre, against infringements of the "lawful" rights of the regions. All other guarantees invented by the Mensheviks are downright foolishness; they are foolscaps donned by provincial philistines to protect themselves from the power of the central authority which has been concentrated by capitalism. That is exactly the kind of philistine foolishness that Novosedsky is guilty of, as also the whole of the present programme, which conceives the possibility of complete democracy in local self-government and a "lower" degree of democracy at the centre. Incomplete democracy means that power at the centre is not in the hands of the majority of the population, not in the hands of those elements which predominate in the local self-governing bodies; and that means not only the possibility but the inevitability of conflicts, out of which, by virtue of the laws of economic development, the non-democratic central authority must emerge victorious!

page 340

    "Municipalisation" from this angle, regarded as a means of "securing" something for the regions against the central authority, is sheer philistine nonsense. If that can be called a "fight" against the centralised bourgeois authority, it is the sort of "fight" that the anti-Semites are waging against capitalism, that is, the same extravagant promises, which attract the dull and ignorant masses and the same economic and political impossibility of fulfilling these promises.

    Take the stock argument of the advocates of municipalisation against nationalisation, namely, nationalisation will strengthen the bourgeois state (or as John so admirably put it: "will strengthen only the state power"), and will increase the revenues of the anti-proletarian, bourgeois government; whereas -- this is exactly what they say -- where as municipalisation will yield revenues for the needs of the population, for the needs of the proletariat. This kind of argument makes one blush for Social-Democracy, for it is sheer anti-Semitic stupidity and anti-Semitic demagogy. We shall not quote the "small fry" who have been led astray by Plekhanov and Maslov; we shall quote Maslov "himself":

    "Social-Demoeraey," he instruets the readers of Obrazovaniye "always makes its calculations in such a way that its plans and aims will be vindicated even under the worst cireumstanees. . . . We must assume that the bourgeois system with all its negative features will predominate in all spheres of social life. Self-government will have the same bourgoois character as the whole state system; the same acute class struggle will go on in it as in the municipalities of Western Europe.

    "What is the difference, then, between local self-government and the state authority? Why does Soeial-Democracy seek to transfer the land not to the state, but to the local self-governing bodies?

    "To define the functions of the state and of local self-government, let us compare their budgets." (Obrazovaniye, 1907, No. 3, p. 102.)

    Then follows a comparison: in one of the most democratic republics -- the United States of America -- 42 per cent of the budget is spent on the army and navy. The same applics to France, England, etc. The "landlord Zemstvos" in Russia spend 27.5 per cent of their budgets on public health, 17.4 per cent on education, 11.9 per cent on roads .

page 341

    "This comparison of the respective budgets of the most democratic states with the least democratic local self-governing bodies shows that the former, by their functions, serve the interests of the ruling classes, that the state funds are spent on means of oppression, on means of suppressing democracy, on the other hand, we find that the most undemocratic, the very worst type of local self-government is compelled however badly, to serve democracy, to satisfy local requirements" (p. 103).

    "Social-Democrats must not be so naïve as to accept nationalisation of the land on the grounds, for instance, that the revenues from nationalised lands would go towards the maintenance of republican troops. . . . It will be a very naïve reader who believes Olenov when he says that Marx's theory 'permits' the inclusion in the programme only of the demand for the nationalisation of the land, i.e., the expenditure of ground rent [irrespective of whether it is called absolute or differential rent?] on the army and navy, and that this theory does not permit the inclusion of municipalisation of the land, i.e., the expeuditure of rent on the needs of the population" (p. 103).

    Clear enough, one would think. Nationalisation -- for the army and navy; municipalisation -- for the needs of the people! A Jew is a capitalist; down with the Jews means down with the capitalists!

    Good Maslov fails to see that the high percentage of expenditure on cultural needs in the budgets of local self-governing bodies is a high percentage of secondary items of expenditure. Why is that? Because the jurisdiction and financial powers of local self-governing bodies are determined by the central authority and determined in such a manner that it takes vast sums for the army, etc., and gives only farthings for "culture". Is such a division unavoidable in bourgeois society? Yes, it is; for in bourgeois society the bourgeoisie could not rule if it did not spend vast sums on making its class rule secure and thus leave only farthings for cultural purposes. One must be a Maslov to conceive this brilliant idea: if I declare this new source of vast sums to be the property of the Zemstvos, I get round the rule of the bourgeoisie! How easy the task of the proletarians would be if they reasoned like Maslov: all we have to do is to demand that the revenues from the railways, post, telegraph, and the liquor monopoly should not be "nationalised", but "municipalised", and all those revenues will be spent not on the army and navy, but for cultural purposes. There is no need whatever to

page 342

overthrow the central authority, or to change it radically; all we have to do is simply to secure the "municipalisation" of all the big items of revenue, and the trick is done. Oh, wiseacres!

    In Europe, and in every bourgeois country, municipal revenues are those revenues -- and let the good Maslov remember this! -- which the bourgeois central authority is willing to sacrifice for cultural purposes, because they are secondary items of revenue, because it is inconvenient for the central authority to collect them, and because the principal, cardinal, fundamental needs of the bourgeoisie and of its rule have already been met by the vast sums of revenue. Therefore, to advise the people to secure new vast sums, hundreds of millions from the municipalised lands, and to make sure the money is spent for cultural purposes by handing it over to the Zemstvos and not to the central authority, is the advice of a charlatan. The bourgeoisie in a bourgeois state can give nothing but farthings for real cultural purposes, for it requires the large sums to secure its rule as a class. Why does the central authority appropriate nine-tenths of the revenues from taxes on land, commercial bodies, etc., and allow the Zemstvos to keep only one-tenth? Why does it make it a law that any additional taxes imposed by the Zemstvos shall not exceed a certain low percentage? Because the large sums are needed to ensure the class rule of the bourgeoisie, which by its very bourgeois nature cannot allow more than farthings to be spent for cultural purposes.*

page 343

    The European socialists take this distribution of thr large sums agd the farthings for granted; they know quite well that it cannot be otherwise in bourgeois society. Taking this distribution for granted, they say: we cannot participate in the central government because it is an instrument of oppression; but we may participate in municipal governments because there the farthings are spent for cultural purposes. But what would these socialists think of a man who advised the workers' party to agitate in favour of the European municipalities being given property rights in the really large revenues, the total rent from local land, the whole revenue from the local post offices, local railways, and so on? They would certainly think that such a man was either crazy or a "Christian Socialist" who had found his way into the ranks of Social-Democracy by mistake.

    Those who, in discussing the tasks of the present (i.e., bourgeois) revolution in Russia, argue that, we must not strengthen the central authority of the bourgeois state, reveal a complete inability to think. The Germans may and should argue in that way because they have before them only a Junker-bourgeois Germany; there can be no other Germany until socialism is established. In our country, on tho other hand, the whole content of the revolutionary mass struggle at the present stage is whether Russia is to be a Junker-bourgeois state (as Stolypin and the Cadets desire), or a peasant-bourgeois state (as the peasants and the workers desire). One cannot take part in such a revolution without supporting one section of the bourgeoisie, one type of bourgeois evolution, against the other. Owing to objective economic causes, there is not and cannot be any other "choice" for us in this revolution than that between a bourgeois centralised republic of peasant-farmers and a bourgeois centralised monarchy of Junker-landlords. To

page 344

avoid that difficult "choice" by fixing the attention of the masses on the plea: "if only we could make the Zemstvos a little more democratic", is the most vulgar philistinism.

    A difficult "choice", we said, meaning of course not the subjective choice (which is the more desirable), but the objective outcome of the struggle of the social forces that are deciding the historical issue. Those who say that my agrarian programme, which links the republic with nationalisation, is optimistic, have never thought out what the "difficulty" involved in a favourable outcome for the peasantry really is. Here is Plekhanov's argument on the subject:

page 345

    I have quoted this argument in full because it clearly indicates Plekhanov's mistake. He has complete1y failed to understand the optimism which scares him. The "optimism" is not in assuming the election of officials by the people, etc., but in assuming the victory of the peasant agrarian revolution. The real "difficulty" lies in securing the victory of the peasant agrarian revolution in a country which, at least siuce 1861, has been developing along Junker-bourgeois lines; and since you admit the possibility of this fundamental economic difficulty, it is ridiculous to regard the difficulties of political democracy as all but anarchism. It is ridiculous to forget that the scope of the agrarian and of the political changes cannot fail to correspond, that the economic revolution presupposes a corresponding political superstructure. Plekhanov's cardinal mistake on this question lies in this very failure to understand the root of the "optimism" of our common, Menshevik and Bolshevik, agrarian programme.

    Indeed, picture to yourselves concretely that a "peasant agrarian revolution ", involving confiscation of the landlords' estates, means in contemporary Russia. There can be no doubt that during the past half-century capitalism has paved the way for itself through landlord farming, which now, on the whole, is unquestionably superior to peasant farming, not only as regards yields (which can be partly ascribed to the better quality of the land owned by the landlords), but also as regards the wide use of improved implements and crop rotation (fodder grass cultivation).* There is no doubt that landlord farming is bound by a thousand ties not only to the bureaucracy, but also to the bourgeoisie. Confiscation undermines a great many of the interests of the big bourgeoisie, while the peasant revolution, as Kautsky has rightly pointed out, leads also to the bankruptcy of the state, i.e., it damnges the interests not only of the Russian, but of the whole international bourgeoisie. It stands to reason that under such conditions the victory of the peasant revolution, the victory of the petty

page 346

page 348

the toiling masses. On the other hand, we must also explain the petty-bourgeois nature of the peasant revolution, and the fallacy of placing any "socialist" hopes in it.

page 349

division) with political "pessimism" (Novosedsky's democratisation "of a comparative degree" at the centre).

    The Mensheviks, as if in spite of themselves, accept the peasant revolution, but do not want to give the people a clear and definite picture of it. One can detect in what they say the opinion expressed with such inimitable naïveté by the Menshevik Ptitsyn at Stockholm: "The revolutionary turmoil will pass away, bourgeois life will resume its usual course, and unless a workers' revolution takes place in the West, the bourgeoisie will inevitably come to power in our country. Comrade Lenin will not and cannot deny that" (Minutes, p. 91). Thus, a superficial, abstract conception of the bourgeois revolution has obscured the question of one of its varieties, namely, the peasant revolution! All of this last is mere "turmoil", and the only thing that is real is the "usual course". The philistine point of view and failure to understand what the struggle is about in our bourgeois revolution could hardly be expressed in clearer terms.

    The peasantry cannot carry out an agrarian revolution without abolishing the old regime, the standing army and the bureaucracy, because all these are the most reliable mainstays of landlordism, bound to it by thousands of ties. That is why the idea of achieving a peasant revolution by democratising only the local institutions without completely breaking up the central institutions is scientifically unsound. In practice it is reactionary because it plays into the hands of petty-bourgeois obtuseness and petty-bourgeois opportunism, which sees the thing in a very "simple" way: we want the land; as to politics, God will take care of that! The peasant agrees that all the land must be taken; but whether all political power has to be taken as well, whether all political power can be taken, and how it should be taken, are things he does not bother about (or did not bother until the dissolution of two Dumas made him wiser). Hence, the extremely reactionary standpoint of the "peasant Cadet" Mr. Peshekhonov, who already in his Agrarian Problem wrote: "Just now it is far more necessary to give a definite answer on the agrarian question than, for instance, of the question of a republic" (p. 114).

page 350

And that standpoint of political imbecility (the legacy of the arch-reactionary Mr. V. V.) has, as we know, left its mark on the whole programme and tactics of the "Popular-Socialist" Party. Instead of combating the short-sightedness of the peasant who fails to see the connection between agrarian radicalism and political radicalism, the P.S.'s ("Popular Socialisits") adapt themselves to that short-sightedness. They believe it is "more practical that way", but in reality it is the very thing which dooms the agrarian programme of the peasantry to utter failure. Needless to say, a radical political revolution is difficult, but so is an agrarian revolution; the latter is impossible apart from the former, and it is the duty of socialists not to conceal this from the peasants, not to throw a veil over it (by using rather vague, semi-Cadet phrases about the "democratic state", as is done in our agrarian programme), but to speak out, to teach the peasants that unless they go the whole way in politics it is no use thinking seriously of confiscating the landlords' land.

