The Tragedy of Property by Maxim Trudolyubov

Author:Maxim Trudolyubov
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509527007
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

The commune versus the private farmer

If the tsarist government did not put the problem in these terms, it was undoubtedly aware of it, but left addressing it too late. The succession of reforms and changes in legislation that began in 1861 and continued until the collapse of tsarism were all designed to make the rural economy more efficient.

It proved impossible to move society easily and swiftly from a communal economy to one based on individual initiative. The changes were very painful, for which both the reformers and the objective difficulty of the task were to blame. The reformers introduced changes without abandoning the privileges of the nobility and were, accordingly, trying to modernize society and the economy while preserving their archaic domination and the archaic institution of the commune. The resulting oppressive conditions attached to the emancipation of the serfs compelled many peasants to cling to the commune.

The government tried to abolish the old subsistence programme without providing a new, workable development programme to replace it. Private property could have been the foundation stone of such a programme, but that was not done because few considered it desirable or an acceptable solution. The introduction of private land ownership led to a rapid reduction in the size of holdings, and brought with it an obligation to pay for the land for many years into the future. The price of land, meanwhile, rose steeply, by 750% between 1861 and 1901 (or, according to some, by anything from 1,000 to 1,300%). Olga Sukhova comments that ‘The real reduction in the size of holdings, the heavy burden of redemption payments, and oppressive conditions attached to renting did not conduce to establishing social harmony.’27

Additionally, a direct result of retaining the commune in Russia was a surplus of labour, which, by the beginning of the twentieth century, amounted to anything between 5 and 33 million workers. The availability of such a huge army of hired hands was one of the reasons wages were low, not only in the countryside but also in the towns.28

It has to be admitted that the task really was very difficult: society simply cannot be changed so rapidly. The fairness of the commune became a prism through which the peasants, at least in Central Russia, looked at the world. The idea of equalizing all land holdings along the lines of the commune was not consigned to the past, but took root in the national psyche, and seemed to many (though not all) to be the pattern for an ideal future. Alexander Engelgardt enthused in one of his ‘letters from the country’,

A redistributing of the land occurs in the communes after a certain period of time, an evening out among the members of the commune … during the universal redistribution there will be an evening out among communes. Here the question is … of … evening out of all the land, both the landowners’ and the peasants’. Peasants who have purchased land as property or, as they say, for eternity, also talked about

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