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

486
V. I. LENIN
countries, where large-scale machine industry had given
rise to a tremendous development of metallurgy.
The main cause of stagnation in the Urals was serfdom;
the ironmasters were at once feudal landlords and industrialists,
and their power was based not on capital and competition,
but on monopoly* and their possessional right.
The Ural ironmasters are big landowners even today. In
1890, the 262 ironworks in the Empire had 11.4 million
dessiatines of land (including 8.7 million dessiatines of
forestland), of which 10.2 million belonged to 111 Urals
ironworks (forestland covering 7.7 million dessiatines).
On the average, consequently, each Urals works possesses
vast latifundia covering some hundred thousand dessiatines.
The allotment of land to the peasants from these
estates has to this day not been completed. Labour is
obtained in the Urals, not only by hire, but also on the labourservice
basis. The Zemstvo statistics for Krasnoufimsk
Uyezd, Perm Gubernia, for example, estimate that there
are thousands of peasant farms that have the use of factory-owned
land, pastures, woodland, etc., either gratis,
or at a low rent. It stands to reason that this free use of the
land actually has a very high cost, for it serves to reduce
wages to a very low level; the ironworks get their “own”
workers, tied down to the works and cheaply paid.**
* When the peasants were emancipated, the Ural ironmasters
particularly insisted on, and secured the retention of, a law prohibiting
the opening of any coal- and wood-burning establishments within
the area of their undertakings. For some details, see Studies,
pp. 193-194. (See present edition, Vol. 2, The Handicraft Census of
1894-95 in Perm Gubernia.—Ed.)
** The Ural worker “is ... partly a cultivator, so that work in the
mines is of good assistance to him on his farm, although the pay is
lower than in the other mining-and-metal districts” (Vestnik Finansov,
1897, No. 8). As we know, the terms on which the Ural peasants were
emancipated from serf dependence were made to correspond to their
position in the mining industry. The mining and works population
was divided into workmen having no land, who had to work in the
industry all year round, and agricultural labourers, having allotments,
who had to do auxiliary jobs. Highly characteristic is the term that
has survived to this day, namely, of Ural workers being “debtbound.”
When, for example, one reads in the Zemstvo statistics “information
about a team of workers bound by debt to their jobs in the shops of
the Arta works” one involuntarily turns to the title-page to see the
date: Is it really ninety-four, and not, say, forty-four? 151