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

278
V. I. LENIN
more profitable, but “the majority of the farms having one
or two cows, and sometimes more, are not . . . able to deliver
their milk to St. Petersburg direct”—they have no horses,
it does not pay to cart small quantities, etc. The buyers-up
of the milk include not only specialist merchants, but individuals
with dairies of their own. The following data are
for two volosts in the uyezd:
Two volosts in
St. Petersburg Uyezd
No. of
families
No. of cows
belonging
to them
Cows per
family
“Earnings”
of these families
(rubles)
Earnings
Families selling milk to
buyers-up . . . . . 441 1,129 2.5 14,884 33.7 13.2
Families selling milk in
St. Petersburg . . . 119 649 5.4 29,187 245.2 44.9
Total . . . . . 560 1,778 3.2 44,071 78.8 24.7
One can judge from this how the benefits of dairy farming
are distributed among all the peasants in the non-blackearth
belt, among whom, as we have seen, the concentration
of dairy cattle is even greater than among these 560 families.
It remains for us to add that 23.1% of the peasant families
in St. Petersburg Uyezd hire workers (most of whom,
here, as everywhere in agriculture, are day labourers).
Bearing in mind that agricultural workers are hired almost
exclusively by families having fully-operating farms”
(constituting only 40.4% of the total number of families
in the uyezd) “the conclusion must be that more than half
of such farms do not manage without hired labour” (158).
Thus, at opposite ends of Russia, in the most varying
localities, in St. Petersburg and, say, Taurida gubernias,
the social and economic relations within the “village
community,” prove to be absolutely identical. The
“muzhik-cultivators” (Mr. N. —on’s term) in both places
differentiate into a minority of rural entrepreneurs and a
mass of rural proletarians. The specific feature of agriculture
is that capitalism subjugates one aspect of rural economy
Per family
Per cow