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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
When assessed by the area under crops the differences between
the groups are seen to be even greater than when assessed
by the amount of land actually held and in use, to say nothing
of the differences in the size of the allotments.* This
shows again and again the utter uselessness of classification
by allotment holding, the “equality” of which has now become
a legal fiction. The other columns of the table show how the
“combination of agriculture with industry” is taking place
among the peasantry: the well-to-do peasants combine commercial
and capitalist agriculture (the high percentage of
households employing farm labourers) with commercial and
industrial undertakings, whereas the poor combine the sale
of their labour-power (“outside employments”) with crop
growing on an insignificant scale, that is, are converted
into allotment-holding farm labourers and day labourers.
Let us observe that the absence of a proportionate diminution
in the percentage of the households with outside employments
is explained by the extreme variety of these “employments”
and “industries” of the Nizhni-Novgorod peasantry:
besides agricultural workers, unskilled labourers, building
and shipbuilding workers, etc., the industrialists here include
a relatively very large number of “handicraftsmen,”
owners of industrial workshops, merchants, buyers-up, etc.
Obviously, the lumping together of “industrialists” of such
diverse types distorts the data on “households with outside
earnings.”**
On the question of the differences in cultivation by the various
groups of peasants, let us observe that in the Nizhni-
Novgorod Gubernia, “manuring the land . . . is one of the chief
conditions determining the degree of productivity” of the
ploughlands (p. 79 of the Returns for Knyaginin Uyezd). The
* If we take the size of the allotment of the horseless peasants
(per household) as 100, the allotments of the higher groups will be
expressed by the figures: 159, 206, 259, 321. The corresponding figures
for land actually held by each group will be as follows: 100, 214,
314, 477, 786; and for area under crops the figures for the groups will
be: 100, 231, 378, 568, 873.
** On the “industries” of the Nizhni-Novgorod peasantry, see
Mr. Plotnikov’s Handicraft Industries of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia
(Nizhni-Novgorod, 1894), tables at the end of the book, also Zemstvo
statistical returns, particularly for the Gorbatov and Semyonov
uyezds.
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