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

92
V. I. LENIN
to the complete adaptation of the notorious “communal ties”
to the farms of big crop growers that employ labourers.
The relationship between the peasant groups proves to be
absolutely analogous in Nikolayevsk Uyezd (cited statistical
returns, p. 826 and foll.; we leave out those living away from
home and the landless). For example, 7.4%, the rich households
(having 10 and more draught animals), comprising
13.7% of the population, concentrate in their hands 27.6%
of the total livestock and 42.6% of the rented land, whereas
29%, the poor households (horseless and one-horse), comprising
19.7% of the population, have only 7.2% of the livestock
and 3% of the rented land. Unfortunately, the tables for
Nikolayevsk Uyezd, we repeat, are too scanty. To finish
with Samara Gubernia, let us quote the following highly
instructive description of the position of the peasantry from
the Combined Returns for Samara Gubernia.
“. . . The natural increase in the population, augmented by
the Immigration of land-poor peasants from the western
gubernias, in connection with the appearance in the sphere
of agricultural production of money-grubbing speculators in
land, has with every passing year complicated the forms of
the renting of land, raised its worth and converted the land
into a commodity which has so quickly and immensely
enriched some and ruined many others. To illustrate the latter
point, let us indicate the area cultivated by some of the southern
merchant- and peasant-owned farms, where the tillage
of 3,000 to 6,000 dessiatines is no rarity, while some practise
the cultivation of 8-10-15 thousand dessiatines of land,
renting several tens of thousands of state-owned land.
“The existence and the growth of the agricultural (rural)
proletariat in Samara Gubernia are to a considerable extent
the product of recent times, with their increasing production
of grain for sale, rise in renting prices, ploughing up of
virgin and pasture land, clearing of forests, and so forth.
The landless households throughout the gubernia number
21,624 in all, whereas the non-farming ones number 33,772
(of those households that have allotments), while the horseless
and one-horse households together number 110,604 families,
with a total of 600,000 persons of both sexes, counting
five and a fraction persons per family. We take the liberty of
counting these, too, as proletarians, although legally they