    It is not the "ifs" that are important here in the programme. The important thing is to point out in it that the agrarian and the political changes must correspond. Instead of using the word "if", the same idea can be put differently: "The Party explains that the best method of taking possession of the land in bourgeois society is by abolishing private ownership of land, nationalising the land, and transferring it to the state, and that such a measure can neither be carried out nor bear real fruit without complete democratisation not only of the local institutions, but of the whole structure of the state, including the establishment of a republic, the abolition of the standing army, election of officials by the people, etc."

    By failing to include that explanation in our agrarian programme we have given the people the false idea that confiscation of the landlords' estates is possible without the complete democratisation of the central government. We have sunk to the level of the opportunist petty bourgeoisie, i.e., the "Popular Socialists"; for in both Dumas it so happened that their programme (the Bill of the 104) as well as ours linked agrarian changes with democratisation only of the local institutions. Such a view is philistine

page 351

obtuseness, of which the events of June 3, 1907, and the Third Duma should have cured many people, the Social-Democrats above all.

    The agrarian programme of Russian Social-Democracy is a proletarian programme in a peasant revolution that is directed against the survivals of serfdom, against all that is medieval in our agrarian system. Theoretically, as we have seen, this thesis is accepted by the Mensheviks as well (Plekhanov's speech at Stockholm). But the Mensheviks have failed to think out that proposition and to perceive its indissoluble connection with the general principles of Social-Democratic tactics in the Russian bourgeois revolution. And it is in Plekhanov's writings that this shallow thinking is most clearly revealed.

    Every peasant revolution directed against medievalism, when the whole of the social economy is of a capitalist nature, is a bourgeois revolution. But not every bourgeois revolution is a peasant revolution. If, in a country where agriculture is organised on fully capitalist lines, the capitalist farmers, with the aid of the hired labourers, were to carry out an agrarian revolution by abolishing the private ownership of land, for instance, that would be a bourgeois revolution, but by no means a peasant revolution. Or if a revolution took p]ace in a country where the agrarian system had become so integrated with the capitalist economy in general that that system could not be abolished without abolishing capitalism, and if, say, that revolution put the industrial bourgeoisie in power in place of the autocratic bureaucracy -- that would be a bourgeois revolution, but by no means a peasant revolution. In other words, there can be a bourgeois country without a peasantry, and there can be a bourgeois revolution in such a country without a peasantry. A bourgeois revolution may take place in a country with a considerable peasant population and yet not be a peasant revolution; that is to say, it is a revolution which does not revolutionise the agrarian relations that especially affect the peasantry, and does not bring the peasantry to the fore as a social force that is at all

page 352

active in creating the revolution. Consequently, the general Marxist concept of "bourgeois revolution" contains certain propositions that are definitely applicable to any peasant revolution that takes place in a country of rising capitalism, but that general concept says nothing at all about whether or not a bourgeois revolution in a given country must (in the sense of obiective necessity) become a peasant revolution in order to be completely victorious.

page 353

    The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, ever since the beginning of the revolution in the spring and summer of 1905, when the confusion of Bolshevism with boycottism, boyevism, etc., that is now so prevalent among the ignorant or stupid, was still out of the question, clearly pointed to the source of our tactical differences by singling out the concept of peasant revolution as one of the varieties of bourgeois revolution, and by defining the victory of the peasant revolution as "the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". Since then Bolshevism won its greatest ideological victory in international Social-Democracy with the publication of Kautsky's article on the driving forces of the Russian revolution ("The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution", Russian translation edited and with a preface by N. Lenin, published by Novaya Epokha Publishers, Moscow, 1907). As is known, at the beginning of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903, Kautsky sided with the latter. In 1907, having watched the course of the Russian revolution, on the subject of which he wrote repeatedly, he at once saw the mistake made by Plekhanov, who had sent him his famous questionnaire. In that questionnaire, Plekhanov inquired only about the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution, without specifying the concept of peasant bourgeois revolution, without going beyond general formulas such as "bourgeois democracy", "bourgeois opposition parties". In answering Plekhanov Kautsky rectified that mistake by pointing out that the bourgeoisie was not the driving force of the Russian revolution, that in that sense the days of bourgeois revolutions had passed, that "a lasting community of interests during the whole period of the revolutionary struggle exists only between the proletariat and the peasantry" (op. cit., pp. 30-31), and that "it [this lasting community of interests] should be made the hasis of the whole of the revolutionary tactics of Russian Social-Democracy" (ibid., p. 31). The underlying principles of Bolshevik tactics as against those of the Mensheviks are here clearly expressed. Plekhanov is terribly angry about this in his New Letters, etc. But his annoyance only makes the impotence of his argument more obvious. The crisis through which we are passing is "a bourgeois crisis for all

page 354

that", Plekhanov keeps on repeating and he calls the Bolsheviks "ignoramuses" (p. 127). That abuse is an expression of his impotent rage. Plekhanov has failed to grasp the difference between a peasant bourgeois revolution and a non-peasant bourgeois revolutiom By saying that Kautsky "exaggerates the speed of development of our peasant" (p. 131), and that "the difference of opinion between us [between Plekhanov and Kautsky] can only be one of nuances" (p. 131), etc., Plekhanov resorts to the most miserable and cowardly shuffling, for anyone at all capable of thinking can see that the very opposite is the case. It is not a question of "nuances" or of the speed of development, or of the "seizure" of power that Plekhanov shouts about, but of the basic view as to which classes are capable of being the driving force of the Russian revolution. Voluntarily or involuntarily, Plekhanov and the Mensheviks areinevitably falling into a position of opportunist support to the bourgeoisie, for they fail to grasp the counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie in a peasant bourgeois revolution. The Bolsheviks from the outset defined the general and the basic class conditions for the victory of this revolution as the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Kautsky arrived at substantially the same view in his article, "The Driving Forces", etc., and he repeated it in the second edition of his Social Revolution, in which he says: "It [the victory of Russian Social-Democracy in the near future] can only come as the result of a coalition [einer Koalition ] between the proletariat and the peasantry." (Die soziale Revolution, von K. Kautsky, Zweite Auflage. Berlin, 1907, S. 62.) (Space does not permit us to deal with another addition Kautsky made to the second edition, in which he sums up the lessons of December 1905, a summing up which differs radically from Menshevism.)

    Thus we see that Plekhanov completely evaded the question of the underlying principles of the general Social-Democratic tactics in a bourgeois revolution that can be victorious only as a peasant revolution. What I said at Stockholm (April 1906)* about Plekhanov having reduced Menshevism to absurdity by repudiating the conquest of power

page 355

by the peasantry in a peasant revolution has been completely borne out in subsequent literature. And that fundamental error in the tactical line was bound to affect the Mensheviks' agrarian programme. As I have repeatedly pointed out above, municipalisation does not in either the economic or the political sphere fully express the conditions of a real victory of the peasant revolution, for the real conquest of power by the proletariat and the peasantry. In the economic sphere, such a victory is incompatible with the perpetuation of the old system of allotment landownership; in the political sphere, it is incompatible with mere regianal democracy and incomplete democracy in the central government.

    Comrade John said at Stockholm (p. 111 of the Minutes) that the "draft providing for land municipalisation is more acceptable, because it is more flexible: it takes into account the diversity of economic conditions, and it can be carried out in the process of the revolution itself". I have already pointed out the cardinal defect of municipalisation in this respcct: it rivets allotment ownership to the property form. Nationalisation is incomparably more flexible in this respect, because it makes it much easier to organise new farms on the "unfenced" land. Here it is also necessary to refer briefly to other, minor arguments that John raised.

    "The division of the land," says John, "would in some places revive the old agrarian relations. In some regions the distribution would be as much as 200 dessiatins per household, so that in the Urals, for instance, we would create a class of new landlords." That is a sample of an argument which denounces its own system! And it was that kind of argument that decided the issue at the Menshevik Congress! It is municipalisation, and it alone, that is guilty of the sin referred to here, for it alone rivets the land to individual regions. It is not the division of land that is to blame, as John thinks, thus falling into a ridiculous logical error, but the provincialism of the municipalisers. In any case, according to the Menshevik programme, the mu-

page 356

nicipalised lands in the Urals would remain the "property" of the people of the Urals. That would mean the creation of a new, reactionary, Cossack stratum -- reactionary because privileged small farmers having ten times more land than all the rest of the farmers could not but resist the peasant revolution, and could not but defend the privileges of private landownership. It only remains for us to assume that on the basis of that same programme, the "democratic state" might declare the tens of millions of dessiatins of Ural forests to be "forests of national importance", or "colonisation lands" (does not the Cadet Kaufman apply that term to the forest land in the Urals, within the 25 per cent limit, which means 21,000,000 dessiatins in the Vyatka, Ufa, and Perm gubernias?), and on that ground become their "owner". Not flexibility, but confusion, pure an simple, is the distinguishing feature of municipalisation.

    Now let us see what carrying out municipalisation in the very process of the revolution means. Here we meet with attacks on my "revolutionary peasant committees" as a class institution. "We are for non-class institutions," the Mensheviks argued at Stockholm, playing at liberalism. Cheap liberalism! It did not occur to our Mensheviks that in order to introduce local self-government of a non-class character it is necessary to defeat the privileged class against which the struggle is being waged and to wrest the power from it. It is just "in the very process of the revolution", as John puts it, i.e., in the course of the struggle to drive out the landlords, in the course of those "revolutionary actions of the peasantry " that are mentioned also in the Mensheviks' resolution on-tactics, that peasant committees can be set up. The introduction of local self-government of a non-class character is provided for in our political programme; it is bound to be established as the organisation of administration after the victory, when the whole of the population will have been compelled to accept the new order. If the words of our programme about "supporting the revolutionary actions of the peasantry, including the confiscation of the landlords' lands" is not mere phrase-mongering, then we must think about organising the masses for those "actions"! Yet that is entirely overlooked in the Menshevik programme. That programme is so

page 357

drawn up as to be easily and wholly converted into a parliamentary Bill, like the Bills proposed by the bourgeois parties, which either (like the Cadets) hate all "actions", or opportunistically shirk the task of systematically assisting and organising such actions (like the Popular Socialists). But a programme built on such lines is unworthy of a workers' party which speaks of a peasant agrarian revolution, a party which pursues the aim not of reassuring the big bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy (like the Cadets), not of reassuring the petty bourgeoisie (like the Popular Socialists), but exclusively of developing the consciousness and initiative of the broad masses in the course of their struggle against feudal Russia.

    Recall, if only in general outline, the innumerable "revolutionary actions" of the peasantry which took place in Russia in the spring of 1905, in the autumn of 1905, and in the spring of 1906. Do we pledge our support to such actions or not? If not, then our programme would not be telling the truth. If we do, then obviously our programme fails to give directives about the organisation of such actions. Such actions can be organised only on the spot where the struggle is going on; the organisation can be created only by the masses who are directly taking part in the struggle, i.e., the organisation must definitely be of the peasant committee type. To wait for big, regional self-governing bodies to be set up during such actions would be ridiculous. The extension of the power and influence of the victorious local committees to adjacent villages, uyezds, gubernias, towns, areas, and to the entire country is, of course, desirable and essential. There can be no objection to the need for such an extension being indicated in the programme, but that should certainly not be confined to regions, it should embrace the central government as well. That in the first place. Secondly, in that case we must not speak about local self-governing bodies, since that term points to the dependence of the local governing organisations upon the structure of the state. "Local self-government" operates according to the rules laid down by the central authority, and within the limits set by the latter. The organisations of the fighting people of which we are speaking must be quite independent of all the institutions of the old regime, they

page 358

must fight for a new state structure, they must serve as the instrument of the full power of the people (or the sovereignty of the people), and as the means for securing it.

    In short, from the standpoint of the "very process of the revolution", the Menshevik programme is unsatisfactory in all respects. It reflects the confusion of Menshevik ideas on the question of the provisional government, etc.

