p The process of disintegration of our village commune affects even its outward appearance. "I stood for a long time on the edge of a graveyard looking at the outward appearance of villages (lying below at the foot of a hill),” says Mr. N. Zlatovratsky. "What variety! On one side, a group of houses, apparently decrepit, having two windows and thatched roofs.... On the other side new houses with three windows each, roofs of planks and separated by a broad passage; between them I could see green iron roofs with weather-vanes on the chimneys. And then a third group, long and winding like a worm, where, side by side with the mansion of a well-to-do kulak, there was a structure something between a cabin and a hovel, hardly rising above the ground."  [249•*  Corresponding to this outwardly very picturesque variety we have a variety of figures expressing the budgets of different households. Mr. Zlatovratsky says that the village commune which he selected for study displayed, "in spite of its small size, fairly extreme degrees of economic inequality, from those sitting on a money bag and munching nuts for days 250 on end to the widow of a hussar, living in misery with a whole crowd of children; and this village was very clearly divided into the sunny side and the cold side". And yet this commune "was an example of the average new village of the type to which the Russian villages in general tend, while some have managed to go much farther in the same direction, i.e., in the direction of disorganising the foundations of the old village as the representative of the principle of labour and economic equality”. Mr. Zlatovratsky knows that such villages still exist and that "there are still many of them in which you can feel and see the strong, unshakable foundations" of the old community life. "But there used to be more of these villages than there are now."  [250•*  Now, indeed, what the author of Everyday Life calls the "atmosphere of village duplicity and double-facedness”, which is the inevitable consequence of the splitting of the village commune into diverse sections with completely irreconcilable interests, is becoming more and more rooted in the countryside.

p On the one side you see the “kind-hearted” enterprising peasant "who has no more than a one-person allotment and yet manages to cultivate three, four or even five allotments belonging to his associates who are unable to cope with them”; and on the other side you see before you those very “weak” householders, the “obscure”, the “poor”, etc., who "either work themselves as wage-labourers for their leaseholders or close up their houses altogether and go away, God knows where, and never return to their native village commune”. And there are quite a lot of these poor people. No. 2922 of Novoye Vremya , of April 18 this year, gave the following very significant report: "Here is a fact the authenticity of which is borne out officially. Out of the 9,079,024 households in the village communes in Russia (not counting the Vistula and Baltic .regions), there are 2,437,555 which have not a single horse. This means that one out of every four peasant households has no horse. But a peasant who has no horse cannot farm on his own account. This means that one-quarter of the rural population of Russia should not be included in the number of agriculturists running their own economy."  [250•**  But the peasant who cannot run his economy independently is a candidate to the title of proletarian, a candidate who must be confirmed in that title in the very near 251 future. Though he avoids for the present being exploited by the big capitalist employer, this peasant is already completely dependent on the small usurer’s capital of the village kulaks or even of the mere "clever masters”. How the "clever enterprising peasants" treat their impoverished commune associates is seen from the already quoted Mr. Zlatovratsky’s book.

p “But do those shut-up houses belong to the ’airy’ people? " the author asks his interlocutors.

p “Airy ... that’s what they are! " the interlocutor says with a smile, "for they fly, like birds! For a time they sit tight, try to settle down and make ends meet on their dessiatine, and then up they get and fly away. They ask their neighbours to lease their plot so that their passports will not be delayed, they invoke the name of God , stand a treat of vodka, undertake to send money in addition, and all they ask for is that the neighbours should do them the favour of taking the land. And, of course, the neighbours do ... that suits us, the enterprising peasants ... what happens is that if these people come back and want to have their land again they have nothing to cultivate it with: they hire themselves out to the leaseholder as wagelabourers of their own land.... Each gets what the Lord sends him! "

p Do you like the commune of such "enterprising peasants”, reader? If so, your taste hardly resembles that of the "airy people”, who "invoke the name of God" to be freed from the land. And note that these “people” are quite right in their way. The difference between their sympathies and yours is determined by the very simple circumstance that the commune which you like in no way resembles the one which the "airy people" 252 have to deal with. In your imagination you picture the ideal village commune which may appear after the revolution in the Narodnik or Narodovoltsi fashion. But the airy people have to do with the real village commune in which their irreconcilable antagonist, "the enterprising, clever peasant" has already asserted himself and self-complacently repeats, "in our commune the poor will not hold out, there is no air for them, and if it were not for them, would we be able to live? Were it not for these airy people, our life would be very cramped.... But now, if you release the airy people sufficiently from the mir, you will be more at ease".  [252•*  The mir which releases the poor "from itself" is the mir of kulaks and exploiters. Having nothing to “breathe”, the airy people flee it as they would a prison.

