p The Russian translator and man of letters A. M. Voden, recollecting his conversations with Engels in 1893, said:

p "Engcls expressed his conviction that the thing most necessary for Russian Social-Democrats was to take up the agrarian question in Russia seriously; that this field of investigation promised, in fact, new results vital both for the history of the forms of landownership and land-usage and for applying and checking economic theory, especially the theory of differential rent, against a tremendous amount of material. Engcls mentioned that he felt it very desirable that Plekhanov should take up the study of this central question for Russia (my italics—A.M.) and that it should be serious research and not merely polemical articles.” "Besides,” Voden went on, "Engels would like Russians—and not only Russians—not to assemble quotations from Marx and himself (Engels), but to think in the way Marx would think in their place—he said it was only in this sense that the use of the word ‘Marxist’ was justified."  [286•1 

p It so happened, however, that Lenin was the only one to follow Engels’s advice and to carry out the task which this great teacher of the proletariat and comrade-in-arms of Marx addressed to the Russian Social-Democrats.

p Lenin continued the study of agrarian relations in Russia that Marx had begun, while working on the section of Volume III of Capital dealing with ground rent and making use of Russian materials. For a long time, particularly in the late sixties and in the seventies, Marx made a special study of the variety of the forms of landownership and of the exploitation of agricultural producers in Russia. However, he did not complete these studies. Lenin took up the study of the agrarian question in Russia after the 1861 Land Reform. He thus made his own independent and outstanding contribution to Marxist political economy.

p Lenin’s earliest surviving work, "New Economic Developments in Peasant Life (On V. Y. Postnikov’s Peasant Fanning in South Russia)”, written in 1893, deals with socio-economic relations in agriculture.

p Lenin discovered in Postnikov’s book "an extremely detailed and thorough description of peasant farming in the Taurida, Kherson and Yekatcrinoslav gubernias".  [287•1  In his analysis of this book, Lenin showed himself to be a profound and expert interpreter of statistics. His exceptionally thorough and original approach to statistical material is one of his most remarkable features as a research worker in economics.

p Lenin realised that social and economic statistics were a powerful means of obtaining social knowledge, and also that statistics could be made to serve a contrary purpose, namely, to cause confusion by irrelevant and even dangerous juggling with figures. That is why in taking censuses and in processing the obtained data particular attention should be paid to the manner of summarising and grouping these data. Lenin himself set an example of the art of summarising census returns in order to obtain a clear picture of the political, economic and social structure of agriculture. At the very outset of his scientific activity Lenin made the vitally important observation that it was desirable to group and treat together statistical data covering areas with similar economic conditions. Postnikov, however, bracketed together figures relating to, say, both the black earth areas of the South and the non-black earth areas of the North.

p Lenin’s attention was drawn to the material which Postnikov cited to show the differentiation of the rural population into groups with very different levels of income. Data relating to the position of the poor strata of peasants stood out with particular force: the less the size of small peasants’ holdings, the higher, proportionately, the rents charged to tenants; the far larger areas of land were held by well-to-do peasants; and, in general, the land was distributed according to income.

p Making use of Postnikov’s data Lenin came to conclusions different from his. Postnikov was a conscientious statistician and economist, but he did not possess the necessary methodological background to sort out and interpret correctly large numbers of facts and observations. The weakest part of his work was his plan for solving the agrarian question. He tried to explain 288 economic processes but failed in this. It was Lenin who discerned the real social and economic trends of development in agriculture and pointed to the existence of capitalism there, which entailed the differentiation of classes, the property inequalities and the exploitation of poor peasants by well-to-do peasants. "Recognising the profound economic strife among the peasantry of today, we can no longer restrict ourselves to just dividing the peasants into several strata according to the property they possess."  [288•1 

p Lenin believed that it was necessary to take into consideration at once: a) the economic nature—commercial or natural—of given farms or households; b) the growth and improvement of the farms of better-off groups of peasants at the expense of the ruin of lower groups; and c) the use of hired labour by well-= to-do peasants, and the need for poor peasants to resort to selling their own labour. It was necessary, therefore, to make “ qualitative differences”, and "to classify the peasantry according to differences in the character of the farming itself (meaning by the character of farming peculiarities not of a technical but of an economic order)".  [288•2 

