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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
339
In post-Reform Russia the growth of small industries,
expressing the first steps in the development of capitalism,
has manifested, and manifests, itself in two ways:
firstly, in the migration of small industrialists and handicraftsmen
from the central, long-settled and economically
most advanced gubernias, to the outer regions; secondly,
in the formation of new small industries and the spread of
previously existing industries among the local population.
The first of these processes is one of the manifestations
of the colonisation of the border regions to which we have
referred (Chapter IV, §II). The peasant industrialist
in the Nizhni-Novgorod, Vladimir, Tver, Kaluga and other
gubernias, sensing the increased competition accompanying
the growth of the population, and the growth of capitalist
manufacture and of the factory that constitute a menace
to small production, leaves for the South, where “artisans”
are still few, earnings high and the living cost low. In
the new locality a small establishment was set up which
laid the foundations for a new peasant industry that spread
later in the village concerned and in its environs. The central
districts of the country, possessing an industrial culture
of long standing, thus helped the development of the same
culture in new parts of the country, where settlement was
beginning. Capitalist relations (which, as we shall see below,
are also characteristic of the small peasant industries)
were thus carried to the entire country.*
Let us pass to the facts that express the second of the
above-mentioned processes. We shall first say that although
of factory-made cotton fabrics” (p 26). Here, consequently, the growth
of commodity production and of capitalism is manifested in the
elimination of petty industry by the factory.
* See, for example, S. A. Korolenko, loc. cit., on the movement
of industrial workers to the outer regions, where part of them settle.
Transactions of the Handicraft Commission, Vol. I (on the preponderance
in Stavropol Gubernia of industrialists from the central
gubernias), Vol. III, pp. 33-34 (the migration of boot-makers from
Viyezdnaya, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, to the Lower-Volga towns);
Vol. IX (tanners from the village of Bogorodskoye in the same gubernia
established tanneries all over Russia). Industries of Vladimir
Gubernia, IV, 136 (Vladimir potters carried their trade into Astrakhan
Gubernia). Cf. Reports and Investigations, Vol. I, pp. 125, 210; Vol. II,
pp. 160-165, 168, 222 for general remarks on the preponderance
“all over the South” of industrialists from the Great-Russian gubernias.