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

240
V. I. LENIN
existence of such a mass of “peasants” who abandon their
homes and allotments (where they have homes and allotments)
vividly testifies to the tremendous process of the
conversion of small cultivators into rural proletarians, of
the enormous demand by growing agricultural capitalism
for wage-labour.
The question now arises, what is the total number of
rural wage-workers in European Russia, both migratory and
resident? The only attempt to answer this question that
we know is the one made in Mr. Rudnev’s work Peasant
Industries in European Russia (Sbornik Saratovskogo Zemstva
[Symposium of the Saratov Zemstvo], 1894, Nos. 6 and
11). This work, an extremely valuable one, gives a summary
of the Zemstvo statistics for 148 uyezds in 19 gubernias of
European Russia. The total number of “industrialists”
is put at 2,798,122, out of 5,129,863 working males (18 to
60 years of age), i.e., 55% of the total number of working
peasants.* Under “agricultural industries” the author
includes only work as hired agricultural labourers (farm
labourers, day labourers, herdsmen, stockyard workers). An
estimate of the percentage of agricultural workers to the
total number of males of working age in various gubernias
and districts of Russia, leads the author to the conclusion
carried in 1891 by the three principal railways in the direction examined
does not exceed 200,000 (170,000 to 189,000)—as we are told
by Mr. Shakhovskoi (loc. cit., p. 71, according to railway returns).
Consequently, the total number of workers leaving for the South
must be about 2 million. Incidentally, the very small proportion of
agricultural workers who travel by rail points to the incorrectness
of Mr. N. —on’s view when he assumed that the passenger traffic on
our railways is in the main that of agricultural workers. Mr. N. —on
lost sight of the fact that non-agricultural workers receive higher
wages and therefore make greater use of the railways and that the
migration season of these workers (for example, builders, navvies,
stevedores and many others) is also spring and summer.
* By “industries,” as Mr. Rudnev also points out, are meant all
sorts ot occupations by peasants except cultivation on their own,
purchased or rented land. Undoubtedly, the majority of these “industrialists”
are wage-workers in agriculture or in industry. We
therefore call the reader’s attention to the closeness of these figures
to our estimate of the number of rural proletarians: in Chapter II,
it was assumed that the latter constitute about 40% of the peasants.
Here we see that “industrialists” constitute 55%, and of these, in all
probability, over 40% are engaged in all sorts of hired labour.