V. I.   Lenin

New Economic Developments in Peasant Life

(On V. Y. POSTNIKOV’S Peasant Farming in South Russia)

“At the present time,” says Postnikov, “a South Russian village of any size (and the same can probably be said of most localities in Russia) presents such a variegated picture as regards the economic status of the various groups of its inhabitants, that it is very difficult to speak of the living standard of separate villages as single units, or to depict this standard in average figures. Such average figures indicate certain general conditions that determine the economic life of the peasantry, but they do not give any idea of the great diversity of economic phenomena that actually exists” (p. 106).

A little further on, Postnikov expresses himself still more definitely:

“The diversity in economic level,” he says, “makes it extremely difficult to settle the question of the general prosperity of the population. People who make a cursory tour through the large villages of Taurida Gubernia usually draw the conclusion that the local peasants are very prosperous. But can a village be called prosperous when half its peasants are rich, while the other half live in permanent poverty? And by what criteria is the relatively greater or lesser prosperity of a particular village to be determined? Obviously, average figures characterising the condition of the population of a whole village or district are here insufficient to draw conclusions as to the prosperity of the peasants. This latter may be judged only from the sum-total of many facts, by dividing the population into groups ” (p. 154).

One might think that there is nothing new in this statement of the differentiation of the peasantry; it is referred to in practically every work dealing with peasant farming in general. But the point is that, as a rule, when mention is made of the fact, no significance is attached to it, it being regarded as unimportant or even incidental. It is deemed possible to speak of a type of peasant farming, the type being defined by average figures; discussion takes place about the significance of various practical measures in relation to the peasantry as a whole. In Postnikov’s book we see a protest against such views. He points (and does so repeatedly) to the “tremendous diversity in the economic status of the various households within the village community” (p. 323), and takes up arms against “the tendency to regard the peasant mir^[1] as something integral and homogeneous, such as our urban intelligentsia still imagine it to be” (p. 351). “The Zemstvo statistical investigations of the past decade,” he says, “have shown that our village community is by no means the homogeneous unit our publicists of the seventies thought it was, and that in the past few decades there has taken place within it a differentiation of the population into groups with quite different levels of economic prosperity” (p. 323).

Postnikov supports his opinion with a mass of data dispersed throughout the book, and we must proceed to gather all these data systematically in order to test the truth of this opinion and to decide who is right—whether it is the “urban intelligentsia,” who regard the peasantry as something homogeneous, or Postnikov, who asserts that there is tremendous heterogeneity—and then how profound is this heterogeneity, does it prevent a general description of peasant farming being given from the political-economic standpoint, on the basis of only average data, and can it alter the action and influence of practical measures in relation to the various categories of the peasantry?

Before citing figures that supply the material to settle these questions, it should be noted that Postnikov took all data of this kind from the Zemstvo statistical abstracts for Taurida Gubernia. Originally, the Zemstvo census statistics were confined to data covering whole village communities, no data being collected on individual peasant households. Soon, however, differences were noted in the property status of these households, and house-to-house censuses were undertaken; this was the first step towards a more thoroughgoing study of the economic status of the peasants. The next step was the introduction of combined tables: prompted by the conviction that the property differences among the peasants within the village community^[9] are more profound than the differences between the various juridical categories of peasants, the statisticians began to classify all the indices of peasant economic status according to definite property differences; for example, they grouped the peasants according to the number of dessiatines^[2] under crops, the number of draught animals, the amount of allotment arable per household, and so on.

