Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 3 -- The Peasantry and the Agrarian Question
wounds from the sharp edges of the agrarian problem: this was true in December 1905, in the first Duma,
and the second Duma. Today the third Duma is scurrying around the agrarian question like a squirrel in a
wheel. Tsar ism, too, runs the risk of smashing its criminal head against the same problem.
The government of the nobility and the bureaucracy, even with the best intentions, is powerless when it
comes to carrying out a reform in an area where palliatives have long since lost all meaning. The 6 or 7
million dessyatins of good land which are today at the government's disposal are utterly inadequate,
given the presence in the country of 5 million surplus male workers. But even if the state were to sell this
land to the peasants, it would have to do so at prices which it would have to pay itself to the landowners:
which means that even if these millions of dessycitins were to pass rapidly and entirely into peasant
hands, every muzhik rouble, instead of finding productive use in the economy, would drop into the
bottomless pocket of the nobility and the government.
The peasantry cannot make the leap from poverty and hunger into the paradise of intensive and rational
agriculture; to make such a transition possible at all, the peasantry must immediately, under the existing
conditions of its economy, receive adequate land to which to apply its labor power. The transfer of all
large and medium lands into the hands of the peasants is the first and essential prerequisite of any
profound agrarian reform. Compared with the tens of millions of dessyatins which, in the hands of the
landowners, serve only as a means of extorting usurers rents from the peasants, the i ,84o pieces of land,
ex tending over 7 million dessyatins, where relatively rational large-scale agriculture is being conducted,
are hardly significant. Yet the sale of this privately owned land to the muzhiks would change the
situation only very little: what the muzhik now pays as rent, he would then have to pay in the form of
purchase price. There remains confiscation
But it is not difficult to show that even confiscation of large lands would not, by itself, save the
peasantry. The overall profit from agriculture amounts to 2.8 billion roubles, of which 2.3 billion are
derived from peasants and agricultural laborers and approximately 450 million from the landowners. We
have al ready mentioned that the peasantry's annual deficit amounts to 850 million roubles. It follows that
the income which would be derived from the confiscation of the landowners' lands would not even cover
that deficit.
Those who oppose the expropriation of landowners' lands have often based their arguments on
calculations of this kind. But they ignore the main aspect of the problem: the real significance of
expropriation would be that a free farming economy at a high technological level, which would multiply
the overall income from the land, could be developed on the estates torn from the idle hands which now
possess them. But such American-type farming is only conceivable in Russia if Tsarist absolutism with
its fiscal demands, its bureaucratic tutelage, its all-devouring militarism, its debts to the European stock
exchanges, were totally liquidated. The complete formula for the agrarian problem is as follows:
expropriation of the nobility, liquidation of Tsarism, democracy.
That is the only way in which our agriculture can be shifted from its present stagnation, increasing its
productive forces and at the same time raising its demand for industrial products. Industry would receive
a mighty impulse for further development and would absorb a considerable proportion of the surplus
rural population.
None of this, of course, can provide a final solution to the agrarian problem: no solution can be found
under capitalism. But, in any case, the revolutionary liquidation of the autocracy and feudalism must
precede the solution which is to come. The agrarian problem in Russia is a heavy burden to capital ism: it
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