Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

230V. I. LENINUnder the bill, no orchards, plantations, beet fields, etc.,can go into the lease pool! Nor can the pool include landsrequired “to satisfy the needs of the owner, his family, employeesand workers, or to ensure the maintenance of availablelivestock”!This means that the great landowner who has a sugarrefinery, a potato processing plant, oil or other mill, orchardsand plantations, hundreds of head of cattle anddozens of employees and workers, is to retain a great estatefarmed on capitalist lines. The S.R. Party has indeed cheatedthe peasants with exceptional brazenness.Landed estates, or “privately held land”, as the billputs it, are to be transferred to the lease pool by land committeesset up under the law of April 21, 1917, by the governmentof landed proprietors headed by Prince Lvov and Co.,the selfsame government of Milyukov and Guchkov, theimperialists and plunderers of the masses, who were routedby the workers’ and soldiers’ movement in Petrograd onApril 20 and 21, i.e., a full six months ago.The land committee law issued by this government oflanded proprietors is, of course, far from being a democratic(popular) law. On the contrary, it contains a whole series ofoutrageous departures from democracy. Take its Clause 11,which gives the “gubernia* land committees the right tosuspend decisions of the volost and uyezd committees, pendinga final ruling by the central land committee”. Under thisswindling landowners’ law, the committees are so constitutedthat the uyezd committee is less democratic thanthe volost committee, the gubernia committee is less democraticthan the uyezd committee, and the central committeeis less democratic than the gubernia committee.The volost land committee is entirely elected by the populationof the volost. Under the law, for instance, the uyezdcommittee must include the local magistrate and five membersof “provisional executive committees” (pending the* Gubernia, uyezd, volost—Russian administrative territorial units.The largest of these was the gubernia, divided into uyezds, which inturn were subdivided into volosts. This system continued underSoviet power until the introduction of the new system of administrativeterritorial divisions in 1929-30.—Ed.