p All our previous arguments were based on the assumption that the Russian village commune will still for a long time be weighed down by unbearable taxation and land hunger. Let us now examine the matter from another aspect. Let us admit that thanks to some circumstances or others the village commune will manage to get rid of that burden. The question is: will the disintegration of the commune which has already set in then stop? And will not the commune then rush to communist ideals with the speed and impetuosity of Gogol’s troika? ^^191^^

p At present the total of the payments exacted on the peasant allotments is, in the majority of cases, higher than the income from those allotments. Hence the quite natural desire of a certain section of the peasantry to detach themselves from land which only brings a negative rent. Let us now imagine the opposite case. Let us picture that there has been a serious reform in our taxation system and that the payments exacted on the peasant allotments have become considerably less than the income. This general case which we assume exists even now in the form of isolated exceptions. Even now there are village communes in which the land is not a burden for the peasant, communes in which, on the contrary, it brings.him a definite, though not large, income. The tendencies observed in such communes ought to show us what the fate of the ancient form of our peasant land tenure should be in the event of all village communes being placed in such comparatively favourable conditions. Let us see what hopes, what expectations the examples of these privileged communes can awake in us.

p In the Collection of Statistical Reports on Moscow Gubernia we find the following highly important indication: "General reallotments of village commune fields take place all the oftener according as the payments exacted on the commune lands are higher, and as these (payments) are more out of proportion to the income from the land. If the sum of the payments is not higher than the income from the commune land, reallotments take place only after long intervals of from 15 to 20 or more years; if, on the contrary, the sum of the payments exceeds the income from the land, the intervals between reallotments are shorter, the reallotments being repeated all the more frequently according as the proportion between payments and the income from the land is greater, other conditions being equal."  [259•*  The same thing was noted by Mr. Lichkov in Ryazan Gubernia. It is easy to understand what this means: it shows us that a lowering of the payments exacted 260 on the peasant’s land would arouse a tendency to lengthen the intervals between reallotments. To be more exact, however, we should say that a lowering of the payments would only increase that tendency, since it already exists even at present. "A comparison of the mean figures expressing the periods between general reallotments in single uyezds and the figures expressing the frequency of reallotments reveals a tendency to lengthen the periods between reallotments, and therefore to lower the number of reallotments, i.e., to lengthen the duration of tenure."  [260•*  The same tendency is pointed out in the “Report” of the Agricultural Commission in regard to other gubernias in European Russia. Many of our Narodniks have great sympathy for that tendency. They think it will provide the possibility of removing or extenuating certain inconveniences in agriculture which are inseparable from radical reallotments of commune lands. This is correct, but the misfortune is that the inconvenient consequences of the commune principle will in this case be removed only by means leading to the undermining of that principle itself and which very much resemble curing a headache by cutting the head off. The lengthening of the period of the allotment is one of the signs of the imminent disintegration of the village commune. In every place where this form of land tenure has disappeared under the influence of growing individualism, its disappearance has taken place by a fairly long process of adaptation of the village commune to the rising needs for individual immovable property. Here, as everywhere, factual relations have anticipated juridical relations: land which was the property of the whole commune remained longer and longer ’in the possession of a certain family which cultivated it until, in the end, the lengthening of the period of allotment prepared the ground for the complete abolition of the antiquated juridical standards. The cause of this is easy to understand and is easily revealed by any at all attentive study of the process by which immovable property becomes individual property.

