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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
capitalism is the free development of small peasant farming,
which has received a tremendous impetus as a result of the
expropriation of the landlords’ estates in the interests of
the peasantry. The entire agrarian system becomes capitalist,
for the more completely the vestiges of serfdom are
destroyed the more rapidly does the differentiation of the
peasantry proceed. In other words: either—the retention, in the
main, of landed proprietorship and of the chief supports of the
old “superstructure”; hence, the predominant role of the
liberal-monarchist bourgeois and landlord, the rapid transition
of the well-to-do peasantry to their side, the degradation
of the peasant masses, not only expropriated on a vast
scale but enslaved, in addition, by one or other kind of
Cadet 8 -proposed land-redemption payments, and downtrodden
and dulled by the dominance of reaction; the executors of
such a bourgeois revolution will be politicians of a type
approximating to the Octobrists. 9 Or—the destruction of
landlordism and of all the chief supports of the corresponding
old “superstructure”; the predominant role of the
proletariat and the peasant masses, with the neutralising of
the unstable or counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie; the speediest
and freest development of the productive forces on a
capitalist basis, under the best circumstances for the worker
and peasant masses at all conceivable under commodity
production;—hence, the establishment of the most favourable
conditions for the further accomplishment by the
working class of its real and fundamental task of socialist
reorganisation. Of course, infinitely diverse combinations of
elements of this or that type of capitalist evolution are possible,
and only hopeless pedants could set about solving the
peculiar and complex problems arising merely by quoting
this or that opinion of Marx about a different historical epoch.
The essay here presented to the reader is devoted to an
analysis of the pre-revolutionary economy of Russia. In a
revolutionary epoch, life in a country proceeds with such
speed and impetuosity that it is impossible to define the
major results of economic evolution in the heat of political
struggle. Messrs. the Stolypins 10 , on the one hand, and the
liberals on the other (and not only Cadets à la Struve, but
all the Cadets in general), are working systematically,
doggedly and consistently to accomplish the revolution
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