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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY411amount of land to be alienated? Although criticising theCadets, Chizhevsky does not yet realise this.*The conclusion to be drawn from our review of the Dumaspeeches on the agrarian question delivered by the “nationals”is obvious. Those speeches fully confirm what I saidin opposition to Maslov in the pamphlet Revision, etc.,on p. 18 (first edition)** on the question of the relationbetween municipalisation and the rights of the nationalities,namely, that it is a political question, which is fullydealt with in the political section of our programme, andis dragged into the agrarian programme merely because ofphilistine provincialism.In Stockholm, the Mensheviks worked with comical zealto “purge municipalisation of nationalisation” (the wordsof the Menshevik Novosedsky, Minutes of the StockholmCongress, p. 146). “Some historical regions, such as Polandand Lithuania,” said Novosedsky, “coincide with nationalterritories, and the transfer of land to these regions mayserve as the basis for the successful development of nationalist-federalisttendencies, which will again, in effect,transform municipalisation into nationalisation piecemeal.”And so Novosedsky and Dan proposed and secured theadoption of an amendment: for the words, “self-governinglarge regional organisations” in Maslov’s draft substitutethe words: “large local self-governing bodies that willunite urban and rural districts”.An ingenious way of “purging municipalisation of nationalisation”,I must say. To substitute one word for another* Chizhevsky also brings out very strikingly the thesis of theunconsciously bourgeois Trudoviks, with which we are already familiar,namely, growth of industry and a decrease in the movementto the land in the event of a consistent peasant revolution. “The peasantsin our district, the very electors who sent us here, have made,for example, the following calculation: ‘If we were a little richer andif each of our families could spend five or six rubles on sugar everyyear, several sugar refineries would arise in each of the uyezds whereit is possible to grow sugar beet, in addition to those that are alreadythere’. Naturally, if those refineries were to arise, what a mass ofhands would be required for intensified farming! The output of thesugar refineries would increase,” etc. (622). That is precisely theprogramme of “American” farming and of the “American” developmentof capitalism in Russia.** See present edition, Vol. 10, p. 182.—Ed.