p But the clever peasant does not always give the poor their freedom gratis. Joining "in a single allotment four" which belong to his ruined co-villagers, he even demands "money in addition" from them. Hence we get amazing contracts like the following, consigned to history by Mr. Orlov: "In the year 1874, on November 13, I, the undersigned, of Moscow Gubernia, Volokolamsk Uyezd, village of Kurvina, hereby declare to my peasant commune of the village of Kurvina that I, Grigoryev, give my land, and allotment for three persons, for the use of the commune, in return for which, I, Grigoryev, undertake to pay 21 rubles a year and the said sum to be sent every year by the first of April, not counting the passports, for which I must pay separately, and also for their dispatch; which undertaking I pledge with my signature.” If we compare the payments exacted on peasants’ allotments with the rent for them, it is obvious that this was not the only such case. It has been concluded that the average size of the payments effected on peasants’ plots in twelve uyezds of Moscow Gubernia was 10 rubles 45 kopeks, while the average rent for a one-person plot was no higher than 3 rubles 60 kopeks. Thus the average additional payment made by the owner for a plot which he hired out amounted to 6 rubles 80 kopeks. "Of course one comes across cases in which the plot is rented at a price compensating for the payment exacted upon it,” says Mr. Orlov; "but such cases are extremely rare and can therefore be considered as exceptions, while the general rule is that there is a bigger or smaller additional payment besides the rent of the plot.... It is now understandable why the peasants, as they themselves put it, are not envious of commune land."  [252•**  Anybody familiar with the famous studies 253 made by Mr. Yanson on peasants’ plots and payments knows that the disparity noted by Mr. Orlov between the profitableness of allotments and the total payments exacted on them exists throughout the greater part of Russia. This disparity often reaches really terrifying proportions. In Novgorod Gubernia "payments on a dessiatine of land for isolated groups of payers amount to the following percentage of the normal income from the land:

p On lands of state peasants................. 160%
On lands of peasant proprietors:
of former appanage peasants............. 161%
of former landlords’ peasants............. 180%
of temporarily-bound peasants^^18^^?......... 210%

p But under unfavourable conditions, i.e., when the peasant proprietors had to effect extra payments, when the temporarilybound peasants had only small plots and their general dues were high, these payments reached:

p for peasants having bought their liberty up to .... 275% for temporarily-bound peasants up to..........565%”  [253•* 

p In general, comparing the data collected in Volume XXII of The Works of the Taxation Commission with the figures given in the report of the agricultural commission, Mr. Nikolai—on found that "the state independent peasants in 37 gubernias" (therefore not counting the western gubernias) "of the European part of Russia pay 92.75 per cent of the net income from the land they have, i.e., for all their needs they have 7.25 per cent of the income from the land left. But the payments demanded from former landlords’ peasants amount to 198.25 per cent of the net income from the land, i.e., these peasants are obliged not only to surrender the whole of their income from the land, but to pay as much again out of their outside earnings”. Hence it follows that the poor peasants "released by the mir" must in the majority of cases pay a certain sum every year for the right to give up their plot and be free to move around. This indisputable conclusion is confirmed by facts in every case in which the peasants’ economic relations have been studied with any attention. For example, in the sandy region of Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, as Mr. V. S. Prugavin says, "the paltry, 254 ungrateful plot of soil is a burden for the economy, the land is a stepmother for the peasant. Here, far from the plot compensating for the payments imposed upon it, the one who rents out the land has moreover to pay out 8-10 rubles on each plot, since the average rent for a cheap plot in this region is 4-5 rubles a year per person".  [254•*  Weighed down by the burden of taxation, ruined by "stepmother earth”, the rural poor fall into the most desperate position. On the one hand, lack of resources prevents them from cultivating the land that they have, and on the other hand, the legislation in force forbids them to renounce ownership of the land, although it brings them nothing but loss. What does such a state of affairs lead to? The answer is quite clear. As Mr. Orlov says, those householders who have given up their land "detach themselves into a special group and are so to speak rejected and banned from the commune; the latter divides into two parts, each of which enters into hostile relations towards the other; enterprising peasants consider those who have given it up as a heavy burden, having in the majority of cases to answer for them under the collective responsibility, and there is generally nothing they can get out of them; those, on the other hand, who have given up their land, being finally ruined and having ceased corn-growing, are compelled to go elsewhere with their families in order to earn; at the same time, although they do not make use of their plots, they have to pay all the taxes levied on them, for otherwise the mir does not give them their passports and, besides, ’scourges’ them at the volost administration offices for failing to pay; obviously, in the eyes of those who have given up the land the mir is a burden, a scourge, a hindrance". It is easy to understand that "the link between these two sections of the village commune is purely exterior, artificial and fiscal; with the dissolution of this link the final disintegration of the groups mentioned must inevitably take place: the village commune will consist only of corn-growers, while those who have given up their land, having no means of starting to farm again and gradually losing the habit of agricultural work, will finally be transformed into landless people, which is what they are now in actual fact".  [254•** 