p This work of Lenin’s was his worthy debut both as an economist and an expert on the agrarian question. He demonstrated his outstanding ability to analyse theoretically complicated economic phenomena. Lenin appeared as a talented disciple of Marx and Engels. But the full extent of his gift as a research worker was unfolded in his fundamental economic work The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Some 600 sources of all kinds were used by Lenin in writing it. He critically analysed all this material. Lenin described in this book the path of social development of Russia following the 1861 Reform, and outlined the general laws of the development of capitalism in agriculture. The Development of Capitalism in Russia has a permanent value as a vital reference work on Marxist agrarian theory.

p The 1861 Reform was bourgeois in content. The need for it was not predestined by God, as the high-flown royal decree of Alexander II stated, but by the necessities of economic life. Its real aim was not to change the peasants’ lot for the better but to adjust agrarian relations to the needs of capitalist production and the capitalist market, which did not receive sufficient stimuli from the old forms of land-usage and methods of working the 289 land. The “great” peasant Reform initiated by the landlords cleared the way for capitalism on the land.

p Both before and after the Reform, many people, the Narodniks in particular, used to stress Russia’s exclusiveness and her special destiny, unlike that of any other country in the world. All analogy between Russia and the capitalist West was rejected. The Narodniks advanced the theory of the “artificiality” of capitalism in Russia. They employed such completely a priori arguments as the shrinking of the home market resulting from the ruin of the peasantry and the inaccessibility of foreign markets to Russia. Hence their conclusion that the realisation of surplus value so necessary for the appearance and survival of capitalism was impossible in Russia. Again, the Narodniks idealised labour-service and saw something positive in the allotting of land to peasants under the corvee system as a means of tying the producer to the means of production. They also persistently propagated the myth that the Russian peasantry was socially homogeneous. The local village commune (mir), a relic of feudalism, was glorified by them as the bearer and model of equitable socialist relations. Narodniks alleged that the communes blocked the way to the penetration of capital into agriculture. Meanwhile the commune with its system of “ collective responsibility" served as one of the pillars of tsarism, providing the government with a convenient means of oppressing and robbing the peasants.

p Lenin’s book The Development of Capitalism in Russia upset all these theories and myths. Lenin’s criticism of Narodism cleared the ground for the victory of Marxism in the Russian workers’ movement. It could be compared to Marx’s and Engels’s criticism of the Left Hegelians (the Bauer brothers and others), the “true socialists”, and all the other German ideologists (Proudhonists and so on) who obscured the minds of the workers and advanced intellectuals in the 18405 by distorting the true character of the existing situation and indicating wrong means of struggle. Since the centre of the European revolutionary movement shifted to Russia in the late I9th century and the early 2Oth century, Lenin’s criticism of the dogmas of the Narodniks was of key importance not only for Russia. It played a big part in strengthening revolutionary Marxism internationally.

p Lenin brought out all the salient features of the social and economic evolution of Russia, omitting nothing of any great importance.

p Capitalism was gaining ground in Russia, and because of this 290 her economic system was becoming more and more like that of any West European country where the victory of capitalism had long been an accomplished and irrefutable fact.

p In Russia, as in other countries, the offensive of capital resulted in the disintegration and proletarianisation of the peasantry, and the gradual flight of large numbers of peasants from the land. Russia and the capitalist West differed only in the extent to which this process had gone. In Russia, it was still in its initial stages, but the position in which the poor peasants found themselves compelled them to seek alliance with the working class, for it was only in the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat that the small peasants saw any real hope of escape from eternal want, poverty and inevitable ruin.

p The separation of the immediate producer from his means of production and the expropriation of the vast bulk of the peasantry marked the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist production in agriculture. This led to the creation of a home market, ensuring the turnover and realisation of the social product and also surplus product appropriated gratis by the capitalist owners of means of production. Capitalist progress meant a steady growth in the demand for articles of personal consumption, as well as for articles of productive consumption. In opposition to the Narodniks, who believed that the ruin of the peasantry caused a shrinking of the home market, Lenin proved that it was precisely the disintegration of the peasantry into a peasant bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat, i.e., its separation into rich peasants and hired labourers, that formed the basis for the expansion of the home market.

