V. I. L E N I N
34
Consequently, ten million peasant families, out of a total
of about 13 million, own 73 million dessiatines of land.
The average per household is seven dessiatines. To this
should be added the small privately-owned estates. The
number of owners of farms of less than 10 dessiatines each
is placed at 409,864, and they own a total of 1,625,226 des-
siatines of land, i.e., less than four dessiatines per house-
hold. Consequently, we have a total of approximately ten
and a half million peasant families with 75 million dessia-
tines of land.
Now we can place side by side these principal figures,
which are very often forgotten or misrepresented in argu-
ments about the peasant problem:
Large landed estates—30 thousand owners, 70 million
dessiatines of land.
Small peasant farms—ten and a half million owners,
75 million dessiatines of land.
To be sure, these are the gross figures. For a more detailed
study of the condition of the peasants and the role of the big
estates, it is necessary to take the figures for the various
regions or districts, sometimes even for the individual gu-
bernias. But the economists of the government, the liberal
and even, to a certain extent, the Narodnik camps very often
obscure the essence of the land problem by referring to indi-
vidual regions or to particular aspects of the problem. To
get at the root of the land problem and of the condition of
the peasants, we must not lose sight of the main figures
cited above; we must not allow the main point to be obscured
by particulars.
In our next article,
*
we shall cite instances of this kind of
obscuring. For the present, we will make the first fundamen-
tal summary.
The land in European Russia is so distributed that the
big landlords, those owning more than 500 dessiatines each,
hold 70 million dessiatines, and the number of such landlords
is less than 30 thousand.
On the other hand, the vast majority of the peasants,
namely, ten and a half million families out of 13 million
peasant families, own 75 million dessiatines of land.
*
See pp. 73-77 of this volume.—Ed.
35
LANDOWNERSHIP IN EUROPEAN RUSSIA
The average large landed estate is 2,200 dessiatines. The
average size of a small peasant farm is seven dessiatines.
If the land of the thirty thousand big landlords were
transferred to ten million peasant households, the land held
by these households would be nearly doubled.
In our next article, we shall discuss the economic rela-
tions between the landlords and the peasants resulting from
this distribution of the land.
Nevskaya Zvezda No. 3 ,
Published according
May 6 , 1 9 1 2
to the text in Nevskaya Zvezda
Signed: R. Silin
36
THE TRUDOVIKS AND THE WORKER DEMOCRATS
The Fourth Duma election campaign has brought about
some little revival of activity and has increased the interest
in political issues. The broad movement stirred up by the
events in the Lena gold-fields has lent importance to this
revival and made this interest particularly urgent. More
than ever, it is now appropriate to discuss the question of the
attitude of the Trudoviks, i.e., of the peasant democrats, to
the worker democrats.
In an article entitled “The Trudovik Group and the
Workers’ Party” (Zaprosy Zhizni No. 17), Mr. V. Vodovozov,
answering my articles—”Liberalism and Democracy”
*
—in Zvezda,
37
sets forth the Trudovik view on this
question. The controversy bears on the very essence of two
political trends which express the interests of nine-tenths of
Russia’s population. It is therefore the duty of every
democrat to pay the closest attention to the subject of the
controversy.
I
The standpoint of the working-class democracy is the class
struggle. The wage-workers constitute a definite class in
modern society. The position of this class is radically dif-
ferent from that of the class of small proprietors, the peas-
ants. That is why their association in one party is out of
the question.
The aim of the workers is to abolish wage slavery by elim-
inating the rule of the bourgeoisie. The peasants’ aim lies
in democratic demands that could abolish serfdom, with all
*
See present edition, Vol. 17, pp. 569-77.—Ed.
37
THE TRUDOVIKS AND THE WORKER DEMOCRATS
its social roots and in all its manifestations, but which could
not even slightly affect the rule of the bourgeoisie.
In Russia today, the tasks which the workers and the
peasants have in common are drawing the working-class
democracy and the peasant democracy closer together.
While necessarily following different paths, the two democ-
racies can, and for the purpose of achieving success should,
act jointly against all that is contrary to democracy. Unless
there is such joint or common action, unless the peasant dem-
ocrats get rid of the tutelage of the liberals (Cadets), any
serious democratic reforms in Russia will be out of the ques-
tion.
Those are the views of the working-class democrats, the
Marxists, which I have developed in the two articles entitled
“Liberalism and Democracy”.
The Trudoviks, whose views are expounded by Mr. Vodo-
vozov, want to be a party standing “above classes”. They
are convinced that one party “could fully take care of the
interests of three classes of society”: the peasantry, the work-
ing class and the “working intelligentsia”.
I said that this “conviction” contradicted (1) all the facts
of economic science, (2) the entire experience of countries
which went through epochs similar to the present epoch in
Russia, and (3) Russia’s experience during a particularly
important and crucial period of her history, the year 1905.
I derided the truly Cadet claim to “embrace” different
classes, and recalled the fact that the Cadets describe the
Maklakovs as “working intelligentsia”.
Mr. Vodovozov, without citing these arguments of mine
fully and coherently, seeks to disprove them by disjointed
statements. In reply to the first argument, for instance, he
says: “The peasantry is a mass of people living by their own
labour, its interests are the interests of labour, and therefore
it represents one contingent of the great army of labour,
just as the workers represent another contingent of that
army.”
This is not Marxist, but bourgeois economic science: the
phrase about the interests of labour here obscures the fun-
damental difference between the position of the small propri-
etor and that of the wage-worker. The worker owns no means
of production and sells himself, his hands, his labour-
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