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

422V. I. LENINservice system, i.e., a direct survival of the corvée, cultivationof the land with the implements of the peasants andby the virtual enslavement of the small tillers in an endlessvariety of ways: winter hiring, annual leases, half-sharemétayage, leases based on labour rent, bondage for debt,bondage for cut-off lands, for the use of forests, meadows,water, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Capitalist developmentin Russia has made such strides during the lasthalf-century that the preservation of serfdom in agriculturehas become absolutely impossible, and its abolition hasassumed the forms of a violent crisis, of a nation-wide revolution.But the abolition of serfdom in a bourgeois countryis possible in two ways.Serfdom may be abolished by the feudal-landlord economiesslowly evolving into Junker-bourgeois economies, bythe mass of the peasants being turned into landless husbandmenand Knechts, by forcibly keeping the masses down toa pauper standard of living, by the rise of small groupsof Grossbauern, of rich bourgeois peasants, who inevitablyspring up under capitalism from among the peasantry. Thatis the path that the Black-Hundred landlords, and Stolypin,their minister, have chosen. They have realised thatthe path for the development of Russia cannot be clearedunless the rusty medieval forms of landownership are forciblybroken up. And they have boldly set out to breakthem up in the interests of the landlords. They have thrownoverboard the sympathy for the semi-feudal village communewhich until recently was widespread among the bureaucracyand the landlords. They have evaded all the “constitutional”laws in order to break up the village communesby force. They have given the kulaks carte blanche to robthe peasant masses, to break up the old system of landownership,to ruin thousands of peasant farms; they have handedover the medieval village to be “sacked and plundered” bythe possessors of money. They cannot act otherwise if theyare to preserve their class rule, for they have realised thenecessity of adapting themselves to capitalist developmentand not fighting against it. And in order to preserve theirrule they can find no other allies against the mass of thepeasants than the “upstarts”, the Razuvayevs and Kolupayevs.143 They have no alternative but to shout to these