p Lenin wrote: "...the transformation of the peasantry into a rural proletariat creates a market mainly for articles of consumption, whereas its transformation into a rural bourgeoisie creates a market mainly for means of production. In other words, among the bottom groups of the ’peasantry’ we observe the transformation of labour-power into a commodity, and in the top ones the transformation of means of production into capital. Both these transformations result in precisely that process of the creation of a home market which theory has established for capitalist countries in general."  [290•1 

p The entrenchment of capitalism in Russian agriculture completely broke up the system of binding the peasant to the land, together with the egalitarian system of landownership, which 291 Lenin regarded as relics of the pre-Reform (corvee) system. The peasant bourgeoisie forced more and more middle and poor peasants off the land altogether, while the proportion of hired labourers rose. There was a growing tendency for peasants to move to outside employment, to places away from home where they could earn their living, and for many labourers to migrate to newly colonised or newly cultivated areas.

p The Russian “communal” peasantry, therefore, far from being capitalism’s antagonist, constituted its most firm foundation. Because of the process of disintegration going on within the peasantry, i.e., “de-peasanting”, including the expropriation of some peasants by others, new types of agriculturists appeared among the rural population, differing in their position in the process of social production and therefore socially remote from one another. Property inequalities led, in particular, to the emergence of two class opposites, a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. Capitalist commodity relations became predominant in the countryside, and farming as a whole assumed a commercial character.

p The 1861 Reform undermined the corvee system of economy but it did not abolish it completely. The landowners retained a considerable part of the peasants’ land (servitudes), "cut-off lands”, woods, meadows, watering places, pastures, and so on. There also remained the possibility of extra-economic compulsion vis-à-vis the peasants through their temporarily-bound status, through "collective responsibility”, corporal punishment, forced labour on public works, etc. Lenin convincingly demonstrated that most peasants were burdened, as before the Reform, by all kinds of labour-service, e.g., hire on a half-crop basis, work in payment of a debt, work "for trespass”, share cropping, etc. All these various types of labour represented one or another form of labour-service or rent in kind. He wrote: "It is noteworthy that the enormous variety of forms of labour-service in Russia, and of forms of land renting with all sorts of supplementary payments, etc., are covered in their entirety by the main forms of pre-capitalist relations in agriculture indicated by Marx in Chapter 47, Vol. III of Capital.”  [291•1 

p Based on a weakly-developed commodity economy, labour-= service and payments in kind held back the advance of capitalism, but were not, in the final count, able to prevent its inevitable victory. Innermost economic requirements prevailed over the force of inherited institutions.

p Lenin proved that with the passage of time the remnant forms of feudal bondage were being replaced by capitalist relations, which presupposed the “free” hired labour of the former peasant, now deprived of all means of production, including land, working on the land of the rural bourgeois, who lent the labourer his own tools of labour and draught animals. In the mixed economic system, capitalist forms of production were increasingly becoming prevalent, and the corvee system was gradually withering away.

p Lenin studied the many forms of exploitation of agricultural labourers, especially those cruel devices for extracting surplus labour from them that were widely used by both small and big landowners: employment "according to choice”, speed-up, low wages, and extremely poor housing conditions. Rural proletarians accounted, according to Lenin’s estimates, for about 40 per cent of the total number of the peasants.  [292•1  Their lot was poverty and hard, compulsory labour for profit-greedy masters.

p Nevertheless, the victory of the capitalist system in Russian farming was historically a great and progressive development. Capitalism is undoubtedly an evil. But it is an evil which,’as Lenin wrote in his article "Marx on the American ’General Redistribution’ ”, is a "historical benefit, for it will accelerate social development tremendously and bring ever so much nearer new and higher forms of the communist movement".  [292•2 

By making a thorough study of the evolution of agrarian relations in Russia after 1861, Lenin was able to visualise the inexorable development of the capitalist system in farming, to substantiate the need to work out an agrarian programme for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and to provide the theoretical basis for this programme.