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institutions were also encouraged, with conspicuoussuccess in the South. In addition, migration to Siberiaand elsewhere and to the towns was made easier byprovisions allowing peasants to abandon the communealtogether. At the same time, one vital step in the policyof disrupting the commune was completed by the fullabolition of communal responsibility for taxation.The results were remarkable even in ten years anddespite the outbreak of the First World War; but in soshort a time only a relatively small minority could betransformed into a ' solid peasantry,' and the communeshowed greater vitality than its opponents expected.The kulaks, the richer independent farmers, increasedconsiderably through buying or leasing the gentry's landand buying cheap the holdings of peasants leaving thecommunes. On the eve of the 1917 Revolution somethinglike 1,300,000 peasant households (about a tenthof the whole) had been established on new consolidatedholdings, and an even larger number were in process ofsuch consolidation. 1905 and 1907 had been years ofwidespread crop failures, 1906 of famine in certain areas—a fact that had intensified the revolutionary spirit ofthe peasants—but the next ten years saw good or bumperharvests, except in the famine year of 1911, and therewas a general advance in most branches of agriculture.More machinery, more artificial manures were beingused: the crop acreage and co-operatives were extending.This improvement, however, was chiefly concentrated inthe Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Siberia, and was inthe main limited to the individual farmers, as contrastedwith those still in the commune, and to the big estates.The material level of the great majority of the peasantsstill remained deplorably low, perhaps more comparablewith India than with western Europe.If one section of the peasantry was rising, the other—and much the larger—was only just managing to maintainits level, or was even sinking. It was still, in the main,illiterate. By 1917 the great majority of the peasantsin European Russia were still working their scatteredstrips in the open fields of the commune, though mostnow held them hereditarily. Migration did little to ease'34