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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY279which will sift the farmers from the useless lumber. Andthis new sorting out is nationalisation of the land, i.e., thetotal abolition of private landownership, complete freedomto till the land, the unhampered transformation of the oldpeasantry into free farmers.Picture to yourselves the present system of peasant farmingand the character of the old peasant landownershipbased on allotments. “Although united by the village communeinto tiny administrative, fiscal, and land-holdingassociations, the peasants are split up by a mass of diversedivisions into grades, into categories according to size ofallotment, amount of payments, etc. Let us take, for example,the Zemstvo statistical returns for Saratov Gubernia;there the peasants are divided into the following grades:gift-land peasants, owners, full owners, state peasants,state peasants with communal holdings, state peasantswith quarter holdings, state peasants that formerly belongedto landlords, crown-land peasants, state-land tenantsand landless peasants, owners who were formerly landlords’peasants, peasants whose farmsteads have been redeemed,owners who are former crown-land peasants, colonist freeholders,settlers, gift-land peasants who formerly belongedto landlords, owners who are former state peasants, manumitted,those who do not pay quit-rent, free tillers, temporarily-bound,former factory-bound peasants, etc.; furtherthere are registered peasants, migrant, etc. 112 All thesegrades differ in the history of their agrarian relations, insize of allotments, amount of payments, etc., etc. Andwithin the grades there are innumerable differences of asimilar kind: sometimes even the peasants of one and thesame village are divided into two quite distinct categories:‘Mr. X’s former peasants’ and ‘Mrs. Y’s former peasants’.All this diversity was natural and necessary in theMiddle Ages.”* If the new division of the landlords’ estateswere carried out in conformity with this feudal system oflandownership—whether by levelling to a uniform rate,i.e., equal division, or by fixing some kind of ratio between* The Development of Capitalism, Chapters V, IX, “Some Remarkson the Pre-Capitalist Economy of Our Countryside”. (See presentedition, Vol. 3, pp. 381-82.—Ed.)