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

258
V. I. LENIN
have quickly increased the area under crops.* The extensive
development of commercial crops was possible only
because of the close economic ties of these colonies with
central Russia, on the one hand, and the European grainimporting
countries, on the other. The development of
industry in central Russia and the development of commercial
farming in the outer regions are inseparably connected and
create a market for each other. The industrial gubernias
received grain from the South, selling there the products of
their factories and supplying the colonies with labour,
artisans (see Chapter V, §III on the migration of small industrialists
to the outer regions), and means of production
(timber, building materials, tools, etc.). Only because of this
social division of labour could the settlers in the steppe
localities engage exclusively in agriculture and sell huge quantities
of grain in the home and particularly in the foreign
market. Only because of their close connection with
the home and foreign markets could the economic
development of these localities proceed so rapidly; and it was
precisely capitalist development, for along with the growth
of commercial farming there was an equally rapid process
of the diversion of the population into industry, the process
of the growth of towns and of the formation of new centres
of large-scale industry (see below, Chapters VII and VIII).**
* See Mr. V. Mikhailovsky’s material (Novoye Slovo, [New Word],
June 1897) on the enormous increase in the population of the outer
regions and on the migration to these parts, from 1885 to 1897, of
hundreds of thousands of peasants from the interior gubernias. On
the increase in the area under crops, see the above-mentioned work
by V. Postnikov, the Zemstvo statistical returns for Samara Gubernia;
Grigoryev’s Peasant Migration from Ryazan Gubernia. On Ufa
Gubernia, see Remezov’s Sketches of the Life of Wild Bashkiria—a
vivid description of how the “colonisers” felled timber for shipbuilding
and transformed the fields “cleared” of “wild” Bashkirs into “wheat
factories.” This is a sample of colonial policy that bears comparison
with any of the Germans’ exploits in a place like Africa.
** Cf. Marx, Das Kapital, III, 2, 289,—one of the basic features
of the capitalist colony is abundance of free land easily accessible to
settlers (the Russian translation of this passage, p. 623, is quite wrong). 95
Also see III, 2, 210. Russ. trans., p. 553,—the enormous grain surplus
in the agricultural colonies is to be explained by the fact that their
entire population is at first “almost exclusively engaged in farming,
and particularly in producing agricultural mass products,” which