p The village commune is no more than one of the stages in the decline of primitive communism.  [260•**  Collective ownership of the land could not but arise in societies which did not know any other form of ownership. "The historian and ethnographer,” Mr. Kovalevsky rightly says, "will seek the oldest forms of common ownership not among the tribes that had already become settled, but among the nomads who hunted and fished, and he will see in communal land tenure of the former no more than the transposition to immovable property of all the juridical ideas and 261 institutions which arose under the pressure of necessity among individual tribes when the only means of subsistence were hunting and fishing."  [261•*  Thus the "juridical ideas and institutions" connected with movable property had a decisive influence on the character of immovable property. Far from weakening, this influence even grew still more when movable property assumed an individual character. But on the other hand, it now took the opposite direction. Formerly movable property tended to give a collective character to immovable property, because it belonged not to individuals but to the whole tribe. Now, on the contrary, it undermines communal immovable property because it does not belong to the whole village commune but to individuals. And this indubitable influence of movable property on immovable was shown with particular force where, as in agriculture, the very essence of the economic undertaking demands simultaneous utilisation of articles of both private and collective property. The corn-grower needs first land available for his use only for a certain time, and second, fertilisers, seeds, draught animals and instruments of labour, which are his private property. It is in this point of contact of the two kinds of property that the disintegrating influence of individualism attains its peak and victory falls all the sooner on its side according as the objects of movable (private) property acquire greater influence in agriculture, i.e., as the given category of communal lands requires more labour, fertilisers and care. That is why kitchen gardens and lands attached to the house, being the object of more assiduous cultivation, become hereditary property of the household earlier than other lands, whereas common pastures and waste lands, which require only to be fenced in for the safety of the cattle gracing on them, remain communal property longer than other lands. Between these two extremes come the other communal lands in ascending or descending order of the complication of their cultivation.

p Thus the lengthening of the period of the allotment is the natural consequence of the increasing diligence with which the lands are cultivated.

p The following examples will explain this.

p In the Zaozyorye village commune (Novgorod Gubernia) "all the ploughland is divided into two types: 1) steady lands and 2) ploughland”. The former pass from one householder to another only at radical reallotments, which take place only at inspections; the second type of fields, ploughland, "are divided among the householders every year before the autumn”. This difference is determined by the fact that "steady fields are usually dunged" and 262 the "peasants are satisfied with relatively long intervals from one reallotment to the next”, because, as they themselves say, "one must get some profit out of the land, or else why the devil should I work well on my strip if tomorrow I have to hand it over to somebody else? " More careful cultivation leads to more prolonged ownership, and this in turn is naturally extended to other types of communal lands which for some reason are considered by the peasants to be of particular value, although their cultivation requires no particular expense. In the same Zaozyorye commune the communal hayfields are divided just like the ploughlands into several categories; those of the first category, "large water meadows" along the river Khorinka, "are included only in the radical reallotment".  [262•* 

p The same phenomenon, only more pronounced, is to be found in the Torkhovo commune, Tula Gubernia. Those householders in this commune "who fertilise their strips hold on to them and bring themselves to yield them to another householder only in exceptional circumstances".

p In Mikhailov Uyezd, Ryazan Gubernia, "the peasants do not divide the dunged fields".

p In Mtsensk Uyezd, Orel Gubernia, "at the reallotment one strip of land is left undivided so that each can fertilise it. These strips are called dung strips. Each peasant has five sazhen = ^^192^^ of such dung strip, which is never reallotted."

p In Kurmysh Uyezd, Simbirsk Gubernia, "in recent years"—this was written in the early seventies—"allotments of land are made for longer periods, as a result of which agriculture is improving and it is becoming a general custom to dung the fields".  [262•** 

p The connection between the lengthening of allotment periods and improved cultivation of the fields is obvious from the examples quoted. There is no longer any doubt that householders are very unwilling to part with land whose cultivation has demanded any particular expense. This tendency to hold for as long as possible strips once received in allotment would naturally become much weaker if all the members of the commune had the material possibility to fertilise their fields to the same extent. "If all or at least a considerable majority of the households could grow corn with the same efficiency, there would not be any great difference between the strips, and general reallotments of fields would not be burdensome to anybody,” said Moscow Gubernia peasants to Mr. Orlov. But such equality is of itself very unstable in a village 263 commune, in which economy is run by single households on the commune land , and each individual member cultivates at his own risk and peril the strip of land allotted to him. The number of animals, the quality of agricultural implements and the labourpower of the family are variable magnitudes which considerably diversify the income of individual households. The development of industry around or inside the village commune opens up new means of earning and at the same time new sources of inequality. One household has no means at all of "earning outside”, while another earns a considerable part of its income in this way. One householder engaging in cottage industry becomes a "small master" and exploiter of the members of his own commune, while the fate of another is to fall into the numerous category of exploited. All this, of course, affects the economic capacity of the various households. And finally, not all households bear the burden of state taxation with equal ease. In this way the village commune is divided into the “sunny” side and the “cold” side— into a section of rich, "enterprising peasants" and section of poor ones, who little by little become “airy” people. Then reallotments become extremely unprofitable for prosperous peasants. These are forced to "work not for themselves, but for their weaker and less prosperous neighbours”. It goes without saying that the well-to-do peasants try to avoid this necessity—unpleasant for them; they begin to adopt a very unfavourable attitude to reallotments. We can therefore say that the inequality which necessarily arises in the village commune, also necessarily leads, at a more or less early period of the commune’s existence, to a lengthening of the period of allotment.

