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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
241
that in the black-earth belt about 25% of all working males
are engaged in hired agricultural labour, and in the nonblack-earth
area about 10%. This gives us the number of
agricultural workers in European Russia as 3,395,000, or,
in round numbers, 32 million (Rudnev, loc. cit., p. 448.
This number is about 20% of the total number of males of
working age). It must be observed in this connection that,
according to Mr. Rudnev, “day labour and agricultural jobwork
were placed in the category of industries by the
statisticians only when they were the chief occupation of
the given person or family” (loc. cit., 446).*
Mr. Rudnev’s figure should be regarded as the minimum,
because, firstly, the Zemstvo census returns are more or
less out-of-date, relating to the 80s and at times even to
the 70s, and because, secondly, in determining the percentage
of agricultural workers, no account whatever was taken
of the Baltic and Western gubernias, where agricultural
capitalism is highly developed. For want of other data,
however, we are obliged to take this figure of 32 million.
It appears, consequently, that about one-fifth of the peasants
have already reached a position where their “chief
occupation” is that of wage-labour for rich peasants and landlords.
We see here the first group of the entrepreneurs who
present a demand for the labour-power of the rural proletariat.
These are the rural entrepreneurs, who employ about
half of the bottom group of the peasantry. Thus, there is to be
observed a complete interdependence between the formation
of a class of rural entrepreneurs and the expansion of the
bottom group of the “peasantry,” i.e., the increase in the
number of rural proletarians. Among these rural entrepreneurs
a prominent part is played by the peasant bourgeoisie:
for example, in 9 uyezds of Voronezh Gubernia, 43.4%
of the farm labourers are employed by peasants (Rudnev,
434). Were we to take this percentage as the standard for
all rural workers and for the whole of Russia, it would be
seen that the peasant bourgeoisie present a demand for
* This figure does not include, therefore, the mass of peasants
for whom hired agricultural labour is not the chief occupation, but
one of equal importance with their own farms.