much of the land is unsuitable for cultivation, the peasant farms are considerably larger than this average, which means, of course, that land-hunger prevails among the peasantry of the central provinces of Russia. In actual fact, the average size of farms owned by the ex-serfs who comprise the majority of our peasant population is only 6.7 desyatinas. In some of the provinces, and in some of the counties, the farms are only half that size. By the year 1916, the number of peasant farms had risen to 15,492,202, although the share of the peasantry in the total cultivable land had increased very little. The land-hunger, therefore, had been greatly aggravated.
Since, however, most of the crown lands were unsuitable for cultivation, the only way in which the peasants could increase their holdings was at the expense of the land owned by “private individuals and by institutions.”
Among these private individuals, those who had to be deprived of their estates were for the most part great landlords (owning 53,169,008 desyatinas), merchants, and rich peasants, and various cooperatives and companies of a moneymaking, bourgeois type. Individually owned estates exceeding 20 desyatinas comprised in all 82,841,413. The cooperatives owned 15,778,677 desyatinas. It was in these directions that the main onslaught of the peasant revolution moved. As far as concerns the land owned by institutions, the peasants were chiefly interested in the estates held by the church, the monasteries, and the nunneries, and also to some extent in the crown lands.
104. Agrarian Conditions in Russia subsequent to the Revolution.
Before the revolution, privately owned land, and especially the land in the possession of the great landowners, was heavily embarrassed. Over 60,000,000 desyatinas were mortgaged, for a total sum of 3,497,894,600 roubles. In other words, the real owners of these estates were Russian