p Here we have the redemption of lands, which is supposed to present Russia with a new estate of peasant landowners. Some village communes have already redeemed their lands. How has this affected their inner structure?

p “As long ago as in the Collection of Statistical Reports on Tambov Gubernia " says Mr. L. S. Lichkov,  [269•**  "it was pointed out, incidentally, by V. I. Orlov that the system of redeeming lands had very great influence upon the abolition of land reallotment among the peasants for it maintained and spread among the peasantry the view that redeemed land was their personal, inalienable property.... My colleagues and I, in collecting statistical data, also had occasion to note the same thing in Ryazan Uyezd."

p It must be admitted that Mr. Lichkov was able to note a highly curious and instructive phenomenon. "In Ryazan Uyezd,” he says, "the peasants who have redeemed land do not at all rcallot their 270 lands in village communes where land is valued , whereas those who are temporarily bound, especially the state peasants, do effect land reallotments. The peasant landowners, on the other hand, reallot the land only where land is not valued, i.e., where it is not really the land that has to be shared, but the burdens which it brings.... It is extremely characteristic that in all the redeemed communes where the land is divided out among the actual members this distribution is done not after, but before or at the time of the redemption (generally with the intention of never dividing it any more ). But since the redemption there is not a single commune— except those in which the land is poor and only a burden to the peasants—not a single one, I say, in which land was reallotted, notwithstanding the obvious inequality of its distribution. However annoying it may be, one must all the same admit this and other facts, which are characteristic of peasant interests by no means favourable to the village commune—one must admit this because one must look every fact in the face and not embellish it with phrases harmful to the cause."

p The tendency of the lands redeemed by the peasants to become private—or more correctly household—property is not observed only in Ryazan Gubernia, the same can be seen in other places.

p In Krestsy Uyezd, Novgorod Gubernia, "after redeeming land approximately half the former landlords’ peasants resolved by decision of the village commune to distribute all the land by allotments including strips in different fields according to the number of persons and to abolish reallotments for ever”. Similar cases are noted in the "Report of the Agricultural Commission" for Kaluga Gubernia as well. In the village of Starukhino, Tula Gubernia, "communal lands have not been reallotted since the time of the Reform”. In the event of partial reallotments the number of persons "who received shares at the Reform" serves as the standard for the allotment. Even "in the case of the division of a family the same persons are counted, without any consideration for minors. The plot belonging to the household is never divided and goes over to the family.” As we see, the commune principle has made no few concessions to individualism in this village of peasant proprietors, notwithstanding that, as Mrs. Y. Yakushkina says, they see communal land tenure as "the only means of preventing people from becoming landless”. The objective logic of things proves stronger than the subjective logic of the peasant. But here there is still struggle and disagreement between these kinds of logic, while in Borok commune (Pskov Gubernia), which redeemed its land in 1864, the subjective logic of the majority long ago closely allied with the objective logic of money economy. When the poor demanded a new reallotment the answer they were given was that "although those who now have extra allotments do not 271 own them by law (according to the number of persons), all the same they have cleared those allotments of taxes (redemption payments) and it would therefore be unjust to deprive them of those allotments".  [271•*  In another village in the same district the following typical case occurred: "One of the peasants adopted a waif and asked the commune to give an allotment from the common field; then the foster-father redeemed the plot for 100 rubles, i.e., exempted it for ever from reallotment.’ " Here, too, the redemption of the land was hostile to communal land tenure.

p This case leads us on to the redemption of the land not by the village commune as a whole, but by individual members. Such a procedure is admitted by law and is not seldom practised. Sometimes peasants who have ultimately redeemed their allotments continue to hold them on the former commune principle, but sometimes they oppose reallotment and then the commune is obliged to consider them as proprietors. In the village of Soroguzhino in Yuryev Uyezd, Vladimir Gubernia, "there are three houses of full proprietors who have ultimately redeemed their plots, two of them agreed unconditionally to radical reallotment with all its consequences (change of site by lots, decrease in size of plots, etc.), while one demanded that his plot should be enlarged and the commune gave him what he needed by adding strips of land to the edges of each field".  [271•**  In the villages of Khoroshovka and Nikolayevskoye, in the same gubernia, "there are full proprietors and the village communes intend to allot them, if only in separate strips, a complete plot equal to the one they redeemed".  [271•***  Sometimes, on the contrary, the commune is opposed to owners leaving it, and then the redemption of the land itself is retarded. Thus, in Tambov Gubernia "many peasants desire to redeem their plots individually, but the village communes do not allow such redemptions in order not to exempt the rich peasants from the collective responsibility system”. Sometimes the village commune gives householders who have redeemed their allotments the farthest and most inconvenient plots. That is why "peasants buy far more often land from others than they redeem their own"  [271•****  in Kharkov Gubernia.

