Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 3 -- The Peasantry and the Agrarian Question
the creditors of Tsarism: every member of a peasant family spends 19.5 roubles per annum on food, 3.8
roubles on lodging, 5.5 roubles on clothing, 1.4 roubles on other material needs and 2.5 roubles on
spiritual and intellectual needs! A single skilled American worker spends, directly and indirectly, as
much as two Russian families of six members each. Yet to cover this type of expenditure, which no state
moralist could call excessive, the peasantry's income from agriculture is more than a billion roubles short
each year. Cottage industries bring in about zoo million roubles' profit to the villages. If this sum is
deducted, peasant agriculture shows an annual deficit of 850 million roubles, which is precisely the sum
which the state fiscal organization snatches each year from the hands of the peasantry.
In our description of peasant agriculture we have until now ignored the economic differences between
different regions, which, in actual fact, are of the greatest significance and have found powerful
expression in the forms of the agrarian movement (see the chapter entitled The Peasant Riots). If we
concentrate on the fifty provinces of European Russia, and set aside the northern forest strip, the
remainder of the area can, from the viewpoint of peasant agriculture and of economic development in
general, be divided into three large regions:
1. The industrial region, including Petersburg province in the north and Moscow province in
the south. This northern capitalist area, dominated by Petersburg and Moscow, is
characterized by factories (especially textiles), cottage industries, flax cultivation, and
commercial agriculture -- in particular, market gardening. Like all other industrial regions,
this area does not grow sufficient grain for its needs and is obliged to import it from the
south.
2. The southeastern region adjoining the Black Sea and the lower reaches of the Volga: the
Russian America. This area, in which serfdom was almost non-existent, played the role of a
colony in relation to the central part of Russia. So-called "wheat factories," using modern
agricultural machinery and exporting their grain to the industrial region in the north and to
foreign countries in the west, sprang up rapidly in the free expanses of the steppe, attracting
a large number of immigrants. Parallel with this there took place a transfer of labor power to
the processing industries, the flourishing of heavy industry and feverish urban growth. In
this area, the differentiation within the peasant community goes extremely deep, the peasant
farmer standing at one end of the scale and the agricultural proletarian, in many cases an
immigrant from the black- earth provinces, at the other.
3. Between the old industrial north and the new industrial south there lies the broad strip of
black earth, the Russian India. Its population, which was relatively dense even under
serfdom and was engaged in agriculture in its entirety, lost 24 per cent of its land area as a
result of the reform of 186i, the best, essential parts of the peasants' allotments being turned
over to the landowners. Land prices rose rapidly, the landlords engaged in a purely parasitic
economy, partly cultivating their lands with the peasants' stock and partly leasing them to
the peasants, who were thus bound inescapably to slavish rent conditions. Hundreds of
thousands of peasants are leaving this region for the industrial area in the north and for the
south, where they bring down the level of labor conditions. In the black-earth strip there is
neither large-scale industry nor capitalist agriculture. Here, the capitalist farmer cannot
compete with the pauper tenant-farmer, and the steam plow is defeated in the struggle with
the physiological resilience of the muzhik, who, having paid as rent not only the entire profit
on his "capital" but also a large part of his wages, exists on a diet of flour mixed with wood
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