The Taurida Zemstvo statistics classify the peasants according to the number of dessiatines under crops. Postnikov is of the opinion that this classification “is a happy one” (p. XII), as “under the farming conditions in the Taurida uyezds, the amount of land under crops is the most important criterion of the peasant’s living standard” (p. XII). “In the South-Russian steppe territory,” says Postnikov, “the   development among the peasants of various kinds of non-agricultural industries is as yet relatively insignificant, and the main occupation of the vast majority of the rural population today is agriculture based on the cultivation of grain.” “The Zemstvo statistics show that in the northern uyezds of Taurida Gubernia, 7.6% of the native rural population engages exclusively in industries, while 16.3%, in addition to farming their own land, have some subsidiary occupation” (p. 108). As a matter of fact, classification according to area under crops is far more correct even for other parts of Russia than any other basis of classification adopted by the Zemstvo statisticians, as, for example, number of dessiatines of allotment land or allotment arable per household. For, on the one hand, the amount of allotment land is no direct indication of the household’s prosperity, inasmuch as the size of the allotment is determined by the number of registered[10] or of actual males in the family, and is only indirectly dependent on the peasant’s prosperity, and because, lastly, the peasant possibly does not use his allotment land and leases it to others, and when he has no implements he cannot use it. On the other hand, if the principal pursuit of the population is agriculture, the determination of the cultivated area is necessary in order to keep account of production, to determine the amount of grain consumed by the peasant, purchased by him, or placed on the market, for unless these points are ascertained, a highly important aspect of peasant economy will remain unexplained, the character of his farming, its significance relative to other earnings, etc., will not be made clear. Lastly, it is precisely the cultivated area that must be made the basis of classification, so that we can compare the economy of the household with the so-called norms of peasant land tenure and farming, with the food norm (Nahrungsfläche ) and the labour norm (Arbeitsfläche).^[3] In a word, classification   according to area under crops not only seems to be a happy one; it is the best and is absolutely essential.

As to area under crops the Taurida statisticians divide the peasants into six groups: 1) those cultivating no land; 2) those cultivating up to 5 dessiatines; 3) from 5 to 10 dessiatines; 4) from 10 to 25 dessiatines; 5) from 25 to 50 dessiatines and 6) over 50 dessiatines per household. For the three uyezds the proportionate relation of these groups according to the number of households is as follows:

The general proportions (these percentages are given for the whole population, including Germans) undergo little change if we omit the Germans. Thus, the author reckons that of the households in the Taurida uyezds 40% cultivate small areas (up to 10 dessiatines), 40% medium (from 10 to 25 dessiatines) and 20% large areas. If the Germans are excluded, the latter figure is reduced to one-sixth (16.7%, i.e., in all 3.3% less) and correspondingly increases the number of households with a small cultivated area.

To determine the degree to which these groups differ, let us begin with land tenure and land usage.

Postnikov gives the following table (the combined totals of the three categories of land mentioned in it were not calculated by him [p. 145]):

“These figures show,” says Postnikov, “that the more affluent group of peasants in the Taurida uyezds not only have large allotments, which may be due to the large size of their families, but are at the same time the largest purchasers and the largest renters of land” (p. 146).

It seems to me that in this connection we need only say that the increase in the amount of allotted land, as we proceed from the bottom group to the top, cannot be explained entirely by the larger size of families. Postnikov gives the following table showing the family composition by groups for the three uyezds.

The table shows that the amount of allotment land per household increases from the bottom group to the top much more rapidly than the number of persons of both sexes and the number of working members. Let us illustrate this by taking 100 as the figure for the bottom group in Dnieper Uyezd:

It is clear that what determines the size of the allotment, apart from the composition of the family, is the prosperity of the household.

Examining the data for the amount of purchased land in the various groups, we see that the purchasers of land are almost exclusively the top groups, with over 25 dessiatines under crops, and chiefly the very big cultivators, those with 75 dessiatines under crops per household. Hence, the data for purchased land fully corroborate Postnikov’s opinion regarding the differences between the peasant groups. The type of information as that given by the author on p. 147,   for example, where he says that “the peasants of the Taurida uyezds purchased 96,146 dessiatines of land,” does not in any way describe the real situation; almost all this land is in the hands of an insignificant minority, those already best provided with allotment land, the “affluent” peasants, as Postnikov calls them; and they constitute no more than one-fifth of the population.

The same must be said of rented land. The above table gives the total figure for rented land, allotment and non-allotment. It appears that the area of rented land grows quite regularly the greater the prosperity of the peasants, and that, consequently, the better supplied the peasant is with land, the more he rents, thus depriving the poorer groups of the land they need.

