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

286
V. I. LENIN
operated).* “Today,” we read in the Historico-Statistical
Survey, “every sound peasant family engaged in flax growing
has a Couté hand-machine, which has actually come to be
called the ‘Pskov scutcher’” (loc. cit., 82-83). What proportion
this minority of “sound” householders who acquire
machines is to the rest of the peasantry, we have already
seen in Chapter II. Instead of the primitive contrivances
which cleaned the seeds very badly, the Pskov Zemstvo
began to introduce improved seed-cleaners (trieurs), and
“the more prosperous peasant industrialists” now find it
profitable to buy these machines themselves and to hire
them out to flax growers (Vestnik Finansov, 1897, No. 29,
p. 85). The bigger buyers-up of flax establish drying rooms
and presses and hire workers to sort and scutch the flax
(see example given by Mr. V. Prugavin, loc. cit., 115).
Lastly, it should be added that the processing of flax-fibre
requires quite a large number of workers: it is estimated
that the cultivation of one dessiatine of flax requires 26
working days of agricultural work proper, and 77 days to
extract the fibre from stalks (Historico-Statistical Survey,
72). Thus, the development of flax growing leads, on the
one hand, to the farmer being more fully occupied during
the winter and, on the other, to the creation of a demand for
wage-labour on the part of those landlords and well-to-do
peasants who engage in flax growing (see the example in
Chapter III, §VI).
Thus, in the flax-growing area, too, the growth of commercial
farming leads to the domination of capital and to the
differentiation of the peasantry. A tremendous obstacle to
the latter process is undoubtedly the ruinously high renting
prices of land,** the pressure of merchant’s capital, the
tying of the peasant to his allotment and the high payments
for the allotted land. Hence, the wider the development
* Strokin, 12.
** At the present time renting prices of flax land are falling due
to the drop in the price of flax, but the area of land under flax, in the
Pskov flax area in 1896, for example, has not diminished (Vestnik
Finansov, 1897, No. 29).