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

230V. I. LENINSecondly, it may be said that l had no right to assumethat all the confiscated lands (or expropriated lands, forI have not yet said anything about the terms of expropriation)will be transferred to the peasants with little land. Itmay be said that owing to economic necessity the landsmust be transferred to the wealthier peasants. But such anobjection would be a misunderstanding. To demonstratethe bourgeois character of the revolution, I must take thebest eventuality from the standpoint of the Narodniks,I must assume the achievement of the aim set themselves bythose who are fighting. I must take an aspect that mostclosely approaches the so-called General Redistribution 100and not the further consequences of the agrarian revolution.If the masses win the struggle, they will take the fruitsof the victory for themselves. To whom these fruits willultimately go is another matter.Thirdly, it may be said that I have assumed an unusuallyfavourable result for the poor peasantry (that the wholeof the poor peasantry will be transformed into middle peasantswith holdings up to 18 dessiatins per household) byoverestimating the extent of the unoccupied land area. Itmay be said that I should have discounted forests, which,it is said, cannot be allotted to the peasants. Such objectionsmay, and even inevitably will, be raised by theeconomists in the government and Cadet camp, but theywill be wrong. First, one must be a bureaucrat who all hislife grovels to the semi-feudal landlord to imagine thatthe peasants will not be able to manage forest land properlyand derive an income from it for themselves and notfor the landlords. The standpoint of the police official andof the Russian liberal is: how to provide the muzhik withan allotment? The standpoint of the class-conscious workeris: how to free the muzhik from feudal landlordism? Howto break up the feudal latifundia? Secondly I have left outthe whole of the northern region (the Arkhangelsk, Vologda,and Olonets gubernias), as well as parts of the Vyatka andPerm gubernias, i.e., areas in which it is difficult to imaginethat the agricultural exploitation of land covered byforests is likely in the near future. Thirdly, a special calculationof the forest areas would greatly complicate thematter without much altering the results. For instance,