It is important that soviet agriculture and municipal market gardening should be something more than model enterprises. They must definitely help to relieve the food crisis. Experience has shown that in the most difficult season, just before the new crops are harvested in the rural districts and when the peasants have not begun or are only just beginning to thresh, the situation has been saved by the existence of the soviet farms. In the years 1918 and 1919, the first corn of the new harvest was provided by the soviet farms. In the future, the importance of the soviet farms in this respect will be greatly increased. By the utilisation of all the land on the soviet farms, the Soviet Republic will be enabled to provide about half of the corn needed to feed the urban workers and employees. This will tend to a notable extent to reduce the dependence of the townsfolk upon the peasants.
108. Communes and Artels.
The soviet farms can increase only at the expense of those areas which now lie fallow in their environment, or at the expense of the crown lands which are brought under cultivation by improved methods, by reclamation and drainage. As regards Russian agriculture in general, this cannot become socialist agriculture until peasant agriculture has entered the socialist road. At the soviet farms, the peasants will be able to learn the advantages of large-scale collective agriculture. But as far as they themselves are concerned, they will only be able to realise these advances through cooperative farming, through uniting to form communes and artels. In capitalist society, the change from the petty agriculture of the peasants to large-scale agriculture was usually achieved by the destruction and proletarianisation of the smallholders. In socialist society, large-scale collective farming will arise out of small-scale farming chiefiy through the union of a number of small farms.
Among the peasants, the words “artel” and “commune” mean almost the same thing. Many communes term themselves artels, for the peasant is