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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
343
workrooms or of small yarn-distributing shops, seeing that
handweaving was declining, opened workshops of another
kind, sometimes hiring craftsmen so as to get to know the
trade and to teach their children.* To the extent that largescale
industry forces small capital out of the branch of
production, this capital flows into others and stimulates
their development in the same direction.
The general conditions of the post-Reform period which
called forth the development of small industries in the
rural districts are very vividly described by investigators of
Moscow industries. “On the one hand, the conditions of
peasant life have greatly deteriorated during this period,”
we read in a description of the lace industry, “but on the
other, the requirements of the population, of that part
which lives under more favourable conditions, have
considerably increased.** And the author, using the data
of the region he has taken, notes an increase in the number
of those owning no horses and raising no crops, side by side
with an increase in the number of peasants owning many
horses and in the total number of cattle belonging to peasants.
Thus, on the one hand, there was an increase in the number
of persons in need of “outside earnings” and in search of
industrial work, while on the other, a minority of
prosperous families grew rich, accumulated “savings,” and
were “able to hire a worker or two, or give out work to poor
peasants to be done at home.” “Of course,” the author
explains, “we are not dealing here with cases where individuals
who are known as kulaks, or blood-suckers, develop from
among such families; we are merely examining most
ordinary phenomena among the peasant population.”
So then, local investigators point to a connection between
the differentiation of the peasantry and the growth of small
peasant industries. And that is quite natural. From the data
given in Chapter II it follows that the differentiation of the
agricultural peasantry had necessarily to be supplemented
by a growth of small peasant industries. As natural economy
declined, one form of raw-material processing after another
turned into separate branches of industry; the formation of
* Industries of Vladimir Gubernia, II, 25, 270.
** Industries of Moscow Gubernia, Vol. II, Pt. II, p. 8 and foll.