p But the matter does not end there. With the lengthening of the periods between the reallotments, the inequality among the members of the commune, far from disappearing, is intensified still more. Householders who have the means of cultivating their allotments better now no longer fear that “tomorrow” their land will pass into somebody else’s hands. They cultivate it with great industry and do not stop at expense to improve it. Their troubles are naturally rewarded with better harvests. The well-cultivated strip of the prosperous householder brings in a greater income than the hardly ploughed allotments of the village poor.  [263•*  As a result there is a repetition in the commune of the old and yet ever new story 264 told in the parable of the talents: the prosperous householder becomes still more “prosperous”, the poor one still poorer. The well-to-do householders form among themselves a defensive and offensive alliance against the poor, who still have a voice in deciding commune business and may still demand reallotments. Desiring at all costs to maintain their hold on the well-cultivated strips of commune land, and being hesitant or unable to establish household possession by heredity, the well-to-do peasants resort to the following clever measure. They separate their lands into a special plot, from which allotments are made only to prosperous householders. "The commune lands are divided into two unequal parts: one, comprising the better soil, is all allotted to the prosperous corn-growers and is cultivated by them; the other, which comprises the poorer soil, is allotted to the unenterprising households and lies waste."  [264•*  The poor are thus deprived of any hope of ever having at their disposal the well-cultivated land of their fortunate neighbours. The character of the commune changes radically: from a buttress and bulwark for the poorer members it becomes the cause of their final ruin. The lengthening of the periods between reallotments, which appeared as a result of inequality among the commune members, leads only to an accentuation of the inequality and the final undermining of the village commune.

p In their efforts to achieve the fulfilment of their demands, our reformers presume that they are working for the consolidation of the "traditional foundations which have withstood”, etc., etc., which, being translated from Narodnik into human language, means for the maintenance of communal land tenure. But life has some very unpleasant surprises in store for them. The increase in the allotments and the reduction of taxes result in the peasants “valuing” the land, and where they “value” it they do not like reallotments and therefore endeavour to lengthen the periods between them; but where periods between reallotments are lengthened inequality among the members of the commune grows, and the peasants are gradually prepared by the very logic of things for hereditary household ownership. Briefly, the measure recommended as a means of maintaining the village commune only increases the instability of its equilibrium which already amazes the impartial observer; this measure will be a real "gift of the Greeks" for the commune. It must be conceded that only with the help of a very ardent imagination and a pretty big dose of ignorance can one base any plans of reforin on the shaky foundations of a form of life which is in such a hopeless and contradictory condition.

p The contradictions typical of the social form in question 265 inevitably and fatally affect the way of thinking and the conduct of its supporters. Our legal Narodniks, who are so prolific of all kinds of recipes for supporting and consolidating the "traditional foundations of the Russian people’s life”, do not notice that they are all, in fact, coming more and more to voice the interests of the section of the peasants representing the principle of individualism and kulak enrichment.

p Talk about popular credits and tender emotion at the so-called “commune” leases out of landlords’ estates can serve as new examples of a short-sighted attitude to the interests of the village commune. In essence, neither the communal leases nor the petty credit on land by any means consolidate the “foundations” which are so dear to our Narodniks, they even directly undermine the commune principle. We shall come back to this question, but first of all we consider it necessary to finish dealing with other causes of the disintegration of the village commune upon which we have already touched.

p We already know that the peasants favour the lengthening of the periods between reallotments of the communal lands for the sake of their better cultivation. They do not want to "work well " on a strip which may soon go over to somebody else. Good cultivation of the land presupposes the expenditure not only of the worker’s living labour but also of the inanimate products of his past work, of those means of production which in bourgeois economy bear the name of capital.

