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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
259
As to the question of whether the growth of commercial
farming in this area is bound up with technical progress in
agriculture and with the creation of capitalist relations,
that has been dealt with above. In Chapter II we
saw how large the areas cultivated by peasants in these
localities are and how sharply capitalist relations manifest
themselves there even within the village community. In
the preceding chapter we saw that in this area there has been
a particularly rapid development in the use of machinery,
that the capitalist farms in the outer regions attract hundreds
of thousands and millions of wage-workers, with huge
farms created on a scale unprecedented in agriculture, on
which there is extensive co-operation of wage-workers, etc.
We have little left now to add in completion of this
picture.
In the outer steppe regions the privately-owned estates
are not only distinguished occasionally for their enormous
size, but are also the scene of farming on a very big scale.
Above we made reference to crop areas of 8, 10 and 15 thousand
dessiatines in Samara Gubernia. In Taurida Gubernia,
Falz-Fein owns 200,000 dess., Mordvinov 80,000 dess.; two
individuals own 60,000 dess. each, “and many proprietors
have from 10,000 to 25,000 dessiatines” (Shakhovskoi, 42).
An idea of the scale of farming can be obtained, for example,
from the fact that in 1893 there were 1,100 machines (of
which 1,000 belonged to the peasantry) haymaking for Falz-
Fein. In Kherson Gubernia there were 3.3 million dessiatines
under cultivation in 1893, of which 1.3 million dess.
belonged to private owners; in five uyezds of the gubernia
(without Odessa Uyezd) there were 1,237 medium-sized farms
(250 to 1,000 dess. of land), 405 big farms (1,000 to 2,500 dess.)
and 226 farms each of over 2,500 dess. According to data
gathered in 1890 on 526 farms, they employed 35,514 workers,
i.e., an average of 67 workers per farm, of whom from
16 to 30 were annual labourers. In 1893, 100 more or less big
farms in Elisavetgrad Uyezd employed 11,197 workers
(an average of 112 per farm!), of whom 17.4% were annual,
are exchanged for industrial products “They [the colonial states]
receive through the world market finished products ... which they
would have to produce themselves under other circumstances.” 96