    These two terms were made equivalent by the Mensheviks themselves, who secured the adoption of the agrarian programme at Stockholm. We need only mention the names of two prominent Mensheviks, Kostrov and Larin. "Some comrades," said Kostrov at Stockholm, "seem to be hearing about municipal ownership for the first time. Let me remind them that in Western Europe there is a whole political trend [!precisely!l called 'municipal socialism' [England], which advocates the extension of ownership by urban and rural municipalities, and which is also supported by our comrades. Many municipalities own real estate, and that does not contradict our programme. We now have the possibility of acquiring [!] real estate for the municipalities gratis [!!] and we should take advantage of it. Of course the confiscated land should be municipalised" (p. 88).

page 360

forth about "social peace", about the harmfulness of the class struggle, and so on. What class struggle can there be if the bourgeoisie itself is spending money on the "needs of the population", on public health, on education? What need is there for a social revolution if it is possible through the local self-governing bodies, gradually, step by step, to extend "collective ownership", and "socialise" production: the horse tramways, the slaughter-houses referred to so relevantly by the worthy Y. Larin?

    The philistine opportunism of that "trend" lies in the fact that people forget the narrow limits of so-called "municipal socialism" (in reality, municipal capitalism, as the English Social-Democrats properly point out in their controversies with the Fabians). They forget that so long as the bourgeoisie rules as a class it cannot allow any encroachment, even from the "municipal" point of view, upon the real foundations of its rule; that if the bourgeoisie allows, tolerates, "municipal socialism", it is because the latter does not touch the foundations of its rule, does not interfere with the important sources of its wealth, but extends only to the narrow sphere of local-expenditure, which the bourgeoisie itself allows the "population" to manage. It does not need more than a slight acquaintance with "municipal socialism" in the West to know that any attempt on the part of socialist municipalities to go a little beyond the boundaries of their normal, i.e., minor, petty activities, which give no substantial relief to the workers, any attempt to meddle with capital, is invariably vetoed in the most emphatic manner by the central authorities of the bourgeois state.

    And it is this fundamental mistake, this philistine opportunism of the West-European Fabians, Possibilists, and Bernsteinians that is taken over by our advocates of municipalisation.

    "Municipal socialism" means socialism in matters of local government. Anything that goes beyond the limits of local interests, beyond the limits of state administralion, i.e., anything that affects the main sources of revenue of the ruling classes and the principal means of securing their rule, anything that aflects not the administration of the state, but the structure of the state, thereby goes beyond

page 361

the sphere of "municipal socialism". But our wiseacres evade this acute national issue, this question of the land, which affects the vital interests of the ruling classes in the most direct way, by relegating it to the sphere of "local government questions". In the West they municipalise horse trams and slaughter-houses, so why should we not municipalise the best half of all the lands -- argues the Russian petty intellectual. That would serve both in the event of restoration and in the event of incomplete democratisation of the central government!

    And so we get agrarian socialism in a bourgeois revolution, a socialism of the most petty-bourgeois kind, one that counts on blunting the class struggle on vital issues by relegating the latter to the domain of petty questions affecting only local governmcnt. In fact, the question of the disposal of one half of the best land in the country is neither a local question nor a question of administration. It is a question that affects the whole state, a question of the structure, not only of the landlord, but of the bourgeois state. And to try to entice the people with the idea that "municipal socialism" can be developed in agriculture before the socialist revolution is accomplished is to practise the most inadmissible kind of demagogy. Marxism permits nationalisation to be included in the programme of a bourgeois revolution because nationalisation is a bourgeois measure, because absolute rent hinders the development of capitalism; private ownership of the land is a hindrance to capitalism. But to include the municipalisation of the big estates in the programme of the bourgeois revolution, Marxism must be remodelled into Fabian intellectualist opportunism.

    It is here that we see the difference between petty-bourgeois and proletarian methods in the bourgeois revolution. The petty bourgeoisie, even the most radical -- our Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries included -- anticipates that after the bourgeois revolution there will be no class struggle, but universal prosperity and peace. Therefore, it "builds its nest" in advance, it introduces plans for petty-bourgeois reforms in the bourgeois revolution, talks about various "norms" and "regulations" with regard to landownership, about strengthening the labour principle and small farming,

page 362

etc. The petty-bourgeois method is the method of building up relations making for the greatest possible degree of social peace. The proletarian method is exclusively that of clearing the path of all that is medieval, clearing it for the class struggle. Therefore, the proletarian can leave it to the small proprietors to discuss "norms" of landownership; the proletarian is interested only in the abolition of the landlord latifundia, the abolition of private ownership of land, that last barrier to the class struggle in agricuture. In the bourgeois revolution we are interested not in petty-bourgeois reformism, not in a future "nest" of tranquillised small farmers, but in the conditions for the proletarian struggle against all petty-bourgeois tranquillity on a bourgeois basis.

    It is this anti-proletarian spirit that municipalisation introduces into the programme of the bourgeois agrarian revolution; for, despite the deeply fallacious opinion of the Mensheviks, municipalisation does not extend and sharpen the class struggle, but, on the contrary, blunts it. It blunts it, too, by assuming that local democracy is possible without the complete democratisation of the centre. It also blunts it with the idea of "municipal socialism", because the latter is conceivable in bourgeois society only away from the high road of the struggle, only in minor, local, unimportant questions on which even the bourgeoisie may yield, may reconcile itself to without losing the possibility of preserving its class rule.

    The working class must give bourgeois society the purest, most consistent and most thorough-going programme of bourgeois revolution, including the bourgeois nationalisation of the land. The proletariat scornfully rejects petty-bourgeois reformism in the bourgeois revolution; we are interested in freedom for the struggle, not in freedom for philistine bliss.

    Naturally, the opportunism of the intelligentsia in the workers' party takes a different line. Instead of the broad revolutionary programme of bourgeois revolution, attention is focused on a petty-bourgeois utopia: to secure local democracy with incomplete democratisation at the centre, to secure for petty reformism a little corner of municipal activity away from great "turmoil", and to evade the extra-

page 363

ordinarily acute conflict over the land by following the recipe of the anti-Semites, i.e., by relegating an important national issue to the domain of petty, local questions.

    What confusion the "municipalisation" programme has created in the minds of Social-Democrats and to what a helpless position it has reduced our propagandists and agitators can be seen from the following curious cases.

    Y. Larin is undoubtedly a prominent and well-known figure in Menshevik literature. In Stockholm, as can be seen from the Minutes, he took a most active part in securing the adoption of the programme. His pamphlet, The Peasant Question and Social-Democracy, which was included in the series of pamphlets published by Novy Mir, is almost an official commentary on the Menshevik programme. And here is what this commentator writes. In the concluding pages of his pamphlet he sums up the question of agrarian reform. He foresees three kinds of outcome of these reforms: (1) additional allotments to the peasants as their private property, subject to compensation -- "the most unfavourable outcome for the working class, for the lower strata of the peasantry and for the whole development of the national economy" (p. 103). The second outcome is the best, and the third, although unlikely, is "a paper declaration of compulsory equalised land tenure". One would have thought that we had the right to expect that an advocate of the municipalisation programme would have made municipalisation the second outcome. But no! Listen to this:

    "Perhaps all the confiscated land, or even all the land in general, will be declared the property of the state as a whole and will be turned over to the local self-governing bodies to be distributed gratis [??] for the use of all who are actually cultivating it, without, of course, the compulsory introduction throughout the whole of Russia of equalised land tenure, and without prohibiting the employment of hired lahour. Such a solution of the problem, as we have seen, best secures the immediate interests of the proletariat as well as the general interests of the socialist movement, and will help to increase the productivity of labour, which ie the fundamental, vital question for Russia. Therefore, the Social-Democrats should advocate and carry out an

page 364

agrarian reform [?] precisely of that character. It will be achieved when, at the highest point of development of the revolution, the conscious elements of social development are strong" (p. 103. Our italics).

    If Y. Larin or other Mensheviks believe this to be an exposition of the municipalisation programme, they are labouring under a tragicomical illusion. The transfer of all the land to state ownership is nationalisation of the land, and we cannot conceive of the land being disposed of otherwise than through local self-governing bodies acting within the limits of a general state law. To such a programme -- not of "reform", of course, but of revolution -- I wholeheartedly subscribe, except for the point about distributing the land "gratis" even to those farmers who- employ hired labour. To promise such a thing on behalf of bourgeois society is more fitting for an anti-Semite than for a Social-Democrat. No Marxist can assume the possibility of such an outcome within the framework of capitalist development; nor is there any reason for considering it desirable to transfer rent to capitalist farmers. Nevertheless, except for this point, which was probably a slip of the pen, it remains an indubitable fact that in a popular Menshevik pamphlet the nationalisation of the land is advocated as the best outcome at the highest point of development of the revolution.

    On the question of what is to be done with the privately owned lands, Larin has this to say:

    "As regards the privately owned lands occupied by big, effcient capitalist farms, Social-Democrats do not propose the confiscation of such lands for the purpose of dividing them among the small farmers. While the average yield of small peasant farming, either on privately owned or rented land, does not reach 30 poods per dessiatin the average yield of capitalist agriculture in Russia is over 50 poods' (p. 64).

    In saying this, Larin in effect throws overboard the idea of a peasant agrarian revolution, for his average figures of crop yields appertain to all the landlord lands. If we do not believe in the possibility of achieving a wider and more rapid increase in the productivity of labour on small farms after they have been freed from the yoke of serfdom, then all talk about "supporting the revolutionary actions of the peasantry, including the confiscation of the land from the Iandlords", is meaningless. Besides, Larin forgets

page 365

that on the question of "the purpose for which Social-Democrats propose the confiscation of capitalist estates", there is the decision of the Stockholm Congress.

    It was Comrade Strumilin who, at the Stockholm Congress, moved an amendment to insert after the words: economic development (in the resolution), the following: "insisting, therefore, that the confiscated big capitalist farms should continue to be exploited on capitalist lines in the interests of the whole of the people, and under conditions that best meet the needs of the agricultural proletariat" (p. 157). This amendment was rejected almost unanimously, it received only one vote (ibid.).

    Nevertheless, propaganda is being carried on among the masses that ignores the decision of the Congress! The retention of private ownership of allotment land makes municipalisation such a confusing thing, that commentaries on the programme cannot help running counter to the decision of the Congress.

    K. Kautsky, who has been so frequently and unfairly quoted in favour of one or the other programme (unfairly because he has categorically declined to express a definite view on the question and has confined himself to explaining certain general truths), Kautsky, who, curiously enough, was even cited as being in favour of municipalisation, wrote, it turns out, to M. Shanin in April 1906 as follows:

    We think it will be useful to approach the question of the workers' party's agrarian programme in the Russian bourgeois revolution from another and somewhat different angle. The analysis of the economic conditions for the revolution and of the political arguments in favour of this or that programme should be supplemented by a picture of the struggle between the different classes and parties that will as far as possible embrace all the interests and place them in direct contrast to one another. Only such a picture can give us an idea of the thing we are discussing (the struggle for the land in the Russian revolution) as a whole, excluding the one-sided and accidental character of individual opinions, and testing theoretical conclusions by the practical intuition of the persons concerned. As individuals, any representatives of parties and classes may err, but when they come out in the public arena, before the entire population, the individual errors are inevitably rectified by the corresponding groups or classes that are interested in the struggle. Classes do not err; on the whole, they decide their interests and political aims in conformity

page 367

with the conditions of the struggle and with the conditions of social evolution.

    Excellent material for drawing such a picture is provided by the Stenographic Records of the two Dumas. We shall take the Second Duma because it undoubtedly reflects the struggle of classes in the Russian revolution more fully and with greater maturity: the Second Duma elections were not boycotted by any influential party. The political grouping of the deputies in the Second Duma was much more definite, the various Duma groups were more united and more closely connected with their respective parties. The experience of the First Duma had already provided considerable material which helped all the parties to elaborate a more thought-out policy. For all these reasons it is preferable to take the Second Duma. We shall refer to the debate in the First Duma only in order to supplement, or clarify, statements made in the Second Duma.

