Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

359WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE?Ex-Minister of Agriculture Yermolov’s new book aboutthe “present epidemic of incendiarism in Russia” has givenrise to controversy in the newspapers. The liberal press haspointed out that fires in the countryside have not decreasedbut rather increased after the revolution. The reactionarynewspapers have taken up Yermolov’s outcry and lamentationabout “the impunity of the incendiaries”, “terrorism inthe countryside”, and so on. There has been an extraordinaryincrease in the number of fires in rural localities. For instance,between 1904 and 1907 the figure went up twofold inTambov Gubernia, two and a half times in Orel Gubernia,and threefold in Voronezh Gubernia. “The more or less wellto-dopeasants,” writes Novoye Vremya, which acts as alackey of the government, “want to set up farmsteads and aretrying to introduce new farming methods, but are besieged,as if by guerrillas in enemy territory, by a lawless rural elementthat has run wild. They are being burned out andhounded, hounded and burned out until there is nothing leftfor them to do but ‘abandon everything and flee’.”An unpleasant admission indeed for those supporting thetsarist government! For us Social-Democrats the latest informationis not lacking in interest as further confirmationof the lies of the government and the pitiful impotence ofliberal policy.The Revolution of 1905 fully showed that the old orderin the Russian countryside is irrevocably doomed by history.Nothing in the world can bolster up this order. How is itto be changed? The peasant masses gave the answer by theiruprisings in 1905 and through their deputies in the Firstand Second Dumas. The landed estates must be taken awayfrom the landlords without compensation. When 30,000 landlords(headed by Nicholas Romanov) own 70 million dessiatinesof land and ten million peasant households almost the