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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY391were uncertain about the ownership of land? Did they makeit your first duty in the Duma, your first demand: ‘Mindyou ensure private ownership of the land, otherwise youwill not be carrying out our mandate’? No. You will saythat you were not given such a mandate” (1185).Far from repudiating that statement, the peasant deputiesconfirmed it by the entire content of their speeches.And that, of course, was not because the Russian peasantis devoted to the “village commune”, is an “opponent ofprivate ownership”, but because economic conditions nowdictate to him the task of abolishing all the old forms oflandownership in order to create a new system of economy.To the debit side of the account of the Narodnik intellectualswe must place their loudly voiced arguments about“norms” of peasant landownership. “I think everybody willagree that in order to settle the agrarian questionproperly,” declared Mr. Karavayev, “the following data areneeded: first, the amount of land necessary for subsistence,the subsistence norm; and the amount necessary to absorball the labour of the household, the labour norm. We mustknow exactly how much land the peasants possess; thatwill enable us to calculate how much they are short of.Then we must know how much land can be given” (1186).We emphatically disagree with that opinion. And weassert on the basis of the statements made by the peasantsin the Duma that it contains an element of intellectualistbureaucracy that is alien to the peasants. The peasants donot talk about “norms”. Norms are a bureaucratic invention,a hang-over of the feudal Reform of 1861 of accursedmemory. Guided by their true class instinct, the peasantsplace the weight of emphasis on the abolition of landlordismand not on “norms”. It is not a question of how much landis “needed”. “You will not create another world”, as theabove-mentioned non-party peasant so aptly expressed it. Itis a question of doing away with the oppressive feudal latifundia,which ought to be done away with even if the “norms”are reached without it. The Narodnik intellectual slipsinto this position: if the “norm” is reached, then, perhaps,there will be no need to touch the landlords. The peasants’line of reasoning is different: “peasants, throw them off yourbacks” (meaning the landlords), said the peasant Pyanykh