    To obtain a full and accurate picture of the struggle between the different classes and parties during the debate in the Second Duma we shall have to deal separately with each important and specific Duma group and characterise it with the aid of excerpts from the principal speeches delivered on the chief points of the agrarian question. As it is impossible and unnecessary to quote all the minor speakers, we shall mention only those who contributed something new, or threw noteworthy light on some aspect of the question.

    The main groups of Duma deputies that stood out clearly in the debates on the agrarian question were the following: (1) the Rights and the Octobrists -- as we shall see, no essential difference between them was shown in the Second Duma; (2) the Cadets; (3) the Right and Octobrist peasants, standing, as we shall see, to the Left of the Cadets; (4) the non-party peasants; (5) the Narodniks, or Trudovik intellectuals, standing somewhat to the Right of (6) the Trudovik peasants; then come (7) the Socialist-Revolutionaries; (8) the "nationals", representing the non-Russian nationalities, and (9) the Social-Democrats. We shall mention the government's position in connection with the Duma group with which the government is essentially in agreement.

page 368

page 369

    Like all the parties, the Cadets came out in their true colours in the Second Duma. They "found themselves" by occupying the Centre and criticising the Rights and the Lefts from the "state point of view". They revealed their counter-revolutionary nature by an obvious turn to the Right. How did they mark that turn on the agrarian question? They marked it by finally throwing overboard the last remnants of the idea of land nationalisation, by completely abandoning the plan for a "state land reserve" and by supporting the idea of making the land the peasants' property. Yes, conditions in the Russian revolution have become such that turning to the Right means turning towards the private ownership of land!

    Ex-minister Kutler, the Cadet Party's official spokesman on the agrarian question, at once proceeded to criticise the Left (12th session, March 19, 1907). "Since nobody proposes to abolish property in general," exclaimed that worthy colleague of Witte and Durnovo, "it is necessary with all emphasis to recognise the existence of landed property" (737). This argument fully coincides with that of the Black Hundreds. The Black-Hundred spokesman, Krupensky, like the Cadet Kutler, shouted: "If you are going to divide, divide everything" (784).

    Like a true bureaucrat, Kutler dealt in particular detail with the question of different norms of "allotment" to the peasants. Not backed by any compact class, this liberal intellectual and bureaucrat playing at liberalism evades the question of how much land the landlords have and how much can be taken. He prefers to talk about "norms" in order, on the pretext of raising the question to the state level, to obscure the issue, to conceal the fact that the Cadets propose that landlord economy be retained. "Even the government," said Mr. Kutler, "has taken the path of extending peasant land tenure" (734), so there is nothing infeasible about the Cadets' proposal, which is of the same bureaucratic type! By insisting on what is practical and feasible, this Cadet, of course, throws a veil over the fact that his criterion is whether it is possible to secure the landlords' consent, in other words, to adapt his plan

page 375

to their interests, to pander to the Black Hundreds under the guise of a lofty striving for the conciliation of classes. "I think, gentlemen," said Kutler, "that it is possible to envisage the political conditions under which a Bill for the nationalisation of the land could acquire the force of law, but I cannot envisage in the immediate future the political conditions under which that law could really be put into eflect" (733). To put it bluntly, it is possible to envisage the overthrow of the rule of the Black-Hundred landlords, but I cannot envisage that and, therefore, I adapt myself to this rule.

    Urging that peasant ownership of land is preferable to the Trudoviks' plan in general, and to "equalised tenure" in particular, Mr. Kutler argued as follows: "lf for this purpose [equalising holdings] special officials are appointed, it will mean the introduction of an incredible despotism, an interference in the lives of the people such as we have never known before. Of course, it is proposed to place this matter in the hands of local self-governing bodies, in the hands of persons elected by the people themselves; but can it be taken that the people will be fully guaranteed against the tyranny of these persons, that these persons will always act in the interests of the people, and that the latter will suffer no hardship? I think that the peasants who are present here know that very often their own elected representatives, their volost and village elders, oppress the people as much as the government offcials do" (740). Can one conceive of hypocrisy more revolting than that? The Cadets themselves propose the setting up of land committees on which the landlords will predominate (equal representation for landlords and peasants, the chairman to be a government official or a landlord), but the peasants are warned of the danger of despotism and tyranny on the part of those whom they themselves elect! Only shameless political charlatans can argue like this against equalised holdings, for they have neither the principles of socialism (adhered to by the Social-Democrats, who maintain that equalisation is impossible, but wholly support the election of local committees), nor the principles of the landlords who maintain that private property is the only salvation (adhered to by the Bobrinskys).

page 376

    Unlike either the Right or the Left, the plan of the Cadets is charactcrised not by what they say, but what they keep quiet about, viz., their proposal for the composition of the land committees, which are to compel the peasants to accept a "second emancipation", i.e., to take poor plots at an exorbitant price. To obscure the crux of the matter, the Cadets in the Second Duma (as in the First) resort to downright chicanery. Take Mr. Shingaryov. He poses as a progressive, repeats the current liberal catchwords against the Right and, as is the fashion, bewails violence and anarchy, for which France "paid with a century of sevrere upheavals" (1355). But see how he dodges the question of the land-surveying committees:

    "On the question of the land-surveying committees," he says, "we were opposed by Deputy Yevreinov.* I do not know [sic !!l what his objections are based on; up to now we have not said anything about this [a lie !]; I do not know what Bill he is speaking about, or why he talks about not trusting the people. No such Bill has yet been introduced in the State Duma; evidently, his objections are based on a misunderstanding. I wholly associate myself with those deputies on the Left, Uspensky and Volk-Karachevsky, who spoke of provisional rules, of the necessity of setting up local bodies to carry out land surveying on the spot. I think such bodies will be set up, and probably, within the next

page 377

few days, the Party of People's Freedom will introduce a Bill to that effect and we shall discuss it" (1356).

    Now, is that not fraud? Are we really to believe that this person knew nothing about the debates in the First Duma on the question of local committees, or about the article in Rech at that time? Could he really have failed to understand Yevreinov's perfectly plain statement?

    But he promised to introduce a Bill "within the next few days", you will say. In the first place, a promise to restore what has been obtained by fraudulent means does not cancel the fact of fraud. Secondly, what happened "within the next few days", was this. Mr. Shingaryov spoke on March 29, 1907. On April 9, 1907, the Cadet Tatarinov spoke and said: "I will now, gentlemen, deal with one more question which, I think [he only "thinks"!], is creating considerable controversy, namely, the question that has been raised by all the parties on our Left: the question of local land committees. All these parties urge the necessity of setting up local land committees on the basis of universal, equal, and direct suffrage by secret ballot with the object of settling the land question in the localities. We quite categorically expressed our opposition to such committees last year, and we categorically express it now" (1783).

    Thus, on the extremely important question of the actual terms of the Cadet proposal for "compulsory alienation", two Cadets say different things, swing from one side to another under the blows of the Left parties which bring to light what the Cadets wanted to keep secret! First, Mr. Shingaryov says: "I do not know"; then: "I agree with the Left"; and then: "a Bill within the next few days". Mr. Tatarinov says: "Now, as before, we are categorically opposed". And he adds arguments to the effect that the Duma must not be split up into a thousand Dumas, that the settlement of the agrarian question must not be postponed until political reforms are carried out, until universal, etc., suffrage is introduced. But that is just another evasion. The point at issue is not the moment when a particular measure is to he carried out: the Left members of the Second Duma could have no doubts whatever on that score. The point is: what are the Cadets' real plans ? Who is to compel whom in their scheme for "compulsory alienation"? Are the landlords to

page 378

    Actual Right peasants are to be found in the Second Duma only by way of exception -- Remenchik (Millsk Gubernia) is one, perhaps the only one, who will not hear of any village communes or "land funds" and stoutly defends private ownership (in the First Duma there were many Polish and West-Russian peasants who stood for ownership). But even Remenchik is in favour of alienation "at a fair price" (648), i.e., he in effect turns out to be a Cadet. We place the other "Right peasants" in the Second Duma in a special group because they are-undoubtedly more Left than the Cadets. Take Petrochenko (Vitebsk Gubernia). He begins by saying that he "will defend tsar and country unto death"

page 381

(1614). The Rights applaud. But then he passes on to the question of "land hunger". "You can hold all the debates you like," he says, "but you will never create another world. Therefore you will have to give us this land. One speaker said here that our peasants are backward and ignorant and, therefore, it is useless giving them a lot of land, because it won't be any good to them all the same. To be sure, the land has not been of much good to us up to now, that is to those who have not had any. As for our being ignorant, well, all we are asking for is some land in order, in our stupidity, to grub about in. Personally, I don't think it's dignified for a nobleman to busy himself with the land. It has been said here that private landed property must not be touched because it is against the law. Of course, I agree that the law must be upheld, but to do away with land hunger a law must be passed to make all that lawful. And so that nobody should have any grievance, Deputy Kutler proposed that good terms be offered. Of course, being a wealthy man, he has named a high figure, and we, poor peasants, cannot pay such a price. As for how we should live -- in communes, on separate holdings, or on khutors -- I, for my part, think that everybody should be allowed to live as he finds convenient" (1616).

    There is a wide gulf between this Right peasant and the Russian liberal. The former vows devotion to the old regime, but actually he is out to get land, he is fighting the landlords and will not agree to pay the amount of compensation the Cadets propose. The latter says that he is fighting for the people's freedom, but actually he is engineering a second enthralment of the peasants by the landlords and the old regime. The latter can move only to the Right, from the First Duma to the Second, from the Second to the Third. The former, finding that there is no hope of the landlords "giving up" the land, will move the other way. The "Right" peasant will, perhaps, be found going our way more than the "liberal", "democratic" Cadet. . . .

    Take the peasant Shimansky (Minsk Gubernia). "I have come here to defend our faith, tsar, and country and to demand land . . . not by robbery, of course, but in a peaceful way, at a fair value. . . . Therefore, in the name of all the peasants I call upon the landlord members of the Duma to

page 382

come on to this rostrum and say that they are willing to cede land to the peasants at a fair valuation, and then our peasants will, of course, say thank you, and I think our Father the Tsar, will also say thank you. As for those landlords who refuse to do this, I propose that the Duma impose a progressive tax on their land, and undoubtedly they too will yield in time, because they will learn that they have bitten off more than they can chew" (1617).

    By compulsory alienation and fair valuation this Right peasant means something entirely different from what the Cadets have in mind. The Cadets are deceiving not only the Left peasants but also the Right. What the Right peasants' attitude towards the Cadet plans for setting up the land committees (according to Kutler, or according to Chuprov: see The Agrarian Question, Vol. II) would have been, had they studied them, is evident from the following proposal made by the peasant Melnik (Octobrist, Minsk Gubernia). "I consider it a duty," he said, "that 60 per cent of the members of the committee [agrarian] should be peasants who have practical acquaintance with want [!] and are familiar with the conditions of the peasant class, and not peasants who, perhaps, are peasants only in name. This is a question of the peasants' welfare and of the poor people generally, and has no political significance whatever. People must be chosen who can settle the question practically and not politically for the good of the people" (1285). These Right peasants will go a long way to the Left when the counter-revolution reveals to them the political significance of "the questions that concern the welfare of the poor people"!

    To show how infinitely wide apart are the representatives of the monarchist peasantry and the representatives of the monarchist bourgeoisie, I shall quote passages from the speech delivered by the "Progressist" Rev. Tikhvinsky, who sometimes spoke in the name of the Peasant Union and Trudovik Group. "Our peasants, in the mass, love the tsar," he said. "How I wish I had the cap of invisibility and could fly on a magic carpet to the foot of the throne and say: Sire, your chief enemy, the chief enemy of the people, is the irresponsible ministry. . . . All that the toiling peasantry demands is the strict application of the principle: 'All

page 383

the land to all the people.' . . . [on the question of redemption payments:] . . . Have no fear, gentlemen of the Right, you can rely on our people not to treat you unfairly." (Voices from the Right : "Thank you! Thank you!") "I now address myself to the spokesman from the Party of People's Freedom. He says that the programme of the Party of People's Freedom is close to that of the peasantry and of the Trudovik Group. No, gentlemen, it is remote from that programme. We heard the speaker say: 'Our Bill may be less just, but it is more practical'. Gentlemen, justice is sacrificed to practical expediency!" (789.)

