Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

219The two years of revolution, from the autumn of 1905to the autumn of 1907, have furnished a vast amount ofexperience of historical value concerning the peasant movementin Russia and the character and significance ofthe peasants’ struggle for land. Decades of so-called “peaceful”evolution (i.e., when millions of people peacefullyallow themselves to be fleeced by the upper ten thousand)can never furnish such a wealth of material for explainingthe inner workings of our social system as has been furnishedin these two years both by the direct struggle of thepeasant masses against the landlords and by the demandsof the peasants, expressed with at least some degree of freedom,at assemblies of representatives of the people. Therefore,the revision of the agrarian programme of the RussianSocial-Democrats in the light of the experience ofthese two years is absolutely necessary, particularly inview of the fact that the present agrarian programmeof the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was adoptedat the Stockholm Congress in April 1906, i.e., on the eveof the first public appearance of representatives of the peasantryfrom all over Russia with a peasant agrarian programme,in opposition to the programme of the governmentand to that of the liberal bourgeoisie.The revision of the Social-Democratic agrarian programmemust be based on the latest data on landed propertyin Russia in order to ascertain with the utmost precisionwhat actually is the economic background of all the agrarianprogrammes of our epoch, and what precisely are theissues in the great historic struggle. This economic basisof the real struggle must be compared with the ideologicalpoliticalreflection of this basis that is found in the programmes,declarations, demands, and theories of the