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

248V. I. LENINtheir plentiful survivals of serfdom, and the borderlandswhere those survivals are absent, or weak, and which bearthe features of free-peasant capitalist evolution.What do we mean by the borderlands? Obviously, landswhich are unpopulated, or sparsely populated, and whichhave not been completely drawn into agriculture. Andwe must now pass from European Russia to the wholeof the Russian Empire in order to form an exact ideaof these “borderlands” and of their economic significance.In the pamphlet written by Prokopovich and Mertvago,How Much Land There Is in Russia and How We Use It(Moscow, 1907), the latter of those authors tries to summariseall the statistical data available in our literature onthe amount of land in the whole of Russia and the economicuse to which the known amount of land is put. For the sakeof clarity, we shall quote Mr. Mertvago’s figures in the formof a table, and add the statistics of the population accordingto the census of 1897.These figures plainly show how vast is the land area ofRussia and how little we know about the borderlands andtheir economic importance. Of course, it would be absolutelywrong to regard those lands at the present time, andin their present state, as being suitable for satisfying theland needs of the Russian peasantry. All calculations ofthat kind, frequently made by reactionary writers,* areof no scientific value whatever. In this respect Mr. A. A. Kaufmanis quite right when he ridicules the search for vacantlands for colonisation on the basis of statistics of squareversts. Undoubtedly he is also right when he points outhow little land is suitable for colonisation in the borderlandsof Russia at the present time, and how wrong it is* Also by reactionary deputies. In the Second Duma the OctobristTeterevenkov cited from Shcherbina’s investigations figures of65,000,000 dessiatins of land in the steppe region, and further figuresof the amount of land in the Altai territory—39,000,000 dessiatins—to prove that there is no need for compulsory alienation in EuropeanRussia. Here is an example of a bourgeois joining hands with thefeudal landlord for joint “progress” in the Stolypin spirit. (See StenographicRecord, Second Duma, 39th sitting, May 16, 1907, pp. 658-61.)