p These facts suffice to show how unstable the equilibrium of communal relations is becoming owing to redemptions. It is true that the final juridical transition to hereditary ownership by household, far from being the necessary direct result of redemption, is, on the contrary, a comparatively rare thing. The peasant is conservative, but he is particularly so in his attitude to the land. 272 But that does not change things. Only in name do the mutual relationships between those who have redeemed their land resemble the “mir” of the good old time—the time of natural economy, serfdom and the complete absence of means of communication. The basis of distribution of land is no longer the need of this or that householder, the quantity of labour-power in his family or, finally, even taxes or dues. New birds sing new songs. The peasant proprietors do not like reallotments and are not embarrassed by the needs of their neighbours. The aged villagers moan and complain about the people being “spoilt”, the intelligentsia sigh still more earnestly and when they see to their distress that the " deterioration of morals" is irrepressibly penetrating into the countryside, they hope only for the “revolution” which will put everything right, smooth out everything and restore to the village commune the freshness it had in the time of Gostomysl.^^196^^ But what is surprising in this phenomenon, which so distresses the "old men" in the villages and theNarodniks in the capital? Nothing at all. “Morals” have not deteriorated, they have only been given another economic basis. Formerly the land belonged to the tsar, to “God” or whoever you like, but it was not bought. It was enough for a peasant to succeed in being accepted into a village commune and he received the right to use the land, restricted, sometimes, only by the limitations of his own labour-power. And the commune was in general the master of the territory it occupied, it had authority everywhere its axe, its scythe and its wooden plough went. Serfdom fettered and debased the tiller but did not change his attitude to the land. "We belong to you and the soil belongs to us,” the peasants used to say to the landlords. And now the time has come when the peasants have ceased to belong to the masters, but on the other hand, the soil has also ceased to belong to the peasants. It has to be redeemed, to be paid for in money. What is money? It is first and foremost a commodity, and a commodity which has a very special character; a commodity which buys all other commodities, a commodity which is the measure and the expression of their value. Needless to say, this special commodity cannot be an exception to the general laws of commodity production and circulation. On the contrary, it is the vehicle of those laws, it extends their operation to every place where it happens to make its appearance, through the hazard of some exchange transaction. But what are the laws of commodity production? What is a commodity and where does it come from? Commodity production develops only in a society in which the means of production, and therefore the product, are the private property of the producer; without this condition no division of labour would be enough to give rise to commodity production. Hence, commodityproduction is the result of the development of private property.  273 Money, which naturally grows out of commodity exchange, presupposes a private owner in exactly the same way as does, generally speaking, the entire process of commodity production. Individual members of the village commune can acquire money only in exchange for things that are their private property, although they are produced by cultivating communal land. And it is this money that the peasant must now pay as the price of redemption.

p But "money begets money" in the sense too, incidentally, that the means of production and the materials for manufacture which it buys are themselves exchange value , the equivalent of the sum of money paid for them and again transformable into money should the buyer wish. Consequently, objects bought by some person must become his private property. Such is the irrefutable logic of money economy. And it is that logic which is now taking up the struggle against the tradition of communal land tenure. The redemption of land introduces into the peasant mir a contradiction which can be solved only by the final disintegration of the village commune. By force of habit and tradition, and partly also by conscious conviction, the mir endeavours to preserve the old collective principle of land tenure after the mode of acquisition of that land has become entirely based on the new, money, individual principle. It goes without saying that that endeavour cannot be fulfilled, that it is impossible to transfer to collective ownership of the mir objects which were acquired in exchange for the private property of individual householders.