It should be noted that this phenomenon is common to the whole of Russia. Prof. Karyshev, summarising the facts of peasant non-allotment rentings throughout Russia, wherever Zemstvo statistical investigations are available, formulates the general law that the amount of rented land depends directly on the renter’s degree of affluence.^[4]

Postnikov, incidentally, cites even more detailed figures about the distribution of rented land (non-allotment and allotment together), which I give here:

We see that here, too, average figures do not in any way describe the real situation. When we say, for example, that in Dnieper Uyezd 56% of the peasants rent land, we give a very incomplete picture of this renting, for the percentage of renters in the groups who (as will be shown later) have insufficient land of their own is much lower—only 25% in the first group, whereas the top group, those who have sufficient land of their own, almost all resort to renting (91%). The difference in the number of rented dessiatines per renting household is even more considerable: the top category rents 30, 15 and 24 times more than the bottom one. Obviously, this alters the very character of the renting, for in the top category it is already a commercial undertaking, whereas in the bottom one it may be an operation necessitated by dire need. This latter assumption is corroborated by data on rentals: they show that the bottom groups pay a higher rent for the land, sometimes four times as much as the top category (in Dnieper Uyezd). It should be recalled in this connection that the increase in rent as the amount of rented land grows smaller is not peculiar to South Russia; Karyshev’s work shows the general applicability of this law.

“Land in the Taurida uyezds,” says Postnikov with regard to these data, “is rented chiefly by the well-to-do peasants, who have enough allotment land and land of their own; this should be said in particular of the renting of non-allotment land, i.e., of privately-owned and government land, situated at greater distances from the villages. Actually this is quite natural to be able to rent distant land the peasant must have sufficient draught animals, whereas the less prosperous peasants in these areas have not enough even to cultivate their allotment land” (p. 148).

It should not be thought that this distribution of rented land is due to its being rented by individuals. There is no difference at all where the land is rented by the community, and for the simple reason that the land is distributed on the same principle, that is, “according to where the money lies.”

“According to the registers of the Administration of State Property,” says Postnikov, “in 1890, out of 133,852 dessiatines of government land leased on contract in the three uyezds, 84,756 dessiatines of good land, or about 63% of the total area, were used by peasant communities. But the land rented by the peasant communities was used by a comparatively small number of householders, mostly well to-do at that. The Zemstvo house-to-house census makes this fact quite clear” (p. 150).^[5]

“Thus,” concludes Postnikov, “in Dnieper Uyezd more than half of all the rented arable, in Berdyansk Uyezd over two-thirds, and in Melitopol Uyezd, where mostly government land is rented, even more than four fifths of the rented land was in the hands of the group of well-to-do peasants. On the other hand, the group of poor peasants (cultivating up to 10 dessiatines of arable), held in all the uyezds a total of 1,938 dessiatines, or about 4% of the rented land” (p. 150). The author then cites many examples of the uneven distribution of community-rented land, but there is no need to quote them here.

As to Postnikov’s conclusion about the amount of rented land being dependent upon the degree of prosperity of the renter, it is highly interesting to note the opposite view of the Zemstvo statisticians.

Postnikov placed an article, “On Zemstvo Statistical Work in Taurida, Kherson and Yekaterinoslav Gubernias” (pp. XI-XXXII), at the beginning of his book. Here, among other things, he examines the Taurida Gubernia Handbook, published by the Taurida Zemstvo in 1889, in which the entire investigation was briefly summarised. Analysing the section of the book which deals with renting, Postnikov says:

