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

520 NOTES79808182private property and withdraw from the village commune to hisotrub or khutor. The otrub or khutor peasant could receive a loanfrom the Peasant Bank to acquire his property. The object of Stolypin’sagrarian reforms was to create a mainstay for the autocracy inthe countryside, in the shape of a class of kulaks, while preservinglandlord ownership and destroying the village communes. Thispolicy hastened capitalist evolution of agriculture by the most painful,“Prussian” method, while preserving the power, property, andprivileges of the semi-feudal landlords; it intensified the forcibleexpropriation of the bulk of the peasants, and accelerated the developmentof a peasant bourgeoisie, which was enabled to buy up theallotments of the poor peasants for a song.Lenin called the Stolypin agrarian legislation of 1906 (and theLaw promulgated on June 14 [27], 1910) the second step, after the1861 Reform, towards converting tsarism into a bourgeois monarchy.“The ‘delay’ granted to the old order and the old semi-feudallandlordism by Stolypin,” wrote Lenin, “opened another, and last,safety valve without expropriating the whole landownership of thelandlords” (see present edition, Vol. 18, “The Last Valve”). Despitethe government’s propaganda drive to encourage the peasants towithdraw from the communes, only some 2,500,000 peasant householdswithdrew from the communes in European Russia in the nineyears 1907-15. Those most interested in this arrangement were therural bourgeoisie, for it enabled them to build up their farms. Somepoor peasants, too, left the communes in order to sell theirallotments and have done with village life. The bulk of the smallimpoverished peasants, however, continued the same old miserableexistence on their backward farms.Stolypin’s agrarian policy did not do away with the fundamentalantagonism between the peasantry as a whole and the landlords,and led to the still greater impoverishment of the peasant massesand the aggravation of class contradictions between the kulaks andthe rural poor. p. 142See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,Chapter IV. p. 152Znamya Truda (Banner of Labour)—the central organ of the Socialist-RevolutionaryParty, published in Paris from July 1907 toApril 1914. p. 153The Preface to the Pamphlet by Voinov (A. V. Lunacharsky) on theAttitude of the Party Towards the Trade Unions was written byLenin in November 1907. Lunacharsky’s pamphlet was never published.p. 161This refers to the Mannheim Congress of the German Social-DemocraticParty held September 23-29 (new style), 1906. The chiefitem on the agenda was the question of the mass political strike,which the German Social-Democrats, at their Jena Congress in 1905,recognized as the most important method of political struggle.