    In political outlook, this deputy is on the level of a Cadet. But what a difference there is between his rural simplicity and the "business men" of the bar, the bureaucracy, and liberal journalism!

    The non-party peasants are of special interest as the spokesmen of the least politically conscious and least organised rural masses. We shall, therefore, quote passages from the speeches of all the non-party peasants,* especially as there are not many of them: Sakhno, Semyonov, Moroz, and Afanasyev.

    "Gentlemen, people's representatives," said Sakhno (Kiev Gubernia), "it is difficult for peasants' deputies to get up on this rostrum and oppose the rich landed gentry. At the present time the peasants are living very poorly because they have no land. . . . The peasant has a lot to put up with at the hands of the landlord; he suffers because the landlord sorely oppresses him. . . . Why can a landlord own a lot of land, while the peasant has only the kingdom of heaven?. . . And so, gentlemen, when the peasants sent me here they instructed me to champion their needs, to demand land and freedom for them to demand that all state, crown, private, and monastery lands be compulsorily alienated without compensation. . . . I want you to know gentlemen, people's representatives, that a hungry man cannot keep quiet when he sees that, in spite of his suffering, the government is

on the side of the landed gentry. He cannot help demanding land even if it is against the law; want compels him to demand it. A hungry man is capable of anything, for want makes him reckless, being hungry and poor" (1482-86).

    Just as artless, and just as powerful in its simplicity was the speech of the non-party peasant Semyonov (Podolsk Gubernia, peasant deputy):

    . . . "Bitter is the lot of those peasants who have been suffering for ages without land. For two hundred years they have been waiting for fortune to drop from the skies, but it has not come. Fortune is in the pockets of the big landed gentry who obtained this land together with our grandfathers and fathers; but the earth is the Lord's not the landlords'. . . . I know perfectly well that the land belongs to the whole of the working people who till the land. . . . Deputy Purishkevich says: 'Revolution! Help!' What does that mean? Yes, if the land is taken from them by compulsory alienation, they will be the revolution, but not we, we shall all be fighters, the kindest of peole. . . . Have we got 150 dessiatins like the priest? And what about the monasteries and the churches? What do they want it for? No gentlemen, it is time to stop collecting treasure and keeping it in your pockets, it is time to live reasonably. The country will understand gentlemen, I understand perfectly, we are honest citizens, we do not engage in politics, as one of the preceding speakers said. . . . They [the landlords] only go about and grow fat on our sweat and blood. We shall not forget them, we shall do them no harm, we shall even give them land. If you figure it out, we shall get 16 dessiatins per household, but the big landed gentry will still have 50 dessiatins each. . . . Thousands, millions of people are suffering, but the gentry are feasting. . . . When it comes to military service we know what happens: if a man falls sick they say: 'He has land at home'. But where is his home? He has no home! He has a home only in the roster which says where he was born, where he is registered, what his religion is -- but he has no land. Now I say: the people asked me to demand that the church, monastary, state, and crown lands, and the land conpulsorily alienated from the landlords, should be handed over to the working people who will till the land, and it should be handed over locally: they will know what to do. I tell you that the people sent me here to demand land and freedom and all civil liberties; and we shall live, and we shall not point and say, these are gentry and those are peasants; we shall all be human, and each will be a gentleman in his place" (1930-34).

    When one reads this speech of a peasant who "does not engage in politics" it becomes palpably clear that the implementation not only of Stolypin's but also of the Cadets' agrarian programme requires decades of systematic violence against the peasant masses, of systematic flogging, exter-

page 385

mination by torture, imprisonment, and exile of all peasants who think and try to act freely. Stolypin is aware of this and is acting accordingly. The Cadets, with the obtuseness characteristic of liberal bureaucrats and professors, are either unaware of it or else hypocritically conceal it, "shamefacedly remain silent" about it, just as they do about the punitive expeditions of 1861 and of subsequent years. If this systematic and unchecked violence is shattered by some internal or external obstacle, the honest non-party peasant who "does not engage in politics" will convert Russia into a peasant republic.

    The peasant Moroz, in a short speech, simply said: "The land must be taken away from the clergy and the landlords" (1955), and then quoted the Gospel (this is not the first time in history that bourgeois revolutionaries have taken their slogans from the Gospel). . . . "Unless you bring the priest some bread and a half bottle of vodka he won't baptise a chiid for you. . . . And yet they talk about Holy Gospel and read: 'Ask and it shall be given you; knock and it will be opened unto you.' We ask and ask, but it is not given us; and we knock, but still it is not given us. Must we break down the door and take it? Gentlemen, don't wait until the door is broken down; give voluntarily, and then there will be freedom, liberty, and it will be good for you and for us" (1955).

    Take the non-party peasant Afanasyev, who appraises Cossack "municipalisation" not from the Cossack point of view, but from that of "almost a newcomer". "In the first place, gentlemen, I must say that I represent the peasants of the Don region, numbering over a million, and yet I was the only one elected. That alone shows that we are almost newcomers there. . . . I am infinitely surprised: does St. Petersburg feed the countryside? No, on the contrary. In the past I worked in St. Petersburg for twenty odd years, and I noticed even then that it was not St. Petersburg that fed the countryside, but the countryside that fed St. Petersburg. And I notice the same thing now. All this beautiful architecture, all these edifices and buildings, all these fine houses, they are all built by peasants, as they were twenty-five years ago. . . . Purishkevich gave the example of a Cossack who has over twenty dessiatins of land, and he

page 386

is also starving. . . . Why didn't he tell us where that land is? There is land, there is land in Russia, too, but who owns it? If he knew there is so much land there, but did not say where, it shows that he is an unjust man; but if he didn't know, he should not have started talking about it. And if he really didn't know, then permit me, gentlemen, to tell him where that land is, how much there is of it, and who owns it. If you reckon it up you will find that in the Don Cossack Region there are 753,546 dessiatins used as private stud-farms. I will also mention the Kalmyk stud-farms, what are called nomad camps; they take up in all 165,708 dessiatins. Then there are 1,055,919 dessiatins temporarily leased by rich people. All that land belongs not to the people Purishkevich mentioned, but to kulaks, to the rich, who oppress us; when they get cattle -- they skin us of half, we have to pay a ruble per dessiatin, another ruble for the animal we plough with, but we have to feed our children, and the Cossack wives and children as well. That is why we are starving." He went on to say that leaseholders get 2,700 dessiatins each for supplying eight horses "for the cavalry"; the peasants could supply more. "I will tell you that I wanted to convince the government that it was making a great mistake in not doing this. I wrote a letter to Selsky Vestnik and asked them to publish it, but they answered that it was not our business to teach the government." Thus, on "municipalised" land transferred to the ownership of a region, the "central undemocratic government" is de facto creating new landlords: municipalisation is, as Plekhanov revealed, a guarantee against restoration. . . .

    "The government opened the doors wide for us to acquire land through the Peasant Bank -- that is the yoke that was put on us in 1861. It wants to make us settle in Siberia . . . but would it not be better to send there the man who owns thousands of dessiatins? Look how many people could live off the land he would leave behind!" (Applause on the Left ; voices from the Right : "That's stale, that's stale.") . . . "During the Japanese war I led my recruits through those [landlord's] lands that I have mentioned here. It took us over forty eight hours to get to the assembly place. The men asked me: 'Where are you taking us?' I answered: 'Against Japan.' 'What for?' 'To defend our country.' Being a soldier myself, I felt it was our duty to defend our country, but the men said: 'This is not our country -- the land belongs to the Lisetskys, Bezulovs, and Podkopailovs. There is nothing here that is ours!' They said things to me that I have been

page 387

unable to wipe out from my heart for more than two years. . . . Consequently, gentlemen . . . to sum up, I must say that as regards all those rights that exist in our Russia, from the princes to the nobles, Cossacks, burghers, not mentioning the word peasant, all must be Russian citizens and have the use of land, all those who till the land, who put their labour into it, who cherish and love it. Work, sweat and benefit from it. But if you do not want to live on the land, if you do not want to till it, if you do not want to put your labour into it, you have no right to benefit from it" (1974) (26th session, 12.1V.1907).

    "Not mentioning the word peasant!" That splendid utterance "from the depths of the heart" burst from a peasant who wants to do away with the social estate character of landownership ("all those rights that exist in our Russia"), who wants to abolish the very name of the lowest estate, the peasantry. "Let all be citizens." Equal right to land for the toilers is nothing else than the farmer's point of view applied with the utmost consistency to the land. There must be no other basis for the ownership of land (like that "for service" among the Cossacks, etc.), no other reasons, no other relations, except the right of the farmer to the land, except the reason that he "cherishes" it, except the relation that he "puts his labour" into it. That must be the point of view of the farmer who stands for free farming on free land, for the removal of everything that is extraneous, obstructive, and obsolete, the removal of all the old forms of landownership. Would it not be the stupid application of a thoughtless doctrine if Marxists were to dissuade such a farmer from nationalisation and teach him the benefits of private ownership of allotment land?

    In the First Duma, the peasant Merkulov (Kursk Gubernia) expressed the same idea about the nationalisation of peasant allotment land as that which we quoted above from the reports of the congresses of the Peasant Union. "They try to scare us;" said Merkulov, "by saying that the peasants themselves will refuse to part with the patch of land they now possess. To that I say: Who is going to take it from them? Even with complete nationalisation, only that part of the land will be taken which the owner does not cultivate by himself, but with hired labour" (18th session, May 30, 1906, p. 822).

    That was said by a peasant who, as he himself admitted, owns 60 dessiatins of land. Of course, the idea of abolish-

page 388

    In the speeches of the Narodllik intellectuals, particularly those of the Popular Socialists, i.e., the Narodnik opportunists, two currents must be noted: on the one hand, sincere defence of the interests of the peasant masses -- in that respect their speeches, for understandable reasons, are much less impressive than those of the peasants who "do not engage in politics"; on the other hand, a certain Cadet savour, a touch of intellectualist philistinism, an attempt to adopt the state point of view. It goes without saying that, in contrast to the peasants, their commitment to a doctrine is evident: they are fighting not on account of directly felt needs and hardships, but to vindicate a certain theory, a system of views which distorts the real issue of the struggle.

    "Land for the toilers," proclaims Mr. Karavayev in his first speech, and he characterises Stolypin's agrarian legislation under Article 87 as "the destruction of the village commune", as pursuing a "political aim"; namely, "the formation of a special class of rural bourgeois".

the peasant proletariat; I do not know which is better, a peasant proletariat, or the present land-hungry peasantry which if certain measures were taken, could obtain a sufficient amount of land" (722).

    This smacks of the reactionary Narodism of Mr. V. V.: "Better" for whom? For the state? For the landlord state, or for the bourgeois 'state? And why is the proletariat not "better"? Because the land-hungry peasantry "could obtain", i.e., could more easily be appeased, more easily brought into the camp of order than the proletariat? That is what it amounts to, according to Mr. Karavayev: it is as if he were offering Stolypin and Co. a more reliable "guarantee" against a social revolution!

    If Mr. Karavayev were right in essentials, the Marxists could not support the confiscation of the landlords' land in Russia. But Mr. Karavayev is wrong, because the Stolypin "way", by slowing down the development of capitalism -- in comparison with the peasant revolution -- is creating more paupers than proletarians. Karavayev himself said, and rightly, that the Stolypin policy was enriching (not the new, bourgeois elements, not the capitalist farmers, but) the present landlords, half of whose economies were run on feudal lines. In 1895, the price of land sold through the "Peasant" Bank was 51 rubles per dessiatin; but in 1906, the price was 126 rubles. (Karavayev at the 47th session, May 26, 1907, P. 1189.) And Mr. Karavayev's party colleagues, Volk-Karachevsky and Delarov, brought out even more vividly the significance of those figures. Delarov showed that "up to 1905, during the twenty odd years of its existence, the Peasant Bank bought up only 7,500,000 dessiatins"; but between November 3, 1905 and April 1, 1907, it bought up 3,800,000 dessiatins. The price of land was 80 rubles per dessiatin in 1900, 108 rubles in 1902, rising to 109 rubles in 1903, befare the agrarian movement, and before the Russian revolution. Now it is 126 rubles. "While the whole of Russia was suffering heavy loss as a consequence of the Russian revolution, the Russian big landowners were amassing fortunes. During that period they pocketed over 60,000,000 rubles of the people's money" (1220 -- counting 109 rubles as a "fair" price). But Mr. Volk Karachevsky reckons far more correctly in refusing to regard any price as "fair", simply noting that after November

page 390

page 391

were uncertain about the ownership of land? Did they make it your first duty in the Duma, your first demand: 'Mind you ensure private ownership of the land, otherwise you will not be carrying out our mandate'? No. You will say that you were not given such a mandate" (1185).

