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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
Thus, in the bottom group there are very few independent
peasant farmers; the poor peasants have no improved implements
at all, while the middle peasantry have them in
insignificant numbers. The concentration of animals is still
greater than the concentration of area under crops; the wellto-do
peasants evidently combine capitalist livestock raising
with their large-scale capitalist cropping. At the opposite pole
we have “peasants” who ought to be classed as allotment-holding
farm labourers and day labourers, for their main source of
livelihood is the sale of their labour-power (as we shall see
in a moment), and the landowners sometimes give one or two
animals to their labourers to tie them down to their farms
and to reduce wages.
It goes without saying that the peasant groups differ not
only as to the size of their farms, but also in their methods
of farming: firstly, in the top group a very large proportion
of the peasant farmers (40 to 60%) are supplied with
improved implements (mainly iron ploughs, and also horse and
steam threshers, winnowing machines, reapers, etc.). In the
hands of 24.7% of the households, the top group, are concentrated
82.9% of the total improved implements; 38.2% of the
households, the middle group, possess 17% of the improved
implements; 37.1%, the poor, possess 0.1% (7 implements
out of 5,724).* Secondly, the peasants with few horses are
compelled by necessity to carry on “a different system of
farming, a system of economic activity” entirely different
from that of the peasants with many horses, as the compiler
of Returns for Novouzensk Uyezd says (pp. 44-46). The wellto-do
peasants “let their land rest . . . plough in the autumn
* It is interesting to note that from these very data Mr. V. V.
(Progressive Trends in Peasant Farming, St. Petersburg, 1892, p. 225)
concluded that there was a movement by the “peasant masses” to
replace obsolete implements by improved ones (p. 254). The method
by which this absolutely false conclusion was reached is very simple:
Mr. V. V. took the total figures from the Zemstvo returns, without
troubling to look at the tables showing how the implements were
distributed! The progress of the capitalist farmers (community members),
who employ machines to cheapen the cost of producing
commodity grain, is transformed by a stroke of the pen into the progress
of the “peasant masses.” And Mr. V. V. did not hesitate to write
“Although the machines are acquired by the well-to-do peasants;
they are used by all (sic!!) the peasants” (221). Comment is superfluous
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