p “Although the Statute on Redemption stipulates that peasants’ allotments will be redeemed as communal property,” says Mr. Lichkov, "nevertheless, the payment of a redemption, customarily (i.e., by force of facts, which are always stronger than any juridical standards, and stronger again than any juridical contradictions), is effected in most communes by the members of the commune, according to the quantity of land. The sum of the redemption payment decreases every year as payment proceeds. Here is what may happen as a result of this: having punctiliously paid the redemption money for a period of as much as two or three decades, peasants may be deprived at a reallotment of a considerable portion of the land they have redeemed; on the other hand, those who have not paid anything may get land for nothing. In other words, each further instalment on the redemption price, while apparently increasing the right of the one who pays it to the land redeemed, by the very fact brings him nearer to the time when he will be actually deprived at the first reallotment of this right which he has earned by his sweat and blood. It is understandable that the peasant cannot fail to notice this practical contradiction.” We have already seen that this contradiction can 274 be solved only by the abolition of reallotments and the confirmation in possession of the land of those who have paid for its redemption.

p By January 1883, 20,353,327 dessiatines of land had been redeemed by the peasants. As the total land in use by the peasants is reckoned as 120,628,246 dessiatines, we can support what has been said above with the statement that the redemption of land has already managed to place one-sixth of the peasant lands in conditions which are incompatible with the principle of the village commune.

p The extent to which the communal land tenure principle is incompatible with the redemption of land, or purchase for money, is clear from the following. In Moscow Gubernia some peasant communes have, besides the land allotted to them, "gift land”, that is, land given gratis when they were granted freedom by their former landlords. With the exception of but a single village "gift land is everywhere owned by the communes”. But in cases when peasant communes buy land from the landlords "ownership of the portions falling to each household is always established by inheritance and by household, each household receiving the right freely to dispose of and alienate part or the whole of its portion by sale, gift, etc. Thus the size of the portion belonging to each household taking part in the redemption of the land remains fixed."  [274•* 

p It is exactly the same in Pskov Gubernia: in cases when peasants "acquire estates, examples of which are not rare”, tenure is settled as “non-communal”.

p But that is not all. Mr. Nikolai—on justly remarks that "redemption forces the producer to turn more and more of the product of his labour into commodities and consequently to lay more and more firmly the foundations of capitalist economy".

p From what has been said it is clear how naive the Narodniks are when they see the development of small land credit as means of consolidating the village commune and fighting capitalism. As is their rule, they recommend exactly those measures which can only hasten the triumph of the bourgeois relationships which they hate so much. On the one hand, "all projects aimed at improving the material condition of the producer and based on credit, far from being able to improve his position, on the contrary, better the condition of a few and worsen that of the majority”. On the other hand, often lands which have been redeemed, and always those which have been bought—and the better the land is, the more often this happens—become the personal property of the one acquiring them.

p In the case of the lease of landlords’ or state lands, the peasant mir is also transformed into an association of shareholders responsible for one another, an association in which the distribution of the lands leased is effected proportionally to the amount of money contributed. Where, in this case, is the commune, where are the "traditional foundations"?

p Incidentally, the peaceful Narodniks are not the only ones who are moved by facts of more than doubtful significance. Even the terrorists can boast of such “delicacy”. Mr. Tikhomirov, for example, in" his war against people who are convinced of the "inevitability of Russian capitalism”, points out that the " quantity of land belonging to the peasants is slowly but steadily increasing”. He apparently considers this fact so significant that he gives it without any comments whatsoever. But after all that has been said here about the significance of money economy in the history of the village commune’s disintegration, we are entitled to consider the increase of the quantity of land owned by the peasants as a fact which is extremely ambiguous, to say the least. Reality fully justifies our scepticism.

p In Moscow Gubernia the amount of land bought by the peasants "increased in 12 years from 17,680 dessiatines to 59,741”. So here we see that very "slow but steady increase" noted by Mr. Tikhomirov. Fine. But how is this new land distributed among the peasants? Out of 59,741 dessiatines "31,858 belong to no more than 69 owners , i.e., exceed the usual dimensions of peasant farming, and 10,428 dessiatines consist of plots exceeding 100 dessiatines".  [275•*  How are we to understand this kind of "peasant property"? Does it prove that the bourgeois system cannot exist in Russia? In that case we could say of Mr. Tikhomirov what Proudhon once said of Adam Smith: he sees and does not understand, he speaks and does not realise the meaning of what he is saying!

