Feudal Mode of Production, a mode of producing material wealth, based on the feudal ownership of the main means of production (land), and the personal dependence on them of the producers—peasants engaged in small-scale individual farming on plots belonging to the feudal lords. Feudalism appreared in the 5th century following the disintegration of the slaveowning system, and in certain regions ( including that of the Eastern Slavs) of the primitive communal system. Lenin characterised the conditions and consequences of the corvee system typical of feudalism as follows: predominance of the natural economy, allotment to direct producers of land and implements of labour, the system of non-economic coercion and as a result— a low level of machinery. Landowners (the nobility and clergy) are the ruling class under feudalism, and the peasantry is their antipode. Landownership is the foundation on which landlords obtain unpaid labour or products, i. e. feudal ground (land) rent (labour, natural, and money rent). The relative economic independence of the peasants, which was consolidated in the early Middle Ages, led to the growth of the productive forces and, first of 137 all, to progress in agriculture—the decisive sector of the feudal mode of production (the expansion of the cultivated area, the extension of the three-field system, improved land tilling, etc.). The appearance of towns and the concentration in them of the crafts and trade embodied the development of the social division of labour—the separation of the crafts from agriculture. A new social strata of town dwellers appeared, and the conditions arose for the development of commodity production. In the 14th-15th centuries, peasants in West European countries were freed from feudal dependence, and then forcibly torn away from their land which was expropriated. As a result, the prerequisites appeared for capitalist production. Class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited raged throughout the feudal epoch. And it came to a head in several peasant revolts: Jacquerie in France (1358), the uprising led by Wat Tyler in England (1381), the Hussite wars in Czechia in the first half of the 15th century, the Peasant War in Germany (1524-1525), wars led by Ivan Bolotnikov (1606-1607), Stepan Razin (1667-1671), Emelyan Pugachev (1773-1775) in Russia, and so on. Bourgeois revolutions, especially the French Revolution in the late 18th century, dealt the feudal system a shattering blow, and it was replaced by capitalism. In Russia, feudalism dominated from the 9th to 19th centuries. And even though the peasant reform in 1861 abolished serfdom, its survivals, such as landownership and the tsarist autocracy, lingered on until 1917. The victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Decree on Land adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917 abolished landownership and did away with the remnants of feudalism in Russia. Survivals of feudalism—large landownership, the corvee system, etc.— are characteristic of certain African, Asian and Latin American countries. Therefore, the elimination of the feudal and semifeudal agrarian relations is an important task of the national liberation revolutions.