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So far our handicraftsmen are still peasants. But what kind of peasants! From a so-called subsidiary trade handicraft production has been transformed in many places into the staple item of the peasant’s income. This places agriculture in a dependent, subordinate position. It feels all the vacillations of our industry, all the vicissitudes of its development. The same Mr. Prugavin

233 says that "the disruption of the peasant economy " of the weavers in Vladimir Gubernia is the inevitable consequence of our industrial crises. Once agriculture thus depends on industrial labour, there is no need to be a prophet to foretell the time when the weavers’ peasant economy will be ultimately ruined: that ruin coincides with the transition of "the domestic system of large-scale production" to the factory system. The former handicraftsman will have to give up one of his occupations in order not to be deprived of both. And he will naturally prefer to give up the land which, in the industrial zone of Russia, is far from paying the taxes and dues imposed upon it. Instances of peasants giving up land already occur now.

p According to Mr. A. Isayev, the village of Velikoye which we mentioned above "ceased long ago to be an agricultural village. Only 10 to 15 of the total number (up to 700) of householders cultivate the soik while most of the villagers can no longer use a plough or even a scythe.... These ten to fifteen householders and peasants in the neighbourhood of Velikoye rent the communal land from the people in Velikoye at the rate of a ruble a dessiatine of ploughland" (with such a high rate of "land rent" it is easy enough to give up the land altogether, be it noted incidentally). "The situation of cattle-rearing corresponds entirely to the low level of grain cultivation: there is hardly one cow and one horse to three households.... The Velikoye peasant has lost all resemblance to a peasant".

p But is this process observed only in the village of Velikoye? Voyenno-Statistichesky Sbornik noted the fact that the cotton handicraft industry "is in many places a subsidiary occupation; but there are places where it is the main and even the only one".  [233•*  Similarly, "shoemaking is now the principal means of subsistence of the Kimry peasants and has pushed agriculture into the background. Nobody who studies the Kimry region can fail to notice the number of abandoned strips of land: one is struck by the decay of agriculture”, Mr. Prugavin informs us. Like a true Narodnik, he consoles himself with the thought that "at present it is not the industry itself that is to blame so much as the unfavourable conditions in which agricultural labour is placed" and that most of the craftsmen "have not yet finally abandoned their land”. But, first, the "Report of the Imperial Commission for the Study of the Present Condition of Agriculture" which we have already quoted shows, contrary to Mr. Prugavin, that precisely the majority of the Kimry peasants have 234 “abandoned the land" for ever.  [234•*  Secondly, all that he says on this subject is a fairly doubtful consolation. No matter who or what causes the fall of agriculture, it is an existing fact, as a result of which many craftsmen will soon be able to free themselves altogether from the "power of the land”. Of course, this process could still be slowed down now by providing agriculture with better conditions. But here again we face the question: who will provide it with those conditions? The present government? They do not want to. The revolutionary party? It cannot yet. And by the time the sun rises you can be wading in dew—by the time our revolutionaries acquire strength enough to carry out their reform plans, peasant agriculture may be but a memory in many places.

The decline of agriculture and the disintegration of the old “foundations” of the peasant mir are the inevitable consequence of the development of handicraft production, under the actual conditions, of course, not under the possible conditions with which our Manilovs^^175^^ console themselves and which will be a reality we know not when. For example, in Moscow Gubernia "frequent relations" (of the craftsmen) "with the Moscow trading world have a disrupting influence on the relations of common law; the mir has no say in dividing out family property, which is governed by the elders or the volost court ’according to the law’; the father shares his property among his children by testament ... after the death of the husband the childless widow is deprived of immovable property" (the house) "which goes to the relatives on the husband’s side, while she receives one-seventh of the inheritance".  [234•**  How the same handicraft industry, when it reaches a certain degree of development, tends to undermine agriculture can be seen from the example of starch and treacle production. "A characteristic fact in the industry we are investigating is the extreme unevenness with which plots are distributed between the householders.... Thus, in the village of Tsibino, Bronnitsy Uyezd, 44.5 per cent of all the land intended for 166 households is in the hands of only 18 factory owners" (from among the peasants), "each of them having 10.7 personal allotments, while 52 prosperous peasants have only 172 personal allotments, or 3.3 per household. It is understandable that the more paying the industry becomes, the 235 more the factory owners will be stimulated to lay their hands on as much land as they can, and it is quite possible that the 35 householders who now cultivate their plots by using hired labour will find it more profitable, when the rent is raised, to give up cultivating their plots and hand them over to the factory owners. Exactly the same thing is encountered in other villages in which starch and treacle production is more or less developed."