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

424V. I. LENINbound bureaucracy, which hindered the settlers from establishingthemselves freely, introduced terrible confusioninto the new agrarian relationships, and infected the borderregions with the poison of the feudal bureaucracy of centralRussia.* Not only is landlordism in Russia medieval, butso also is the peasant allotment system. The latter is incrediblycomplicated. It splits the peasantry up into thousandsof small units, medieval groups, social categories. It reflectsthe age-old history of arrogant interference in the peasants’agrarian relationships both by the central government andthe local authorities. It drives the peasants, as into a ghetto,into petty medieval associations of a fiscal, tax-levyingnature, into associations for the ownership of allotmentland, i.e., into the village communes. And Russia’s economicdevelopment is in actual fact tearing the peasantryout of this medieval environment—on the one hand, bycausing allotments to be rented out and abandoned, and,on the other hand, by creating a system of farming by thefree farmers of the future (or by the future Grossbauern ofa Junker Russia) out of the fragments of the most diverseforms of landownership: privately owned allotments, rentedallotments, purchased property, land rented from the landlord,land rented from the state, and so on.In order to establish really free farming in Russia, it isnecessary to “unfence” all the land, landlord as well as allotmentland. The whole system of medieval landownershipmust be broken up and all lands must be made equal forfree farmers upon a free soil. The greatest possible facilitiesmust he created for the exchange of holdings, for thefree choice of settlements, for rounding off holdings, forthe creation of new, free associations, instead of the rusty,tax-levying village communes. The whole land must be“cleared” of all medieval lumber.The expression of this economic necessity is the nationalisationof the land, the abolition of private ownershipof the land, and the transfer of all the land to the state,* Mr. A. Kaufman, in his Migration and Colonisation (St. Petersburg,1905), gives an outline of the history of Russian colonisationpolicy. Like a good “liberal”, he is excessively deferent to the feudallandlord bureaucracy.