103. Agrarian Conditions in Russia prior to the Revolution.
Even before the revolution, Russian agriculture was preeminently peasant agriculture. After the November revolution, after the expropriation of the landlords’ estates, our agriculture became almost exclusively peasant agriculture, and almost exclusively small farming. In these circumstances, the Communist Party encountered wellnigh insuperable difficulties in the way of its campaign on behalf of large-scale collective farming. But the campaign is in progress, and even in this most difficult period, at the very outset, certain results have been achieved.
To understand the environment, to understand the conditions in which, as far as the rural districts are concerned, our party has to realise its program, we must study the data concerning Russian agriculture prior to the revolution and those concerning the changes which the revolution has brought about.
Prior to the revolution, landed property in European Russia was distributed as follows:
Nearly all the State lands consisted of forests, or were in other respects unsuitable for cultivation in their present condition. The land privately owned by individuals and institutions (apart from that held by the peasants) may be classified as follows:
As far as concerns the peasants’ lands, according to the statistics of the year 1905 these comprised 12,277,355 farms, so that the average size of a peasant farm was 11.37 desyatinas. In the outlying provinces, where