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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
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of the agricultural population, the proletarians and semiproletarians
undoubtedly constitute a still higher
percentage.
Further, if we are not to replace the complete economic
picture by petty details, we should include among the wellto-do
small proprietors a considerable section of the
commercial and industrial managerial personnel, clerks,
bourgeois intellectuals, government officials, and so on. Here
we have perhaps been too cautious and fixed the number of
this group of the population too high: it is quite possible
that we-should have put the poor small proprietors at a
higher figure and the well-to-do at a lower. But, of
course, in making such divisions one does not lay claim to
absolute statistical accuracy.
Statistics should illustrate the socio-economic relations
established by an all-round analysis, and not be made an
end in themselves, as too often happens in our country.
To gloss over the large numbers of the petty-bourgeois
strata in the population of Russia would be simply to falsify
the picture of our real economic situation.
VI. STEAM-ENGINE STATISTICS
The employment of steam-engines in production is one
of the most characteristic features of large-scale machine
industry. It will be interesting therefore to examine the
data available on this subject. For the years 1875-1878
the number of steam-engines is supplied by Material for
the Statistics of Steam-Engines in the Russian Empire
(St. Petersburg, 1882. Published by the Central Statistical
Committee).* For 1892 we have the figures of Collection
of Data on Factory Industry, which cover all factory
and mining trades.
Here are these data compared:
* Of the 13 groups of trades we omit, for purposes of comparison
with 1892, the following groups: I (agriculture), XII (printing and
lithography) and XIII (“plumbing,” etc.). Locomobiles are counted
with steam-engines.