p These expenditures of “capital” are paid back over a more or less long period of time. Some are refunded to the owner completely in as little as one or a few years in the form of increased income from the land; others, on the contrary, require a considerable time to circulate. The first are called circulating capital expenditures, the second, constant capital expenditures. It goes without saying that the more constant capital expenditures in peasant agriculture increase, the more the rich and well-to-do householders will intensify their striving to hold on to their allotments as long as possible. The manuring of the soil is not so great an expenditure, and yet we see that it is in itself enough to make a certain section of our peasantry hostile to reallotments. "It is bad because I have three cows, whereas he has one cock,” the peasants of Sengilevskoye Volost,^^194^^ Yuryev Uyezd, say, commenting on reallotment.  [265•*  What, then, will the situation be when more rational management, intensive cultivation and many-field system are introduced? There, can be no doubt that communal land tenure is a serious obstacle to their consolidation This form of land tenure is already leading to abnormal phenomena such as refusal to 266 fertilise ploughlands. In Kaluga Gubernia some "peasants take all the dung out to the hemp-close and fertilise their fields very little for fear that when there is a reallotment the strip may go to another master”. In Moscow Gubernia "the dunging of ploughfields is stopped three years before reallotment”. In Kineshma Uyezd, Kostroma Gubernia, "there are instances of well-to-do peasants selling the dung they have accumulated" because they cannot bring themselves to use it for the fields for the reasons already mentioned. In Tula Gubernia "the fields belonging to peasants who have not yet bought themselves free and are still obliged to pay quit-rent become exhausted year by year through not being fertilised, because for the last ten years dung has not been taken to the fields but has been kept in reserve until the reallotment of the land”. Finally in Syzran Uyezd, Simbirsk Gubernia, "it is obvious from many reports on rent prices that the lease rent under communal land tenure (when whole allotments are leased out) is on the average only half that of land which is private property, owned by a household hereditarily. There can be no doubt about this fact, which can be easily authenticated from books, transactions and contracts in the volost administrative offices.

p “The explanation for this is that the mere cultivation of the land, because of the negligible allotments falling to each householder, is a great inconvenience; this is a fact which is fully acknowledged by the better-off and developed section of the peasant population and it in turn gave rise to two things which must be recognised as the most characteristic in the definition of the present condition of peasant landownership. Firstly, in some villages (Kravkovo, Golovino, parts of Fedrino and Zagarino) the communes have decided to divide the communal land into household allotments. Secondly, in a large number of villages, individual householders redeem their allotments and demand that they be detached from the communal lands. Similar cases are encountered in the villages of Repyevka, Samoikino, Okulovka and many others; they would be far more frequent if there were more order in the peasant administration, but now, a certain obscureness in the law, which is also aggravated by defects in the peasant administration, willy-nilly holds up redemption cases."  [266•* 

p But this does not exhaust the inconveniences of the communal land tenure. The obligatory rotation of crops connected with it also raises considerable obstacles to the improvement of agriculture.

p Can there be radical improvements in agriculture, for example in 267 the Torkhovo village commune, Tula Gubernia, where "it is not allowed either to fence in one’s field or to change the system of field crop cultivation” , or in the Pogorelki commune, Kostroma Gubernia, where "a three-field system, obligatory for all , is in vigour"? Such village communes are by no means exceptions; on the contrary, the order prevailing in them can be acknowledged to be the general rule, based on the simple consideration that in the event of fields being fenced in or the system of cultivation changed by some member of the commune, "for the sake of one everybody would have to bear restrictions on the admission of the cattle to fallow lands and stubble".  [267•*  The elder and the peasants of Tikhonov Volost, Kaluga Uyezd, stated that "no farm work can be done as the individual householder would like: he is not allowed treble fallow ploughing when the others do only double fallow ploughing, because the cattle are put out to graze on the fallow land; for the same reason he cannot sow winter rye earlier than the others; he must start mowing at the same time as the others because one is not allowed to mow before the hay meadows are shared out, and he cannot mow after the others because the cattle are driven from the fallow land; and thus in absolutely all kinds of work there are similar hindrances”. Not to mention the introduction of new crops. This is impossible if they are "sown later than our plants, after the harvesting of which the cattle in the commune will trample everything flat".  [267•**  We can, therefore, say that a struggle between the commune, on the one hand, and its members, who see their advantage in a change in the system of cultivation and have the necessary means, on the other, is inevitable. And it is not difficult to foretell on whose side victory will be: "the rich will always dominate the poor,” the peasants say; in the present case, the rich minority will “dominate” the poor by using the most terrible weapon which history ever created, i.e., improved means of production.

