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

88
V. I. LENIN
. . . plough it again in the spring and sow after harrowing . . .
roll the ploughed land when the soil has aired . . . plough
twice for rye,” whereas the badly-off peasants “do not let their
land rest but sow Russian wheat year after year . . . for wheat
they plough in the spring once . . . for rye they provide neither
fallow nor ploughed land, but merely break the surface before
sowing . . . for wheat they plough in the late spring, and as
a result the corn often does not come up . . . for rye they plough
once, or merely break the surface and not at the proper time
. . . they plough the same plot of land unwisely year after
year, without allowing it to rest.” “And so on and so forth
without end,” the compiler concludes this list. “The facts
enumerated concerning the radical difference between the
farming systems of the better- and the badly-off peasants
result in grain of poor quality and bad harvests for the latter
and comparatively better harvests for the former” (ibid.).
But how could such a big bourgeoisie arise under the agricultural
community system? The answer is supplied by the
figures for land possessed and in use according to groups.
The peasants in the section taken by us (76 households) have
a total of 57,128 dess. of purchased land and 304,514 dess.
of rented land, of which 177,789 dess. are non-allotment land
rented by 5,602 households; 47,494 dess. of the allotment
land rented from other village communities are held by
3,129 households, and 79,231 dess. of the allotment land rented
in their own village communities are held by 7,092 households.
The distribution of this enormous area of land, constituting
more than q of the peasants’ total area under crops,
is as follows (see Table on p. 89).
We see here an enormous concentration of purchased and
rented land. More than � of the total purchased land is in
the hands of 1.8% of the households, the very richest. Of
all the rented land, 69.7% is concentrated in the hands
of peasant capitalists, and 86.6% is in the hands of the top
group of the peasantry. A comparison of the figures on the
renting and the leasing-out of allotment land clearly reveals
the passage of the land into the hands of the peasant bourgeoisie.
Here, too, the conversion of the land into a commodity
leads to the cheapening of the wholesale purchase price of
land (and, consequently, to profiteering in land). If we determine
the price of one dessiatine of rented non-allotment land