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

124
V. I. LENIN
Gubernias there is a very interesting table (classification
according to number of draught horses) of peasant and settler
farms in four regions of Yenisei Gubernia (Vol. III,
Irkutsk, 1893, p. 730 and foll.). It is very interesting to observe
that the relationship between the well-to-do Siberian and the
settler (and in this relationship the most ardent Narodnik
would hardly dare to seek the famous community principle!)
is essentially the same as that between our well-to-do village
community members and their horseless and one-horse “brethren.”
By combining the settlers and the peasant old-timers
(such a combination is necessary because the former serve as
labour-power for the latter), we get the familiar features of the
top and bottom groups. Of the households, 39.4%, the bottom
groups (those with no horses, and with 1 or 2), constituting
24% of the population, have only 6.2% of the total
arable and 7.1% of the total animals, whereas 36.4% of the
households, those with 5 and more horses, constituting 51.2%
of the population, have 73% of the arable and 74.5% of the
total cattle. The latter groups (5 to 9, 10 and more horses),
cultivating 15 to 36 dess. per household, resort extensively
to wage-labour (30 to 70% of the farms employ wage-workers),
whereas the bottom three groups, cultivating 0—0.2—3—5
dess. per household provide workers (20—35—59% of the
farms). The data on the renting and leasing out of land are
the only exception we have met to the rule (of the concentration
of rented land in the hands of the well-to-do), and this
is the sort of exception that proves the rule. The point is
that in Siberia there are none of the conditions that created
this rule, there is no compulsory and “equalitarian” allotment
of land, there is no established private property in land.
The well-to-do peasant neither purchases nor rents land, but
appropriates it (at least that has been the case till now);
the leasing out and the renting of land are rather of the character
of neighbourly exchange, and that is why the group data
on the renting and the leasing of land display no consistency.*
* “The locally collected material giving facts on the leasing and
renting of farmland was considered to be unworthy of especial treatment,
because the phenomenon exists only in a rudimentary form;
isolated cases of leasing out and renting occur now and again, but are
of an utterly fortuitous character and exercise no influence yet on the
economic life of Yenisei Gubernia” (Material, Vol. IV, Part 1, p. V,