p At a certain stage in the disintegration of the village commune there almost necessarily comes a time when the poorest of its 255 members begin to revolt against this form of land tenure which for them has become "a scourge and a hindrance”. At the end of the last century the poorest peasants in France, often demanded the "sharing out of the communal lands either because, not having any cattle, they made no use of them or because they hoped to set up their own independent farm; but in that case they had against them the farmers and the independent owners generally, who sent their cattle to graze on these lands".  [255•*  It is true that the contrary sometimes took place, i.e., the poor wanted to keep their communal pastures and the rich seized them for their own exclusive use; but in any case there is no doubt that the rural commune was an arena of fierce struggle between material interests. Antagonism replaced the original solidarity.  [255•**  The same antagonism is to be noticed now, as we saw, in the villages of Russia, the desire of the poor to withdraw from the village commune being manifest at earlier stages of its disintegration. For instance, the ploughlands in Moscow Gubernia have not yet gone over to private ownership, but the oppression of state taxes is already making the poor section of the peasantry hostile to the village commune. "In those communes where conditions are unfavourable ... to conduct agricultural economy ... the middle peasants are for the maintenance of communal tenure; but the peasants of the extreme sections, i.e., the most and the least prosperous, incline towards the replacement of the communal system by a family and inheritance system.”  [255•***  The kulaks and those who have given up the land strive equally to break off their link with the village commune.

p How widespread is this striving? We already know that it is manifest where "conditions are unfavourable for all households to conduct agricultural economy”, and where "some of the households gradually become poor and weak and then lose their agricultural economy altogether, cease to engage in corn-growing, turn exclusively to outside employments and thus break off their immediate ties with the commune lands”. Wherever such a state of affairs is observed, the striving of the poor to break away from the village commune is so natural that it is an already existing fact or a matter of the very near future. Wherever the cause is to hand, the effect will not be long in becoming visible.

p We also know that in the majority of our village communes conditions, far from being favourable, are simply impossible. Our economy, both as a state and as a specifically popular economy,^^188^^ now rests on a most unreliable foundation. To destroy that foundation there is no need of either miracles or unexpected events: the strictest logic of things, the most natural exercise of the functions of our modern social and economic organism are leading us to it. The foundation is being destroyed simply by the weight and disproportion of the parts of the structure we have built on it.

p How quickly the economy of the poorest section of the commune loses its balance can be seen partly from the figures given above on the numbers of households which have no horses, and partly—and more clearly—from the following significant facts. In Podolsk Uyezd, "according to the 1869 census, 1,750 personal allotments out of 33,802, i.e., 5 per cent, were not cultivated; expressed in dessiatines, this means that out of 68,544 dessiatines of peasants’ ploughland 3,564 were abandoned. Exact data about the number of plots not cultivated in 1877 were collected only for three volosts, the finding being 22.7 per cent of ploughland abandoned. Not having any reason to consider those volosts as exceptions and, therefore, presuming that abandonment reigned to the same degree  [256•*  in the rest of the uyezd, we find that the area of uncultivated land rose from 3,500 dessiatines to 15,500, i.e., four- to fivefold. And that in 8 years! This approximate determination of the area of abandoned ploughland is corroborated by reports on the number of householders who did not cultivate their plots".  [256•**  And indeed, whereas in 1869 the number was 6.9 per cent of those who received plots, it increased to 18 per cent by 1877. That is the mean figure for the whole of the uyezd. In some places the increase in the number of householders who did not engage in agriculture was much more rapid. In Klyonovo Volost the figure rose from 5.6 per cent in 1869 to 37.4 per cent in 1877. But even that is not the extreme. In eleven villages taken by the investigators as examples, we find that in the time lapse indicated cattle-rearing dropped 20.6 per cent and the area of abandoned land increased from 12.3 to 54.3 per cent, that is, "more than half the population was obliged in 1877 to seek earnings outside agriculture”. In localities which had the most favourable conditions in that uyezd, in the villages where, as the 257 investigators say, agriculture was “flourishing”, the percentage of those who had given up the land more than doubled all the same, increasing from 4 per cent in 1869 to 8.7 per cent in 1877. Thus this relative “flourishing” only delays the peasants’ break with the land but by no means does away with it. The general trend—fatal to the peasants—of our national economy remains unchanged.