p It is now time for us to finish with the problem of the village commune. We have expounded our views on its history generally and its position in Russia in particular. We have supported what we have said with facts and examples and have often compelled the Narodniks themselves to speak in our favour. Our study has been necessarily brief and superficial. Not only could we not list all the phenomena which confirm our thought and have already been noted by investigators, the limits of our work also prevented us even from pointing out all the tendencies which are now of great importance in the life of the tiller of the land and whose development is incompatible with commune principles. But despite all that, we can say that our statements have not been 276 unsubstantiated. The examples cited and the tendencies indicated perfectly suffice to defend our statements. No serious doubt is possible. Every impartial observer sees that our village commune is passing through a grave crisis, and that this crisis itself is approaching its end, and that primitive agrarian communism is preparing to give way to individual or household ownership. The forms of this ownership are very diverse and it often penetrates into the countryside under the cover of the usual communal relationships. But the old form has not the power to change the new content: it will have to adapt itself to it or perish for ever. And this upheaval which is becoming more and more intense, this process of disintegration which is spreading daily in “width” and “depth” and affecting an ever-increasing area, is introducing radical changes in the peasants’ customs and outlook. While our Slavophile revolutionaries console themselves with the consideration that “three-quarters” of our factory workers are "not at all proletarians and half of them work in the factories only seasonally and accidentally”,  [276•*  the peasants themselves realise full well that the village commune of today is far from being what it was formerly and that the links between the tiller of the land and the land itself are being increasingly severed. "The young, my dear friend, are running, running away from the land.... The town is attracting them,” the peasants say in Mr. Zlatovratsky’s Everyday Life in the Villages. And, indeed, the town is more and more subordinating the country to itself, introducing into it its “civilisation”, its pursuit of wealth, its antagonism between the rich and the poor; it is elevating some and lowering others, creating the “educated” kulak and a whole army of "airy people”, ignoring the lamentations of the old peasants and pitilessly pulling the ground away from under the feet of our reformers and revolutionaries of the old, so to speak, physiocratic fashion. And here, in the attitude to this process of the radical recasting of our rural “foundations”, the absolute powerlessness of the outlook which Marx and Engels branded as metaphysical is clearly shown. "To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. ’His communication is "yea,yea; nay,nay”; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else.” ^^197^^ That is Mr. Tikhomirov’s type of outlook and method of thinking. 277 For him “people” is a fixed and invariable concept given once and for all; for him the village commune "either exists or does not exist”, for him the peasant who is a member of the commune "cannot at the same time be himself and something else”, i.e., in the given case a representative of the principle of individualism, an unwilling, and yet irresistible destroyer of the commune. Mr. Tikhomirov "thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses”; he cannot understand how one can acknowledge the action of capitalism to be useful and at the same time organise the workers to fight it; how one can defend the principle of collectivism and at the same time see the triumph of progress in the disintegration of one of the concrete manifestations of that principle. As "a man who is consistent and can sacrifice himself" our metaphysician presumes that the only thing to do for the people who are convinced of the "historical inevitability of Russian capitalism" is to enter the service of the "knights of primitive accumulation”. His reasoning can be taken as a classic example of metaphysical thought. "The worker capable of class "dictatorship hardly exists. Hence he cannot be given political power. Is it not far more advantageous to abandon socialism altogether for a while as a useless and harmful obstacle to the immediate and necessary aim? " Mr. Tikhomirov does not understand that the worker who is incapable of class dictatorship can become more and more capable of it day after day and year after year, and that the growth of his ability depends to a great extent upon the influence of the people who understand the meaning of historical development. The way our author talks is "yea, yea; nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil".

p “At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sence, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research." ^^198^^

p We already know what "wonderful adventures" Mr. Tikhomirov’s common sense went through during his peregrinations in the realm of suppositions: very often there was not the slightest trace of it left. But the history of that common sense is in the final account a dialectical history too. It does not exist and does exist at one and the same time. It comes to grief on the reefs of suppositions, and yet, like Rocambole resuscitated, it again appears in all its splendour on the more beaten track of reasoning.

We shall not, of course, forego the opportunity of once more meeting this merry companion. But now we must pause to remember the direction of the road we have already traversed on the initiative of Mr. Tikhomirov.