Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

114
V. I. LENIN
especially of allotment land, improved methods of farming,
hiring of regular farm labourers and day labourers, here
omitted, and the combining of commercial and industrial
enterprises with agriculture. The scale of farming by the
peasants here, however, is generally much smaller than in
the above-quoted cases; there are far fewer big crop growers,
and the differentiation of the peasantry, to judge by these two
uyezds, therefore seems weaker. We say “seems” on the following
grounds: firstly, though we observe here that the “peasantry”
turn more rapidly into a rural proletariat and produce
hardly perceptible groups of rural bourgeois, we have,
on the other hand, already seen examples of the reverse,
where this latter pole of the countryside becomes particularly
perceptible. Secondly, here the differentiation of the agricultural
peasantry (we confine ourselves in this chapter
to the agricultural peasantry) is obscured by the “industries,”
the development of which is particularly extensive (40%
of the families). And the “industrialists” here too include,
besides a majority of wage-workers, a minority of merchants,
buyers-up, entrepreneurs, proprietors, etc. Thirdly, here the
differentiation of the peasantry is obscured because of the
absence of data regarding the aspects of local agriculture that
are most closely connected with the market. Commercial,
market cultivation is not developed here to expand the crop
areas to produce grain for sale but for the production of hemp.
The largest number of commercial operations are bound up
with this crop but the data of the tables given in the volume
do not single out this particular aspect of agriculture among
the various groups. “Hemp growing is the main source of the
peasants’ income” (that is, money income. Returns for Trubchevsk
Uyezd, p. 5 of descriptions of villages, and many others),
“the peasants devote their attention mainly to the cultivation
of hemp. . . . All the manure . . . is used on the hemp
fields” (ibid., 87), everywhere loans are contracted “on security
of hemp,” and debts are paid with hemp (ibid., passim).
For the manuring of their hemp fields the well-to-do peasants
buy manure from the poor (Returns for Orel Uyezd, Vol.
VIII, Orel, 1895, pp. 91-105), hemp fields are leased out and
rented in home and outside village communities (ibid.,
260), and the processing of the hemp is done by part of the
“industrial establishments” of whose concentration we have