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

THE NEW AGRARIAN POLICY457ownership, of clearing the way for the free farmer (the agriculturalentrepreneur) on land freed from all medieval partitions.*Capitalism has already irrevocably sapped all the foundationsof the old agrarian system in Russia. It can makeno further progress unless it breaks up that system, and itcertainly and inevitably will break it up; no power on earthcan prevent this. But this system can be broken up in thelandlord way or the peasant way, to clear the path for landlordor peasant capitalism. The landlord way of breakingup the old order involves the forcible destruction of thevillage commune and the accelerated ruination and exterminationof the mass of impoverished owners for the benefitof a handful of kulaks. The peasant way involves the confiscationof the landlords’ land, and the transfer of all theland to free proprietors from among the peasantry (the Narodniks’“equal right to the land” means, in effect, the farmers’right to the land with the destruction of all medievalpartitions).The government of the counter-revolution understoodthis position. Stolypin had a correct grasp of the matter:unless the old system of landownership was broken up Russiacould not develop economically. Stolypin and the landlordsboldly took the revolutionary path, ruthlessly breakingup the old order, handing over the peasant masses as a wholeto the mercy of the landlords and kulaks.The liberals and petty-bourgeois democrats, beginningwith the semi-Octobrist “Meons” 160 followed by the RusskiyeVedomosti people, and ending with Mr. Peshekhonov ofRusskoye Bogatstvo, are now raising a big outcry about thedestruction of the village communes by the government,which they accuse of revolutionism! Never has the betwixtand between position of the bourgeois liberals in the Russianrevolution stood out so sharply. No, gentlemen, whiningover the destruction of the ancient foundations will not mendmatters. Three years of revolution have shattered illusions* The views here set forth are closely bound up with the criticismof our Party programme. In issue No. 21 of Proletary this criticismwas touched on as a private opinion; in subsequent issues the questionwill be dealt with in detail. 159