    Far from repudiating that statement, the peasant deputies confirmed it by the entire content of their speeches. And that, of course, was not because the Russian peasant is devoted to the "village commune", is an "opponent of private ownership", but because economic conditions now dictate to him the task of abolishing all the old forms of landownership in order to create a new system of economy.

    To the debit side of the account of the Narodnik intellectuals we must place their loudly voiced arguments about "norms" of peasant landownership. "I think everybody will agree that in order to settle the agrarian question properly," declared Mr. Karavayev, "the following data are needed: first, the amount of land necessary for subsistence, the subsistence norm; and the amount necessary to absorb all the labour of the household, the labour norm. We must know exactly how much land the peasants possess; that will enable us to calculate how much they are short of. Then we must know how much land can be given" (1186).

    We emphatically disagree with that opinion. And we assert on the basis of the statements made by the peasants in the Duma that it contains an element of intellectualist bureaucracy that is alien to the peasants. The peasants do not talk about "norms". Norms are a bureaucratic invention, a hang-over of the feudal Reform of 1861 of accursed memory. Guided by their true class instinct, the peasants place the weight of emphasis on the abolition of landlordism and not on "norms". It is not a question of how much land is "needed". "You will not create another world", as the above-mentioned non-party peasant so aptly expressed it. It is a question of doing away with the oppressive feudal latifundia, which ought to be done away with even if the "norms" are reached without it. The Narodnik intellectual slips into this position: if the "norm" is reached, then, perhaps, there will be no need to touch the landlords. The peasants' line of reasoning is different: "peasants, throw them off your backs " (meaning the landlords), said the peasant Pyanykb

page 392

(S.R.) in the Second Duma (16th session, March 26, 1907, p. 1101). The landlords must be thrown off not because there are not enough "norms" to go round, but because the farmer does not want to be burdened with donkeys and leeches. There is a "big difference" between these two arguments.

    The peasant does not talk about norms, but with remarkable practical intuition he "takes the bull by the horns". The question is: Who is to fix the norms? This was excellently put by the clergyman Poyarkov in the First Duma. "It is proposed to fix a norm of land per head," he said. "Who is to fix this norm ? If it is to be fixed by the peasants themselves, then, of course, they will not neglect their own interests; but if the landlords as well as the peasants are to do so, then it is a question as to who will gain the upper hand in working out the norm" (12th session, May 19, 1906, p. 488).

    That exactly hits the mark in regard to all the talk about norms.

    In the case of the Cadets it is not mere talk, but down right betrayal of the peasants to the landlords. And that kindly village priest Mr. Poyarkov, who has evidently seen liberal landlords in action in his part of the countryside, instinctively perceived where the falsity lay.

    "Another thing people are afraid of," said the same Poyarkov, "is that there will be a multitude of officials. The peasants will distribute the land themselves!" (488-89.) That is the crux of the matter. "Norms" do, indeed, smack of officialdom. It is different when the peasant speaks: We shall distribute the land on the spot. Hence the idea of setting up local land committees, which expresses the true interests of the peasantry in the revolution and naturally rouses the hatred of the liberal scoundrels.* Under such a plan of nationalisation all that is left to the state is to

page 393

determine what lands can serve for colonisation or may require special intervention ("forests and waters of national importance", as our present programme puts it), i.e., all that is left is what even the "municipalisers" deem necessary to put in the hands of the "democratic state " (they should have said: republic).

    Comparing the talk about norms with the economic facts, we see at once that the peasants are men of deeds, whereas the Narodnik intellectuals are men of words. The "labour" norm would be of real importance if attempts were made to prohibit hired labour. The majority of the peasants have turned down these attempts, and the Popular Socialists have admitted that they are impracticable. That being the case, the question of "norms?' does not arise, and there remains division among a given number of farmers. The "subsistence" norm is a poverty norm, and in capitalist society the peasants will always flee from such a "norm" to the towns (we shall deal with this separately later on). Here too, then, it is not at all a matter of a "norm" (which, moreover, changes with every change in the crop and technical methods), but a matter of dividing the land among a given number of farmers, of "sorting out" the real farmers who are capable of "cherishing" the land (with both labour and capital) from the inefficient farmers who must not be retained in agriculture -- and to attempt to retain them in it would be reactionary.

    The Trudovik peasants and the Socialist-Revolutionary peasants do not differ essentially from the non-party peasants. A comparison of their speeches clearly reveals the same needs, the same demands, and the same outlook. The party peasants are merely more politically conscious, they express themselves more clearly, and grasp more fully the connection between the different aspects of the question.

    The best speech of all, perhaps, was that of the peasant Kiselyov, a Trudovik, at the 26th session of the Second Duma (April 12, 1907). In contrast to the "state point of view" of the liberal petty bureaucrat, he emphasised the fact that "our government's entire domestic policy, which is actually controlled by the landlords, is directed to keeping the land in the possession of its present owners" (1943). The speaker showed that that was the reason why the people were kept "in abysmal ignorance", and then he went on to deal with the speech delivered by the Octobrist, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky. "You have, of course, not forgotten the horrible things he said: 'Abandon all idea of increasing the area of peasant landownership. Preserve and support the private owners. Without landlords, our backward and

page 395

page 398

ants" (1950-51). Neither is it surprising that Struve and those like him were bound to hate the Trudoviks, especially after the Second Duma: the Cadets' plans cannot succeed as long as the Russian peasant remains a Trudovik. But when the Russian peasant ceases to be a Trudovik, the difference between the Cadet and the Octobrist will completely disappear!

    We shall briefly mention the other speakers. The peasant Nechitailo says: "The people who have drunk the blood and sucked the brains of the peasants call them ignorant" (779). Golovin interrupted: The landlord can insult the peasant, but the peasant insulting the landlord?. . . "These lands that belong to the people -- we are told: buy them. Are we foreigners, who have arrived from England, France, and so forth? This is our country, why should we have to buy our own land? We have already paid for it ten times over with blood, sweat, and money" (780).

    Here is what the peasant Kirnosov (Saratov Gubernia) says: "Nowadays we talk of nothing but the land; again we are told: it is sacred, inviolable. In my opinion it can not be inviolable; if the people wish it, nothling can be inviolable.* (A voice from the Right : "Oh-ho!") Yes, oh-ho! (Applause on the Left.) Gentlemen of the nobility, do you think we do not know when you used us as stakes in your card games; when you bartered us for dogs? We do. It was all your sacred, inviolable property. . . . You stole the land from us. . . . The peasants who sent me here said this: The land is ours. We have come here not to buy it, but to take it" (1144).**

page 399

    Here is what the peasant Vasyutin (Kharkov Gubernia) says: "We see here in the person of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers not the minister of the whole country, but the minister of 130,000 landlords. Ninety million peasants are nothing to him. . . . You [addressing the Right] are exploiters, you lease your land out at exorbitant rents and skin the peasants alive. . . . Know that if the government fails to meet the people's needs, the people will not ask for your consent, they will take the land. . . . I am a Ukrainian [he relates that Catherine made Potemkin a gift of a little estate of 27,000 dessiatins with 2,000 serfs]. . . . Formerly land was sold at 25 to 50 rubles per dessiatin, but now the rent is 15 to 30 rubles per dessiatin, and the rent of hay land is 35 to 50 rubles. I call that fleecery. (A voice from the Right : "What? Fleecery?" Laughter.) Yes, don't get excited (applause on the Left ); I call it skinning the peasants alive" (643, 39th session, May 16).

    The Trudovik peasants and the peasant intellectuals have in common a vivid recollection of serfdom. They are all united by burning hatred for the landlords and the landlord state. They are all animated with an intense revolutionary passion. Some spontaneously exert their efforts to "throw them off our backs", without thinking of the future system they are to create. Others paint that future in utopian colours. But all of them detest compromise with the old Russia, all are fighting to shatter to bits accursed medievalism.

    Comparing the speeches of the revolutionary peasants in the Second Duma with those of the revolutionary workers, one is struck by the following difference. The former are imbued with a far more spontaneous revolutionary spirit, a passionate desire to destroy the landlord regime immediately, and immediately to create a new system. The peasant is eager to fling himself upon the enemy at once and to strangle him. Among the workers this revolutionary spirit is more abstract, aimed, as it were, at a remoter goal. This difference is quite understandable and legitimate. The peasant is making his, bourgeois, revolution now, at this moment, and does not see its inherent contradictions, he is not even aware that there are such contradictions. The Social-Democratic worker does see them and because he

page 400

sets himself aims of world socialism, cannot make the fate of the working-class movement hinge on the outcome of a bourgeois revolution. Only we must not conclude from this that the worker must support the liberals in the bourgeois revolution. The conclusion to be drawn from it is that, while merging with no other class, the worker must with all his energy help the peasant to carry through this bourgeois revolution to the end.

    The speeches of the Socialist-Revolutionary intellectuals (we dealt with the S.R. peasants above when dealing with the Trudoviks) are full of the same scathing criticism of the Cadets and bitter enmity towards the landlords. Not to repeat what we have said above, we shall merely point out a new feature that this group of deputies possesses. Unlike the Popular SocialIsts who, instead of the ideal of socialism, are inclined to paint the ideal of . . . Denmark, and unlike the peasants, who are strangers to all doctrine and directly express the sentiments of the oppressed person who just as directly idealises emancipation from the existing form of exploitation, the Socialist-Revolutionaries introduce into their speeches the doctrine of their own "socialism". Thus, Uspensky ahd Sagatelyan (a member of "Dashnaktsutyun" -- which stands very close to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the "young ones" of which even belong to the S. R. Party) raise the question of the village commune. The latter speaker rather naïvely observes: "It must be noted with regret that in developing the wide theory of nationalisation of the land, no special emphasis is laid on the living, surviving institution, on the basis of which alone progress can be made. . . . The safeguard against all these horrors [the horrors of Europe, the destruction of small farming, etc.] is the village commune" (1122).

    The "regret" of this worthy knight of the village commune will be understood if we bear in mind that he was the twenty-sixth speaker on the agrarian question.

    He was preceded by not less than fourteen Left members; Trudoviks, and others, and "no special emphasis was laid on this living, surviving institution" by any one of them!

page 401

There is reason for "regret" when one sees among the peasants in the Duma the same indifference towards the village commune as was displayed by the congresses of the Peasant Union. Sagatelyan and Uspensky took up the cause of the village commune like true sectarians in the midst of the peasant revolution, which does not want to hear of the old agrarian associations. "I sense a certain danger to the village commune," mourned Sagatelyan (1123). Now is just the time at which the village commune must be saved at all costs" (1124). "This form [i.e., the village commune] may develop into a world movement, capable of offering a solution to all economic problems" (1126). Apparently, Mr. Sagatelyan gave vent to all these arguments about the village commune "sadly aud irrelevantly". And his colleague Uspsnsky, criticising Stolypin's legislation against the village communes, expressed the desire that "the mobilisation of landed property be reduced to the utmost limits, to the last degree" (1115).

    This Narodnik's wish is undoubtedly reactionary. Curiously enough, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, in whose names this wish was expressed in the Duma, advocates ths abolition of private ownership of land, without realising that this involves the utmost mobilisation of the land, that it creates the freest and easiest conditions for the land to pass from farmer to farmer, the freest and easiest conditions for the penetration of capital into agriculture! Confusing privats ownership of land with the domination of capital in agriculture is a characteristic mistake of the bourgeois land nationalisers (including Henry George, and many others). In their endeavour to "reduce mobilisation", the Socialist-Revolutionaries are at one with the Cadets, whose representative Kutler openly stated in his speech: "The Party of People's Freedom proposes to limit their [the peasants'] rights only in respect of alienation and mortgage, i.e., to prevent, in the future, the wide develoment of the sale and purchase of land" (12th session, March 19, 1907, p. 740).

