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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
It would be a great mistake to imagine that the concentration
of rented land in the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie
is limited to individual renting and does not apply to renting
by the village community. Nothing of the kind. The
rented land is always distributed “according to where the
money lies,” and the relation between the groups of the peasantry
does not change in the least where land is rented by
the community. Hence, the argument of Mr. Karyshev, for
example, that the relation between community renting and
individual renting expresses a “conflict between two principles
(!?), the communal and the individual” (p. 159, loc. cit.),
that community renting “is characterised by the labour principle
and the principle of even distribution of rented land
among the community members” (ibid., 230)—this argument
belongs entirely to the sphere of Narodnik prejudices. Notwithstanding
the task he set himself of summing up the
“results of Zemstvo statistical investigation,” Mr. Karyshev
carefully avoided all the abundant Zemstvo statistical
material about the concentration of rented land in the hands
of small groups of well-to-do peasants. Let us quote an
example. In the three indicated uyezds of Taurida Gubernia,
state lands rented by peasant communities are distributed
among the groups as follows:
made by Zemstvo statisticians. Noting the fact of commercial
farming by the well-to-do peasants and their demand for land, he
points out that “the Zemstvo statisticians, evidently regarding such
manifestations in peasant life as something illegitimate, try to
belittle their importance” and to prove that the renting of land is determined
not by the competition of rich peasants but by the peasants’
need for land. To prove this, Mr. Werner, the compiler of Taurida
Gubernia Handbook (1889), classified the peasants of the entire Taurida
Gubernia according to size of allotment, taking the group of peasants
with 1 or 2 people working and 2 or 3 draught animals. It turned out
that, within the bounds of this group, as the size of the allotment
increases the number of renting households and the amount of rented
land decrease. Obviously, such a method of calculation proves nothing
at all, since only peasants with an equal number of draught animals
are taken, and it is the extreme groups that are omitted. It is quite
natural that where the number of draught animals is equal the amount
of cultivated land must also be equal, and consequently, the smaller
the allotment, the larger the amount of rented land. The question is
how the rented land is distributed among households with unequal
numbers of draught animals, implements, etc.
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