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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
209
It is supremely important to note that this inseparable
connection between the differentiation of the peasantry and
the elimination of labour-service by capitalism—a connection
so obvious in theory—has long been noted by agricultural
writers who have observed the various methods of
farming on the landlord estates. In the preface to his
collection of articles on Russian agriculture written
between 1857 and 1882, Prof. Stebut points out that . . . “In
community peasant agriculture the farmer-industrialists are
becoming differentiated from the farm labourers. The former,
who are becoming cultivators on a big scale, are beginning to
employ farm labourers and usually cease to take job-work,
unless they find it absolutely necessary to enlarge their
crop area somewhat, or to obtain the use of pasture land,
which in most cases cannot be done except by taking jobwork;
the latter, on the other hand, cannot take any jobwork
for lack of horses. Hence the obvious necessity for a
transition, and a speedy transition, to farming based on
wage-labour, since the peasants who still take job-work by
the dessiatine are, due to the feeble state of their horses and
to the multitude of jobs they undertake, beginning to turn
out work that is bad from the viewpoint both of quality and
of promptness of fulfilment” (p. 20).
References to the fact that the ruin of the peasantry is
leading to the elimination of labour-service by capitalism
are also made in current Zemstvo statistical material. In
Orel Gubernia, for example, it has been observed that the
drop in grain prices ruined many tenants and that the landowners
were compelled to increase the area cultivated on
capitalist lines. “Simultaneously with the expansion of the
area cultivated by the landlords, we observe everywhere a
tendency to replace job-work by the labour of regular farmhands
and to do away with the use of peasants’ implements . . .
a tendency to improve the cultivation of the soil by the introduction
of up-to-date implements . . . to change the system
of farming, to introduce grass crops, to expand and improve
livestock farming and to make it profitable” (Agricultural
Survey of Orel Gubernia for 1887-88, pp. 124-126. Quoted
from P. Struve’s Critical Remarks, pp. 242-244). In Poltava
Gubernia, in 1890, when grain prices were low, there was
observed “a diminution in peasant renting of land . . . through-