    The Cadets link this reactionary aim with methods of solving the agrarian problem (domination of the landlords and the bureaucracy) that make possible stupid bureaucratic restriction and red-tape that will help to enthral the peas-

page 402

ants. The Socialist-Revolutionaries link the reactionary aim with measures that preclude the possibility of bureaucratic restraints (local land committees elected on the basis of universal, etc., suffrage). In the case of the former, what is reactionary is their entire (bureaucratic-landlord) policy in the bourgeois revolution. In the case of the latter, what is reactionary is their petty-bourgeois "socialism", which they mistakenly want to force upon the consistent bourgeois revolution.

page 403

page 412

-- is it not obvious that this will automatically lead to the reshuffling of the "historical regions"?

page 413

programmes the "nationals" often keep somewhat aloof from the Russian agrarian question, as much as to say: it has nothing to do with us, we have our own problem. For the nationalist bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie such a standpoint is inevitable.

    For the proletariat, however, such a standpoint is impermissible; but it is precisely into this impermissible bourgeois nationalism that our programme actually falls. Just as the "nationals", at best, only associate themselves with the all-Russian movement, without the intention of strengthening it tenfold by uniting and concentrating the movement, so the Mensheviks draft a programme which associates itself with the peasant revolution instead of presenting a programme to guide the revolution, to unite it, and advance it. Municipalisation is not a slogan of the peasant revolution, but an artificial plan of petty-bourgeois reformism added on from outside in a backwater of the revolution.

    The Social-Democratic proletariat cannot alter its programme in order to win the "agreement" of this or that nationality. Our task is to unite and concentrate the movement by advocating the best path, the best agrarian system possible in bourgeois society, by combating the force of tradition, prejudice, and conservative provincialism. "Disagreement" with the socialisation of the land on the part of the small peasants cannot alter our programme of the socialist revolution; it can only cause us to prefer action by example. The same applies to the nationalisation of the land in a bourgeois revolution. No "disagreement" with it on the part of a nationality or several nationalities can make us alter the doctrine that it is in the interest of the entire people that they should be freed to the utmost extent from medieval landownership and that private ownership of the land should be abolished. The "disagreement" of considerable sections of the toiling masses of this or that nationality will make us prefer influence by example to every other form of influence. The nationalisation of the land available for colonisation, the nationalisation of forest land, the nationalisation of all the land in central Russia, cannot exist for long side by side with private ownership of the land in some other part of the country (once the unification

page 414

of this country is due to the really main current of economic evolution). One or the other system must gain the upper hand. Experience will decide that. Our task is to explain to the people what conditions are most favourable for the proletariat and for the toiling masses in a capitalistically developing country.

    Of the eight Social-Democratic speeches on the agrarian question in the Second Duma only two contained a defence of municipalisation and not merely a reference to it. One was that of Ozol, and the other the second speech of Tsereteli. The rest of the speeches consisted mainly, almost exclusively, of attacks on landlordism in general, and of explanations of the political aspect of the agrarian question. Highly characteristic in this respect was the artless speech delivered by the Right peasant Petrochenko (22nd session, April 5, 1907), which expressed the general impression made on a rural deputy by the spokesmen of the different parties. "I will not waste your time by going over what has been said here; permit me to put it in simple words. Deputy Svyatopolk-Mirsky made a long speech here. Evidently, that speech was meant to prepare us for something. Briefly, it amounts to this: you have no right to take the land which belongs to me, or which I possess, and I will not give it up. In answer to this Deputy Kutler said: 'Those times have gone, you must give it up, do so and you will be paid for it'. Deputy Dmowski says: 'Do what you like with the land, but we must have autonomy, without fail'. At the same time Deputy Karavayev says: 'We need both, but throw everything in one heap and later on we'll share it out'. Tsereteli says: 'No, gentlemen, we cannot share it out because the old government still exists and it will not permit it. Better for us to try to seize power and then we can share out as we please'" (p. 1615).

    Thus, this peasant grasped what he found to be the only distinction between the speech of the Social-Democrat and that of the Trudovik, namely, that the former explained the necessity of fighting for power in the state, of "seizing power". He failed to grasp the other distinctions -- they

page 415

did not seem important to him! In his first speech Tsereteli did, indeed, expose the fact that "our bureaucratic aristocracy is also a landed aristocracy" (725). The speaker showed that "for several centuries the state authority handed out into private ownership land that belonged to the whole state, land that was the property of the whole people" (724). The statement he made at the end of his speech on behalf of the Social-Democratic group, which was a recapitulation of our agrarian programme, was not backed by any argument, and was not contrasted to the programmes of the other "Left" parties. We are saying this not in order to blame anybody; on the contrary, we think that Tsereteli's first speech, a short, lucid speech which concentrated on explaining the class character of the landlord government, was a very good one. We are saying this in order to explain why the Right peasant (and probably all the peasants) failed to see the specifically Social-Democratic features of our programme.

    The second Social-Democratic speech on the agrarian question was delivered at the next "agrarian session" of the Duma (16th session, March 26, 1907) by a worker Fomichov (Taurida Gubernia), who often used the words: "we peasants". Fomichov made a stinging retort to Svyatopolk-Mirsky, whose famous phrase that the peasants without the landlords are "a flock without a shepherd" did more to stir up the peasant deputies than a number of other Left speeches. "Deputy Kutler, in a lengthy speech, expounded the idea of compulsory alienation, but with compensation. We, the representatives of the peasants, cannot agree to compensation because it will be another noose round the necks of the peasants"(1113). Fomichov ended up by demanding that "all the land be handed over to the working people on the terms proposed by Deputy Tsereteli" (1114).

    The next speech was delivered by Izmailov, also a worker, who was elected by the peasant curia in Novgorod Gubernia (18th session, March 29, 1907). He replied to the peasant Bogatov, his fellow-deputy from Novgorod, who, in the name of the Novgorod peasants, had agreed to compensation. Izmailov indignantly opposed compensation. He spoke of the terms of the "emancipation" of the Novgorod peasants who, out of ten million dessiatins of arable land,

page 416

had received two million dessiatins, and out of six million dessiatins of forest land had received only one million dessiatins. He described the poverty of the peasants who have been reduced to such a state that not only "have they used the fences round their huts for decades to heat their stoves", but "saw off the corners of their own huts"; "out of big old huts they build small ones in order, when rebuilding, to save a log or two for firewood" (1344). "In face of these conditions, under which our peasants live, the gentlemen on the Right sigh for culture. In their opinion, culture has been killed by the muzhik, you see. But can a cold and hungry peasant think of culture? Instead of land they want to offer him this culture; but I don't trust them here either, I think they, too, will be glad to sell their land, only they will bargain to make the peasant pay dearly for it. That's why they agree. In my opinion -- and the peasants particularly should know this -- it is not a question of the land, gentlemen. I think I shall not be mistaken in saying that there is something else behind this land, some other kind of power, which the feudal nobility are afraid to hand over to the people, are afraid to lose together with the land. I mean politicai power, gentlemen. They are willing to give up the land, and they will do so, but in such a way that we remain their slaves as of old. If we fall into debt we shall never free ourselves from the power of the feudal landlords" (1345). It is difficult to imagine anything more striking and apt than this exposure by a worker of the essence of the Cadets' plans!

    The Social-Democrat Serov, during the 20th-session, April 2, 1907, mainly criticised the views of the Cadets, as the "representatives of capital" (1492), "representatives of capitalist landownership". He quoted detailed figures showing what redemption meant in 1861 and rejected the "elastic principle" of a fair valuation. Serov, from the Marxist standpoint, gave a faultlessly correct answer to Kutler's argument that it was impossible to confiscate the land without confiscating capital. "We do not at all put forward the argument that the land is nobody's, that the land is not the creation of human hands" (1497). "Having achieved self-consciousness, the proletariat, represented here by the Social-Democratic Party, rejects all forms of exploitation,

page 417

both feudal and bourgeois. As far as the proletariat is concerned, the question which of these two forms of exploitation is more just does not exist; the question always before it is: are the historical conditions ripe for emancipation from exploitation?" (1499.) "According to the calculations of the statisticians, if the land is confiscated, up to 500,000,000 rubles, representing the unearned incomes of the landlords, will pass to the people. The peasants will, of course, use this income to improve their farms, to expand production, and to increase consumption" (1498).

    At the 22nd session of the Duma (April 5, 1907), speeches on the agrarian question were delivered by Anikin and Alexinsky. The former stressed the connection between "the higher bureaucracy and big landownership" and argued that the struggle for freedom could not be separated from the struggle for land. The latter, in a lengthy speech, explained the feudal character of the labour-service system of farming that predominates in Russia. The speaker thus expounded the basis of the Marxist view of the peasants' struggle against landlordism, and then showed the dual role played by the village commune (a "survival of olden times" and an "apparatus for influencing the landlords' estates"), and the purpose of the laws of November 9 and 15, 1906 (to align the kulaks with the landlords as a "mainstay"). The speaker gave figures showing that "the peasants' land hunger means the nobility's land surfeit" and expIained that the Cadets' scheme for "compulsory" alienation meant "coercing the people for the benefit of the landlords" (1635). Alexinsky quoted the "Cadet organ Rech " (1639), which had admitted the Cadet truth that it wanted the landlords to predominate on the proposed land committees. The Cadet Tatarinov, who spoke at the next session but one after Alexinsky, was thus driven into a corner, as we have already seen.

    Ozol's speech at the 39th session (May 16, 1907) is an example of the arguments, unworthy of Marxists, to which some of our Social-Democrats have been driven by Maslov's famous "criticism" of Marx's theory of rent and by his corresponding distortion of the concept of nationalisation of the land. Ozol argued against the S.R.'s as follows: Their "Bill is hopeless, in my opinion, for it proposes to

page 418

abolish private owneship of the means of production, in this case of the land, while preserving private ownership of factory buildings, and not only of factory buildings, but also of the dwellings and structures. On page 2 of the Bill we read that all the buildings erected on the land, and exploited on capitalist lines, are to remain private property; but every private owner will say: Be so good as to pay all the expenses for the nationalised lands, for paving the streets, and so forth, and I will receive rent from these houses. This is not nationalisation, but simply an easier means of receiving capitalist income in the most developed capitalist form" (667).

    So there it is, this Maslovism! First, it repeats the banal argument of the Rights and the Cadets that it is impossible to abolish feudal exploitation without affecting bourgeois exploitation as well. Secondly, it reveals amazing ignorance of political economy: the "rent" from urban houses, etc., contains the lion's share of ground rent. Thirdly, our "Marxist", following Maslov, entirely forgets about (or denies?) absolute rent. Fourthly, it appears as though a Marxist rejects the desirability of "the most developed capitalist form" advocated by a Socialist-Revolutionary! Pearls of Maslov's municipalisation. . . .

    Tsereteli, in a lengthy concluding speech (47th session, May 26, 1907), defended municipalisation more thoughtfully, of course, than Ozol did; but it was Tsereteli's pains taking, thoughtful, and lucid defence that most glaringly revealed the utter fallacy of the municipalisers' chief arguments.

