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

234V. I. LENINThe peasant’s allotment scale that he takes (8 dessiatins)is a starvation scale. The amount of land to be “compulsorilyalienated” from the landlords that he allows for isinsignificant (18–9= 9 million dessiatins out of 62,000,000in estates of over 500 dessiatins!). To carry out that kindof “compulsory alienation”, the landlords will have to usecompulsion on the peasants, as in 1861!Whether he meant to or not, wittingly or unwittingly,Mr. Prokopovich has correctly expressed the landlord natureof the Cadet agrarian programme. But the Cadets are cautiousand sly: they prefer to say nothing at all about howmuch land they are inclined to expropriate from the landlords.4. THE ECONOMIC NATURE OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTIONAND ITS IDEOLOGICAL CLOAKSWe have seen that the essence of the revolution now inprogress amounts to the break-up of the feudal latifundiaand to the creation of a free and (as far as this is possibleunder present circumstances) well-to-do peasantry capablenot only of toiling in misery on the land, but of developingthe productive forces and promoting the progress of agriculture.This revolution does not and cannot in any wayaffect the system of small production in agriculture, thedomination of the market over the producer and, consequently,the domination also of commodity production,since the struggle for the redistribution of the land cannotalter the relations of production in the farming of this land.And we have seen that a feature of this struggle is the strongdevelopment of small-scale farming on the feudal latifundia.The ideological cloak of the struggle now in progress isfurnished by the theories of the Narodniks. The fact that inthe First and Second Dumas the peasant representativesfrom all over Russia openly came out with agrarian programmeshas definitely proved that the theories and programmesof the Narodniks do indeed constitute the ideologicalcloak of the peasants’ struggle for land.We have shown that the basic and chief component ofthe distributable land for which the peasants are fighting