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confusedly developing towards independent small holdersor farmers. The immense change-over from serfdomwas bound to be slow and complex. The general trendof economic and social life was towards a system ofrelations entirely ruled by a money economy, mobilityof labour, and freedom of contract in contrast with thelong rule of status; but this transformation by thebeginning of the present century had not proceeded veryfar in the 120,000 communes that still sprawled overthe face of European Russia, and even after 1905 thepeasantry still remained for some purposes a separateclass, an 'estate' distinct from the rest of the tsar'ssubjects.Production for a very low level of subsistence wasstill the dominant fact for most peasant households, anddependence on seasonal labour and on supplementarynon-agricultural earnings, especially in the 'consumingprovinces,' was even more widespread than in the past.Old features of the serf regime lived on in decay, andremnants of the old system of labour services stillpersisted, with the corresponding psychology. Conditions,as previously, varied immensely in different partsof the country, even apart from Siberia, which hadnever known agricultural serfdom to any extent, or theCossack and other lands of the new South.By 1916 perhaps as much as two-thirds of the cultivablearea was in peasant hands, but it was very unequallydistributed. In 1905 over a third of the peasant holdingsin the communes was in the hands of only a tenth of thepeasant households, with holdings of over fifty acres.This was the original nucleus of the kulaks. Theprocess of differentiation among the peasantry wasalready marked, and it was greatly increased in the nextdozen years. Above all, there were many more peasantmouths to feed. Between emancipation (1861) and the1905 Revolution the peasantry swelled from 50,000,000to 78,000,000, not counting another 6,000,000 peasantsworking in the towns or elsewhere away from the land.Land hunger and physical hunger were acute throughoutwide regions."No rumours came to me about any little booksI31