The peasants of old Russia were ground down by the exploitation of the landlords and capitalists. They were burdened with excessive taxation and decimated by recurrent famine. The government of the landlords condemned the peasants to darkness and ignorance. Driven by land hunger, nearly half a million peasant families annually migrated to other parts of Russia, chiefly to Siberia. Official statistics show that 30 or 35 per cent of the peasants possessed no draught animals; about 4 per cent had no land at all. On an average, one landlord had as much land as 300 peasant households. The land-starved peasants were barred from the land by the landlords, capitalists and kulaks. They were obliged to rent land on terms that practically reduced them to a state of bondage. After the February Revolution the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Provisional Government, deceived the peasants by promising that the Constituent Assembly would give them land. Every attempt on the part of the peasants to seize land was vigorously suppressed by the Provisional Government. Of all the parties, the Bolshevik Party alone demanded that the land should be handed over to the peasants immediately and without compensation to the landlords.
“As we know,” Lenin said in the report he delivered on the agrarian question at the April All-Russian Conference of the Bolshevik Party, “the petty-bourgeois defencist parties want to have the settlement of the land question postponed until the Constituent Assembly meets. We are for the immediate transfer of the land to the peasants, which should be effected in the most organised manner possible. We are absolutely opposed to anarchistic seizures. You propose that the peasants should enter into agreements with the landlords. We say that the land should be taken over immediately and sown, in order to avert famine and in order to save the country from the crash which is moving on us with such fearful rapidity.”(1)
The confiscation of the landed estates and the nationalisation of all land would strike at private property in land, which was the foundation of the landlords’ power. Nationalisation of the land would not only mean completing the bourgeois revolution—which the Russian bourgeoisie itself was incapable of doing, just as it was incapable either of continuing the war or ending it—but would also, given the dictatorship of the proletariat, be a definite and important step towards Socialism. Nationalisation of the land would hit not only the landed nobility but also the new kulak landlords whom the Stolypin régime had fostered.(2) Being a blow at one of the chief forms of private property, nationalisation of the lands would be a serious blow to private property in general.
The demand for the nationalisation of the land naturally evoked the savage fury of the Provisional Government, the Menshevik Party and the kulak Socialist-Revolutionary Party. But this demand was in accordance with the urgent needs and fervent wishes of the peasants.
The peasants were in revolt all over the country, demanding the abolition of the landed estates. The landlords, in whose memories the sinister glow of burning manors was still fresh, recalled with horror the old peasant cry: “Cut us off land from your estate, or we will cut your throat!”
Here are a few extracts from the dry official reports on the peasant agrarian movement on the eve of the October Revolution:
“Tanbov, September 14. An expeditionary force dispatched from Moscow to suppress the riots has arrived—accompanied by representatives of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. According to the latter, news has been received of the outbreak of disorders in another locality, forty versts from Kozlov, to which a part of the expeditionary force was immediately dispatched. The village of Yaroslavka is in flames.”(3)
“Saratov, September 25. In view of the agrarian disorders in the Sardobak district, troops have been dispatched. The Provincial Commissar has appealed to civic sentiments, pointing out that resort to military force is inevitable.”(4)
“Zhitomir, September 29. The Provincial Commissar has received a number of reports of outbreaks of disorder in the province. Forests and crops are being destroyed. Troops have been dispatched to quell the disorders.”(5)
“Saratov, September 29. In the Serdobsk district the farms of rich peasant farmers are being wrecked and burnt down. Large estates belonging to Dekonskaya, Saburov, Shirinkina and Nenarokomov have been wrecked and also the village of Pavlovsky.”(6)
“Voronezh, October 7. In the neighbourhood of the village of Zhivotinnoye, in the Zadonsk district, the peasants have partially destroyed the manors of Chertkov and other landlords. Over 60,000 poods of wheat and other grain have been burnt.”(7)
“Penza, October 13. Eight manors have been destroyed in the Narovchat district. Cavalry has been sent to quell the disorders. The Lebedeva manor in the Krasnoslobodsk district and the Andronov manor in the Insar district have been plundered.”(8)
“Nizhni Novgorod, October 13. Reports are to hand from the Lukoyanov, Ardatov and Sergach districts stating that wholesale destruction of forests and the burning of farms have begun, in some places accompanied by violence against the owners. The movement is particularly serious in the Lukoyanov district, where four farms have been burnt down. . . . A detachment of troops has been dispatched.”(9)
Burning manors and kulak farms were not only a vivid illustration of the Bolshevik slogan in practice, but also illuminated the path of victory of the proletariat in alliance with the semi-proletarians of the countryside. It was the slogan demanding the confiscation of the landed estates and the nationalisation of all land which roused the peasantry against the landlords and kulaks in the various parts of the country. It was this slogan that in September 1917 secured for the Bolsheviks a majority in the Soviets on the land question.