p But perhaps this uyezd is an exception to the general rule? Hardly. Other uyezds in Moscow Gubernia just as in others in the European part of Russia are in a similar condition. In Serpukhov Uyezd the number of householders not engaged in corn-growing attains 17 per cent, in Vereya Uyezd, 16 per cent. In Gzhatsk Uyezd, Smolensk Gubernia, "there are villages in which as much as half or even three-quarters of the land has been abandoned; ... peasant land cultivation on the whole in the uyezd has decreased by one-quarter".  [257•*  Not multiplying figures and quotations, we can without fear apply to at least half of Russia what Mr. Orlov said about Moscow Gubernia: "Sharp contrasts appear in the property situation of the peasant population: an enormous percentage of the peasants are gradually losing all possibility of engaging in agriculture on their own account and are being changed into a landless and homeless class , while a negligible percentage of the peasants are increasing their wealth in property year by year."  [257•**  This means that at least half of the village communes in Russia are a burden for their members.

p The Narodniks themselves are well aware of the irrefutability of this conclusion. In the pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle we have already quoted Mr. N. Z., in whose opinion "the ill-fated village commune is being discredited in the eyes of the people".  [257•***  Mr. Zlatovratsky too says somewhere that now the village commune is dear only to old men in the country and intellectuals in the towns. Finally, Mr. V. V. himself admits that "the commune is falling to pieces as a voluntary association and there remains only the ’society’ in the administrative sense of the word, a group of persons forcibly bound together by collective responsibility, i.e., each one’s responsibility for the limitations of the powers of all the payers and the inability of the fiscal organs to understand this limitation. All the benefits that the village commune once provided have disappeared and there remain only the disadvantages connected with the membership of the 258 commune."  [258•*  The so-called unshakable foundation of the life of the people is being shattered daily and hourly by the pressure of the state. Capitalism would perhaps not need to enter into active combat with this "invincible armada"^^189^^ which, even without that, will be wrecked on the reefs of land hunger and the burden of taxation.

p But the Narodniks say "Bah! " to the present, really existing village commune and do not cease to sing dithyrambs to the abstract commune, the commune an und fiir sich, the commune which would be possible under certain favourable conditions. They maintain that the village commune is being destroyed owing to external circumstances which do not depend upon it, that its disintegration is not spontaneous and will cease with the removal of the present state oppression. It is to this side of their argument that we must now devote our attention.

p Our Narodniks are really amazingly mild in the majority of cases. They willingly lay the care of delivering the village commune from its modern "captivity in Egypt" on the very government whose efforts have reduced very nearly the whole of Russia to poverty. Shunning politics as being a “bourgeois” pastime, scorning all constitutional aspirations as being incompatible with the good of the people, our legal advocates of the village commune try to persuade the government that it is in its own interests to support the ill-famed “foundations”. It goes without saying that their voice remains the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Vaska the Cat^^190^^ listens, eats, and now and then brings down his paw on the newspapers and journals which bore him really too much with their explanation of his " correctly understood interests”. The indisputable moral of the famous fable is an axiom in social and political life too.

The question of freeing peasant economy from the conditions which are unfavourable to it is thus reduced to that of Russia’s deliverance from the oppression of absolutism. We, for our part, think that the political emancipation of our native country will become possible only as a result of the redistribution of the national forces which without doubt will be caused, and is already being caused, by the disintegration of a certain section of our village communes. But we shall speak of that later. Now we shall make a concession to the Narodniks and forget about the really existing village commune to speak of the possible one.