“In our land-abundant southern and eastern gubernias, the Zemstvo statistics have revealed that a fairly substantial proportion of well-to-do peasants, in addition to having considerable allotments of their own, rent fairly large amounts of land on the side. Farming is here conducted not only to satisfy the requirements of the family itself, but also to obtain some surplus, an income with which to improve buildings, acquire machines and buy additional land. This   is quite a natural desire, and there is nothing reprehensible about it, for in itself it contains no elements of kulakism.” [There are no elements of kulakism here, it is true; but there undoubtedly are elements of exploitation: by renting land far in excess of their requirements, the prosperous peasants deprive the poor of land needed for their subsistence; by enlarging their farms they need extra hands and resort to hiring labour.] “But some of the Zemstvo statisticians, evidently regarding such manifestations in peasant life as something illegitimate, try to belittle their importance and to prove that it is chiefly the need for food that drives the peasant to rent land, and that even if the well-to-do peasants do rent a great deal of land, these renters constitute a percentage that decreases steadily as the size of the allotment increases” (p. XVII)—to prove this point, Mr. Werner, the compiler of the Handbook, grouped together, according to the size of their allotments, the peasant families of the entire Taurida Gubernia who had 1 or 2 working members and 2 or 3 draught animals. It turned out that “as the size of the allotment increases, there is a regular decrease in the percentage of renting households and a less regular decrease in the amount of land rented per household” (p. XVIII). Postnikov quite rightly says that this method is not conclusive at all, since a section of the peasants (only those possessing 2 or 3 draught animals) has been selected arbitrarily, it being precisely the well-to-do peasants who have been omitted, and that, moreover, to lump together the mainland uyezds of Taurida Gubernia and the Crimea is impermissible, since the conditions of renting in the two areas are not identical: in the Crimea, one half to three-fourths of the population are landless (so-called dessiatiners),[11] whereas in the northern uyezds only 3 or 4% are landless. In the Crimea, it is almost always easy to find land for hire; in the northern uyezds it is sometimes impossible. It is interesting to note that the Zemstvo statisticians of other gubernias have been observed to make similar attempts (of course, equally unsuccessful) to tone down such “illegitimate” manifestations in peasant life as renting land to provide an income. (See Karyshev, op. cit.)

If, accordingly, the distribution of peasant non-allotment renting reveals the existence among the various peasant   farms of differences that are not only quantitative (he rents much, he rents little), but also qualitative (he rents through need of food; he rents for commercial purposes), still more has this to be said of the renting of allotment land.

“The total allotment arable rented by peasants from other peasants,” says Postnikov, “as registered in the three Taurida uyezds by the 1884-1886 house-to-house census of the peasantry, amounted to 256,716 dessiatines, which here constitutes one-fourth of the total peasant allotment arable; and this does not include land let by peasants to all sorts of people who live in the countryside, or to clerks, teachers, priests and other persons who do not belong to the peasantry and are not covered by the house-to-house census. Practically all this land is rented by peasants who belong to the well-to-do groups, as the following figures show. The amount of allotment arable rented by peasants from their neighbours, as recorded by the census, was as follows:

“The major part, however, of this leased land, like most of the lessors themselves, belongs to the group of peasants who cultivate no land, do no farming of any sort, or to those who cultivate but little land. Thus, a considerable number of the peasants of the Taurida uyezds (approximately one-third of the total population) do not exploit their whole allotment—some for lack of desire, but mostly for lack of the necessary animals and implements with which to engage in farming—but lease it to others and thereby increase the land in use by the other, better-off section of the peasants. The majority of the lessors undoubtedly belong to the category of impoverished, declining householders” (pp, 136-37).

Corroboration of this is furnished by the following table “for two uyezds of Taurida Gubernia (the Zemstvo statistics provide no information for Melitopol Uyezd), which shows the proportion of householders who lease their allotments to others, and the percentage of allotment arable leased by them” (p. 135):

Let us now pass from peasant land tenure and land usage to the distribution of farm stock and implements. Postnikov gives the following data—for all three uyezds together—on the number of draught animals possessed by the groups:

These figures, by themselves, do not characterise the categories—that will be done below, when we describe the technique of agriculture and classify the peasants according to economic category. Here we shall only mention that the difference between peasant groups with regard to the number of draught animals they own is so profound that we see far more animals in the top groups than can possibly be required for the needs of the family, while the bottom groups have so few (especially draught animals) that independent farming becomes impossible.

Similar in every respect are data on the distribution of farm implements. “The house-to-house census, that registered the peasant-owned iron ploughs and drill ploughs, gives the following figures for the entire population of the uyezds” (p. 214):

This table shows how very large a group of peasants is unable to carry on independent farming. The situation among the top groups can be seen from the following data on the number of implements per household in the various groups, classified according to area under crops:

As regards the number of implements, the top group has 4 to 6 times more than the bottom one (the group with less than 5 dessiatines under crops is entirely disregarded by the author); as regards the number of working members in the   families,[8] however, it has 3/12 times, i.e., less than twice, as many as the same group. This alone shows that the top group has to resort to the hire of labour, while in the bottom group half the households are without farm implements (N.B.—this “bottom” group is the third from below) and, consequently, are unable to carry on independent farming.