    Tsereteli's criticism of the Right deputies at the beginning of his speech was quite correct from the political angle. His remarks about the charlatans of liberalism, who were trying to scare the people with the bogey of upheavals like the French Revolution, were magnificent. "He [Shingaryov] forgets that it was after the confiscation of the landlords' estates and because of it that France was regenerated for a new and vigorous life" (1228). Quite correct too was Tsereteli's chief slogan: "the complete abolition of landlordism and the complete liquidation of the landlord bureaucratic regime" (1224). But as soon as he proceeded to deal with the Cadets, the erroneous position of Menshevism,

page 419

made itself felt. "The principle of compulsory alienation of the land," said Tsereteli, "is, objectively, the principle of the movement for liberation, but not all those who stand for this principle are aware of, or want to admit, all the necessary implications of this principle" (1225). That is the fundamental view of Menshevism, namely, that the "watershed" of the major political divisions in our revolution runs right of the Cadets and not left, as we believe. That this view is wrong is abundantly made clear by Tsereteli's lucid formula, for after the experience of 1861 it is beyond dispute that compulsory alienation is possible together with the predominance of the landlords' interests, with the preservation of their rule, with the imposition of a new form of bondage. Still more fallacious was Tsereteli's statement that "on the question of the forms of land tenure, we [Social-Democrats] are farther removed from them" (the Narodniks) than from the Cadets (1230). The speaker then went on to criticise labour and subsistence "norms". In this he was a thousand times right, but the stand taken by the Cadets on this question is not a bit better than that of the Trudoviks, for the Cadets misuse "norms" far more. That is not all. The fuss the Cadets are making about the stupid "norms" is a result of their bureaucratic outlook and of their tendency to betray the peasants. As for the peasants, "norms" were brought to them from outside by the Narodnik intellectuals; and we have seen above, from the example of the deputies in the First Duma, Chizhevsky and Poyarkov, how trenchantly the practical people from the rural districts criticise all "norms". Had the Social-Democrats explained this to the peasant deputies, had they moved an amendment to the Trudovik Bill repudiating norms, had they theoretically explained the significance of nationalisation, which has nothing in common with "norms", they, the Social-Democrats, would have become the leaders of the peasant revolution as against the liberals. The stand taken by Menshevism, however, is that of subordinating the proletariat to liberal influence. It was particularly strange to say in the Second Duma that we Social-Democrats are farther removed from the Narodniks, since the Cadets declared in favour of restricting the sale and mortgaging of land!

page 420

    Proceeding to criticise nationalisation, Tsereteli adduced three arguments: (1) "an army of officials", (2) "gross injustice to the small nationalities", (3) "in the event of restoration" "a weapon would be placed in the hands of the enemy of the people" (1232). That is a conscientious exposition of the views of those who secured the adoption of our Party programme, and as a Party man, Tsereteli had to expound those views. We have shown above how untenable those views are and how superficial this exclusively political criticism is.

    In support of municipalisation Tsereteli adduced six arguments: (1) under municipalisation "the actual expenditure of these resources [i.e., rent] to meet the people's [!] needs will be ensured" (sic ! p. 1233) -- an optimistic assertion; (2) "the municipalities will strive to improve the conditions of the unemployed" -- as, for example, in democratic and decentralised America (?); (3) "the municipalities can take over these [big] farms and organise model farms", and (4) "during an agrarian crisis . . . will lease land free of charge to landless, propertyless peasants" (sic ! p. 1234). This is demagogy worse than that of the S.R.'s; it is a programme of petty-bourgeois socialism in a bourgeois revolution. (5) "A bulwark of democracy" -- like Cossack local self-government; (6) "the alienation of allotment land . . . may give rise to a frightful counter-revolutionary movement" -- probably against the will of all the peasants who declared for nationalisation.

    Sum and substance of the speeches of the Social-Democrats in the Second Duma: leading role on the question of compensation and of the connection between landlordism and the present state power, and an agrarian programme that slips into Cadetism, betraying failure to understand the economic and political conditions of the peasant revolution.

    Sum and substance of the entire debate on the agrarian question in the Second Duma: the Right landlords displayed the clearest understanding of their class interests, the most distinct conception of both the economic and political conditions needed for the preservation of their class rule in bourgeois Russia. In effect, the liberals aligned themselves with these landlords and sought to betray the

page 421

peasants to them by the most despicable and hypocritical methods. The Narodnik intellectuals introduced in the peasant programmes a touch of bureaucracy and philistine moralising. The peasants, in the most vigorous and forthright manner, expressed the spontaneous revolutionariness of their struggle against all the survivals of medievalism, and against all forms of medieval landownership, although they lacked a sufficiently clear conception of the political conditions of this struggle and naïvely idealised the "promised land" of bourgeois freedom. The bourgeois nationals aligned themselves with the peasants' struggle more or less timidly, being greatly imbued with the narrow views and prejudices that are engendered by the insularity of the small nationalities. The Social-Democrats resolutely championed the cause of the peasant revolution and explained the class character of the present state power, but they were unable to lead the peasant revolution consistently owing to the erroneous character of the Party's agrarian programme.

    The agrarian question is the basis of the bourgeois revolution in Russia and determines the specific national character of this revolution.

    The essence of this question is the struggle of the peasantry to abolish landlordism and the survivals of serfdom in the agricultural system of Russia, and, consequently, also in all her social and political institutions.

    Ten and a half miIlion peasant households in European Russia own 75,000,000 dessiatins of land. Thirty thousand, chiefly noble, but partly also upstart, landlords each own over 500 dessiatins -- altogether 70,000,000 dessiatins. Such is the main background of the picture. Such are the main reasons for the predominance of feudal landlords in the agricultural system of Russia and, consequently, in the Russian state generally, and in the whole of Russian life. The owners of the latifundia are feudal landlords in the economic sense of the term: the basis of their landownership was created by the history of serfdom, by the history of land-grabbing by the nobility through the centuries. The basis of their present methods of farming is the labour-

page 422

service system, i.e., a direct survival of the corvée, cultivation of the land with the implements of the peasants and by the virtual enslavement of the small tillers in an endless variety of ways: winter hiring, annual leases, half-share métayage, leases based on labour rent, bondage for debt, bondage for cut-off lands, for the use of forests, meadows, water, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Capitalist development in Russia has made such strides during the last half-century that the preservation of serfdom in agriculture has become absolutely impossible, and its abolition has assumed the forms of a violent crisis, of a nation-wide revolution. But the abolition of serfdom in a bourgeois country is possible in two ways.

page 425

which will mark a complete break with the feudal relations in the countryside. It is this economic necessity that has turned the mass of Russian peasants into supporters of land nationalisation. The mass of small owner cultivators declared in favour of nationalisation at the congresses of the Peasant Union in 1905, in the First Duma in 1906, and in the Second Duma in 1907, i.e., during the whole of the first period of the revolution. They did so not because the "village commune" had imbued them with certain special "rudiments", certain special, non-bourgeois "labour principles". On the contrary, they did so because life required of them that they should seek emancipation from the medieval village commune and from the medieval allotment system. They did so not because they wanted or were able to build a socialist agriculture, but because they have been wanting and have been able to build a really bourgeois small-scale farming, i.e., farming freed as much as possible from all the traditions of serfdom.

    Thus, it was neither chance nor the influence of this or that doctrine (as some short-sighted people think) that determined this peculiar attitude towards private ownership of the land on the part of the classes that are fighting in the Russian revolution. This peculiar attitude is to be explained by the conditions of the development of capitalism in Russia and by the requirements of capitalism at this stage of its development. All the Black-Hundred landlords, all the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie (including the Octobrists and the Cadets ) stand for private ownership of the land. The whole of the peasantry and the proletariat are opposed to the private ownership of the land. The reformative path of creating a Junker-bourgeois Russia presupposes the preservation of the foundations of the old system of landownership and their slow adaptation to capitalism, which would be painful for the mass of the population. The revolutionary path of really overthrowing the old order inevitably requires, as its economic basis, the destruction of all the old forms of landownership, together with all the old political institutions of Russia. The experience of the first period of the Russian revolution has conclusively proved that it can be victorious only as a peasant agrarian revolution, and that the latter cannot

page 426

completely fulfil its historical mission unless the land is nationalised.

    Social-Democracy, as the party of the international proletariat, the party which has set itself world-wide socialist aims, cannot, of course, identify itself with any epoch of any bourgeois revolution, nor can it tie its destiny to this or that outcome of this or that bourgeois revolution. Whatever the outcome, we must remain an independent, purely proletarian party, which steadfastly leads the working masses to their great socialist goal. We cannot, therefore, undertake to guarantee that any of the gains of the bourgeois revolution will be permanent, because impermanence and inherent contradiction are immanent features of all the gains of the bourgeois revolution as such. The "invention" of "guarantees against restoration" can only be the fruit of shallow thinking. We have but one task: to rally the proletariat for the socialist revolution, to support every fight against the old order in the most resolute way, to fight for the best possible conditions for the proletariat in the developing bourgeois society. From this it inevitably follows that our Social-Democratic programme in the Russian bourgeois revolution can only be nationalisation of the land. Like every other part of our programme, we must connect it with definite forms and a definite stage of political reform, because the scope of the political revolution and that of the agrarian revolution cannot but be the same. Like every other part of our programme, we must keep it strictly free from petty-bourgeois illusions, from intellectualist-bureaucratic chatter about "norms", from reactionary talk about strengthening the village communes, or about equalised land tenure. The interests of the proletariat do not demand that a special slogan, a special "plan" or "system" shall be invented for this or that bourgeois revolution, they only demand that the objective conditions for this revolution shall be consistently expressed and that these objective, economically unavoidable conditions be stripped of illusions and utopias. Nationalisation of the land is not only the sole means for completely eliminating medievalism in agriculture, but also the best form of agrarian relationships conceivable under capitalism.

    Three circumstances have temporarily deflected the

page 427

Russian Social-Democrats from this correct agrarian programme. First, P. Maslov, the initiator of "municipalisation" in Russia, "revised" the theory of Marx, repudiated the theory of absolute rent, and revived the semi-decayed bourgeois doctrines about the law of diminishing returns, its connection with the theory of rent, etc. To repudiate absolute rent is to deny that private landownership has any economic significance under capitalism, and, consequently, this inevitably led to the distortion of Marxist views on nationalisation. Secondly, not having before them visible evidence that the peasant revolution had begun, Russian Social-Democrats could not but regard its possibility with caution, because the possible victory of the revolution requires a number of especially favourable conditions and an especially favourable development of revolutionary consciousness, energy, and initiative on the part of the masses. Having no experience to go on, and holding that it is impossible to invent bourgeois movements, the Russian Marxists naturally could not, before the revolution, present a correct agrarian programme. But even after the revolution had begun, they committed the following mistake: instead of applying the theory of Marx to the special conditions prevailing in Russia (Marx and Engels always taught that their theory was not a dogma, but a guide to action ), they uncritically repeated the conclusions drawn from the application of Marx's theory to foreign conditions, to a different epoch. The German Social-Democrats, for instance, have quite naturally abandoned all the old programmes of Marx containing the demand for the nationalisation of the land, because Germany has taken final shape as a Junker-bourgeois country, and all movements there based on the bourgeois order have become completely obsolete, and there is not, nor can there be, any people's movement for nationalisation. The preponderance of Junker-bourgeois elements has actually transforrned the plans for nationalisation into a plaything, or even into an instrument of the Junkers for robbing the masses. The Germans are right in refusing even to talk about nationalisation. But to apply this conclusion to Russia (as is done in effect by those of our Mensheviks who do not see the connection between municipalisation and Maslov's revision of the theory of

page 428

Marx) is to reveal an inability to think of the tasks each Social-Democratic party has to perform in special periods of its historical development.

page 429

need for achieving not only local, but "central" democracy, i.e., the democratisation of the central government of the state -- and not merely democracy in general, but the absolutely fullest, highest forms of democracy, for otherwise the peasant agrarian revolution in Russia will become utopian in the scientific sense of the term.

    And let it not be thought that at the present moment of history, when the Black-Hundred die-hards are howling and raging in the Third Duma, when the nec plus ultra of rampant counter-revolution has been reached and reation is perpetrating savage acts of political vengeance upon the revolutionaries in general and the Social-Democratic deputies in the Second Duma in particular -- let it not be thought that this moment is "unsuitable" for "broad" agrarian programmes. Such a thought would be akin to the backsliding, despondency, disintegration, and decadence which have spread among wide sections of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals who belong to the Social-Democratic Party, or sympathise with this Party in Russia. The proletariat can only gain by having this rubbish swept clean out of the ranks of the workers' party. Yes, the more savagely reaction rages, the more does it actually retard the inevitable economic development, the more successfully does it prepare the wider upsurge of the democratic movement. And we must take advantage of the temporary lulls in mass action in order critically to study the experience of the great revolution, verify this experience, purge it of dross, and pass it on to the masses as a guide for the impending struggle.

    November-December 1907

page 430