p Much paper has been filled by our Narodniks to prove that the village commune in itself, i.e., by the essence of the principle on which it is based, is not hostile to any improvements in agriculture. All that is necessary is for all the members of a given commune to set about such improvements, or, still better, to cultivate the land collectively, they said, and far from meeting difficulties, the matter will be considerably eased by the absence of private ownership of the land. That is right, of course, but then there are many possibilities whose conversion into realities can be thought of only under certain conditions which are impossible at the time in question.

p “If only frost the flowers did not blight, Flowers would bloom in winter all right! "

p the song says. And that is true, but can one prevent frost in our climate in winter? No? Well, flowers will not bloom in winter except in hot-houses. Our peasants could eat oysters with champagne, if only ... if only they had the means. The importunate question of the means has always been the cold water that cooled the fire of Manilov’s imagination. If all our peasants had the means not to cultivate their fields according to improved methods, but simply to keep up the traditional three-field farming, we would not have the agrarian question which Messrs, the Narodniks are working so hard and so unsuccessfully to solve. Reality tells us that an enormous proportion of our peasantry have no such means, and once they have not got them neither individual householders nor the whole state either desire or have any reason to put off the improvement of the cultivation of the land until the majority of the commune members “recover”: has not our antediluvian wooden plough already played enough tricks on us in the fight for the market, if only with the Americans, who do not postpone the use of the steam plough till the golden age of fraternity and equality?

p Consequently we can say that the introduction of improved methods of agriculture will be a new factor in the disintegration of our village commune unless by some miracle the inequality which already exists in our modern “reformed” countryside disappears. But we shall speak of miracles later.

p But what is improved agriculture? Is it a negative condition of social development, the product of unfavourable influence surrounding the tiller of the soil, or is it, on the contrary, the result of the abolition of those unfavourable influences, the effect of a rise in the level of the peasants’ material welfare? It seems to us that the second assumption is more correct than the first. Now the majority of the peasants are very poor and the system of collective responsibility threatens even the well-to-do minority with ruin. It is easy to understand that they are not interested now in intensive cultivation of the soil. But place them in better conditions, remove the burden of taxation which is oppressing them, and even the collective responsibility system will cease to be a threat to the rich peasants: the fewer insolvent members of the commune there are, the less responsibility the rich will have. Confident of their future, the better-off section of the peasantry will begin to think of serious -improvements in cultivating the soil. But then they will come into conflict with the commune and will have to engage in a mortal struggle with it. The conclusion, therefore, again forces itself upon us that improvement in the material welfare of the 269 peasantry will intensify the instability of communal land tenure and render more frequent the phenomena already observed in Tambov Gubernia, for instance, where "peasants who become rich introduce ownership of plots, but as long as they are poor they adhere to communal ownership, with reallotment of the fields".  [269•*  Our patient is poorly, so poorly! He is now so exhausted that he is rotting alive and yet all the nutrition recommended by our legal Narodnik homeopathists as a means of restoring his strength can do nothing but hasten the process of disintegration that has already begun.

p But is it not time to finish with the village commune? Have we not already shown all the factors of its disintegration? By no means! There are many, very many such factors. All the principles of modern economy, all the springs of modern economic life are irreconcilably hostile to the village commune. Consequently, to hope for its further independent “development” is as strange as to hope for a long life and further development of a fish that has been landed on the bank. The question is not what hook the fish has been caught with, but whether its respiratory organs are adapted to the surrounding atmosphere. And the atmosphere of modern money economy kills our archaic form of land tenure, undermines its very foundation. Do you want illustrations? Here are some.

We have already seen what a destructive effect money economy has on the family community. Let us now look for examples of its influence on the rural commune, the village commune proper.