Naturally, the above-mentioned differences in the amount of land and implements held are the cause of differences in the amount of land under crops. The area under crops per household in the six groups has been given above. The total area cultivated by the peasants of Taurida Gubernia is distributed by groups as follows:

These figures speak for themselves. It should only be added that for a family to live by farming alone, Postnikov estimates (p. 272), a crop area of 16 to 18 dessiatines per household is required.

Notes

[1] Mir—a peasant community. See at the end of the book.—Ed. Eng. Ed.

[2] A dessiatine = 2.7 acres.—Ed. Eng. ed.

[3] Food norm and labour norm—as can be seen from the text Lenin us these expressions as translations of the German political economic terms “ Nahrungsflä#228;aumlche” and “ Arbeitsflä#228;aumlche,” the former being the amount of land required to feed one person (or any other unit, such as the family) and the latter the amount that can be cultivated by one person (or family).—Ed. Eng. ed.

[4] Results of the Economic Investigation of Russia According to Zemstvo Statistical Data ; Vol. II, N. Karychev, Peasant Rentings of Non-Allotment Land, Dorpat, 1892. Pp. 122, 133 et al.—Lenin

[5] The last section of this table (the totals for the three uyezds) is not given by Postnikov. In a note to the table he says that “under the terms of lease the peasants may plough up only one-third of the rented land.”—Lenin

[6] In terms of cattle. —Lenin

[7] In terms of cattle. [DUPLICATED "*"] —Lenin

[8] See below, the table showing the family composition of the various groups. —Lenin

[9] The village community (obshchina or mir ) in Russia was the communal form of peasant use of the land, characterised by compulsory crop rotation, and undivided woods and pastures. Its principal features were collective responsibility (compulsory collective responsibility of the peasants for making their payments in full and on time, and the performance of various services to the state and the landlords), the regular redistribution of the land with no right to refuse the allotment given, the prohibition of its purchase and sale.

The Russian village community was known in ancient times, and in the course of historical development gradually became one of the pillars of feudalism in Russia. The landlords and the tsarist government used the village community to intensify feudal oppression and to squeeze redemption payments and taxes out of the people. Lenin pointed out that the village community “ does not save the peasant from turning into a proletarian; actually it serves as a medieval barrier dividing the peasants, who are as if chained to small associations and to ’categories’ which have lost all ’reason for existence.’” (The Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century. See present edition, Vol. 15.)

The problem of the village community aroused heated arguments and was the subject of an extensive economic literature. The Narodniks displayed particularly great interest in the village community, seeing in it the guarantee of Russian development to socialism by a special path. By tendentiously gathering and falsifying facts, and employing so-called “average figures,” the Narodniks sought to prove that the community peasantry in Russia possessed a special sort of “ steadfastness,” and that the peasant community protected the peasants against the penetration of capitalist relations into the village, and “saved” the peasants from ruin and class differentiation. As early as the 1880s, G. V. Plekhanov showed how unfounded were the Narodniks’ illusions about “community socialism,” while in the 1890s V. I. Lenin completely destroyed the Narodniks’ theories. Lenin cited a tremendous amount of factual and statistical material to show how capitalist relations were developing in the Russian village, and how capital, by penetrating into the patriarchal village community, was splitting the peasantry into the antagonistic classes of kulaks and poor peasants.

In 1906 the tsarist minister Stolypin issued a law benefiting the kulaks; it allowed peasants to leave the community and to sell their allotments. This law laid the basis for the official abolition of the rural community system and intensified the differentiation among the peasantry. In nine years following the adoption of the law, over two million peasant householders withdrew from the communities.

[10] This refers to registered males subject to the poll-tax in feudal Russia (the peasantry and lower urban categories were chiefly affected), and to this end recorded in special censuses (so-called “registrations”). Such “ registrations” began in 1718, the tenth and last being made in 1857-1859. In a number of districts redistribution of the land within the village communities took place according to the number of registered males in the family.

[11] Dessiatiners—peasants in South Russia who rented land for part of the harvest and not for a money payment.