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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY423Kolupayevs: Enrichissez-vous!—enrich yourselves! We shallmake it possible for you to gain a hundred rubles for everyruble, if you will help us to save the basis of our rule underthe new conditions. That path of development, if it is to bepursued successfully, calls for wholesale, systematic, unbridledviolence against the peasant masses and againstthe proletariat. And the landlord counter-revolution ishastening to organise that violence all along the line.The other path of development we have called the Americanpath of development of capitalism, in contrast tothe former, the Prussian path. It, too, involves the forciblebreak-up of the old system of landownership; only theobtuse philistines of Russian liberalism can dream of thepossibility of a painless, peaceful outcome of the exceedinglyacute crisis in Russia.But this essential and inevitable break-up may be carriedout in the interests of the peasant masses and not ofthe landlord gang. A mass of free farmers may serve as abasis for the development of capitalism without any landlordeconomy whatsoever, since, taken as a whole, the latterform of economy is economically reactionary, whereas theelements of free farming have been created among the peasantryby the preceding economic history of the country.Capitalist development along such a path should proceedfar more broadly, freely, and swiftly owing to the tremendousgrowth of the home market and of the rise in the standardof living, the energy, initiative, and culture of theentire population. And Russia’s vast lands available forcolonisation, the utilisation of which is greatly hamperedby the feudal oppression of the mass of the peasantry inRussia proper, as well as by the feudal-bureaucratic handlingof the agrarian policy—these lands will provide theeconomic foundation for a huge expansion of agricultureand for increased production in both depth and breadth.Such a path of development requires not only the abolitionof landlordism. For the rule of the feudal landlordsthrough the centuries has left its imprint on all forms oflandownership in the country, on the peasant allotmentsas well as upon the holdings of the settlers in the relativelyfree borderlands: the whole colonisation policy of the autocracyis permeated with the Asiatic interference of a hide-