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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
381
principal errors of Narodnik economics are the false replies
given to precisely these two questions, i.e., in a wrong
presentation of exactly how capitalism is developing in
Russia, in a false idealisation of the pre-capitalist order.
In Chapter II (and partly in III) and in the present one
we have examined the most primitive stages of capitalism
in small-scale agriculture and in the small peasant industries;
in doing so we could not avoid many references to
the features of the pre-capitalist order. If we now try to
summarise these features we shall arrive at the conclusion
that the pre-capitalist countryside constituted (from the
economic point of view) a network of small local markets
which linked up tiny groups of small producers, severed from
each other by their separate farms, by the innumerable medieval
barriers between them, and by the remnants of medieval
dependence.
As to the scattered nature of the small producers, it
stands out in boldest relief in their differentiation both
in agriculture and in industry, which we established
above. But their fragmentation is far from being confined
to this. Although united by the village community into tiny
administrative, fiscal and land-holding associations, the
peasants are split up by a mass of diverse divisions into
grades, into categories according to size of allotment, amount
of payments, etc. Let us take, for example, the Zemstvo
statistical returns for Saratov Gubernia; there the peasants
are divided into the following grades: gift-land, owner,
full owner and state peasants, state peasants with community
holdings, state peasants with quarter holdings, 128
state peasants that formerly belonged to landlords, appanage,
state-land tenant, and landless peasants, owners who
were formerly landlords’ peasants, peasants whose farmsteads
have been redeemed, owners who are former appanage
peasants, colonist freeholder, settler, gift-land peasants who
formerly belonged to landlords, owners who were former
state peasants, manumitted, those who did not pay quitrent,
free tiller, 129 temporarily bound, former factory-bound,
etc.; further, there are registered peasants, migrant, etc.
All these grades differ in the history of their agrarian relations,
in size of allotments, amount of payments, etc., etc.
And within the grades there are innumerable differences of