and foreign banks. This explains why the various parties of the social solidarians, the social revolutionaries in especial, although they had clamoured for the assignment of all the privately owned lands to the peasants without compensation to the owners, were afraid to face the issue, or desired to postpone the confiscation when the day of realisation approached. It was only the party of communist bolsheviks, the party of those whose sole relationships with capitalism were the relationships of war to the knife, which (in contrast with the social solidarians) pushed to its logical conclusion the peasant revolution directed against the landlords. This revolution secured legislative expression in the Land Decree brought forward by the Communist Party and adopted by the second soviet congress.
By the terms of this decree and by those of the Fundamental Land Law adopted by the third congress, private ownership of the soil was formally abolished. All the land of the republic was placed at the disposal of any and every person who is a working occupier and cultivates the soil by his own labour. There are no restrictions on account of nationality. The land is allotted equally among the population, in quantities not exceeding that which can be properly tilled by the working occupier. Furthermore, in accordance with the prescriptions of the socialist land distribution, all the territories of the republic have been declared to be the property of the whole workers’ and peasants’ State, upon which devolves the supreme right of dealing with the land.
As the outcome of the land revolution, thus legally established, agrarian conditions in Russia have been completely transformed, and are still undergoing numerous changes.
Above all, throughout Great Russia, landed proprietorship, whether large-scale or small-scale, has been abolished. Thus, as regards land-ownership, the rich peasants have been placed upon the same footing as the medium-rich peasants.