The peasants were destroying the basis of the landlord régime, but the Provisional Government, in its declaration of September 25, 1917, implored them to regulate land relations “without violating existing forms of land ownership.”(10) Nationalisation of the land would destroy the foundation of the landlord régime, but the bloc of Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks endeavoured to bolster up this collapsing system.
Confiscation of the land, followed by the nationalisation of the land, would completely eliminate the land hunger which kept the peasant under the yoke of the landlord; it would put an end to the state of affairs in which the peasants had not enough land “to keep a chicken on,” as Tolstoy put it. This alone would be of tremendous revolutionary significance.
But the Bolshevik Party aimed much farther than this. Consistent nationalisation of the land, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, would serve as a basis for the reconstruction of agriculture on new, Socialist lines. By abolishing private property in land, nationalisation would destroy the age-old proprietary instincts which kept the peasants so firmly bound to the soil. The road would be cleared for new forms of agriculture, replacing the ancient feudal methods which held the small peasant in perpetual bondage on his beggarly strip of land. Stalin, speaking at a conference of Marxist agrarian scientists in 1929, summed up the results of the nationalisation of the land carried out by the Soviet government as follows:
“. . . Just because there is no private ownership of land in this country, there is not the slavish attachment of the peasant to the land which exists in the West. And this fact cannot but facilitate the placing of the small-peasant farm on the lines of collective farming.
“This is one of the reasons why the large-scale enterprises in the countryside, the collective farms, are able so easily in our country, where the land is nationalised, to demonstrate their advantages over the small peasant farm.
“Herein lies the great revolutionary significance of the Soviet agrarian laws, which have done away with absolute rent, which have abolished private ownership of land, and which have established the nationalisation of land.”(11)
[1] Lenin, “Report on the Agrarian Question,” Selected Works (Eng. ed.), Vol. VI, p. 342.
[2] The reference is to a series of laws initiated by Stolypin, the tsar’s Prime Minister after the 1905 Revolution, designed to encourage the growth of a class of rich peasants, kulaks, as a bulwark for the tsarist régime.—Trans.
[3] “Late News,” Russkiye Vedomosti, No. 211, September 16, 1917.
[4] “Agrarian Disorders,” Russkiye Vedomosti, No. 220, September 27, 1917.
[5] “Riot and Destruction,” Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta, No. 213, October l, 1917.
[6] “Anarchy in the Country,” Russkiye Vedomosti, No. 223, September 30, 1917.
[7] “Agrarian Disorders,” Torgovo-Promyshlennnya Gazeta, No. 220, October 10, 1917.
[8] “Riots,” Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta, No. 225, October 15, 1917.
[9] “Riots,” Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta, No. 223, October 13, 1917.
[10] “Declaration of the Provisional Government,” Den, No. 174, September 27, 1917.
[11] J. Stalin, “Questions of Agrarian Policy in the Soviet Union,” Leninism (Eng. ed., 1933), Vol. II, p. 188.
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