Our program contains suggestions for a number of measures which the Soviet Power can apply to the help of small-scale peasant farming. They are the following.
First of all, help can be given in the apportionment of land. The chief evil of our rural life, one against which even the peasants are more and more inclined to kick, is the division of the cultivable land into long narrow strips. We continually find that the arables of one village will run right up to the kitchen gardens of the next village, and vice versa. Parts of the arable will be five or six miles from the dwellings, and are often left untilled. In order to put an end to this strip system, the peasants have, in elementary fashion, been endeavouring to do away with the obsolete method of apportioning the cultivable land, which conflicts for the most part with the new subdivisions made after the seizure of the landlords’ estates. In so far as the struggle against the strip system is the forerunner of a more highly developed form of agriculture, and generally speaking in so far as the peasants need assistance in the apportionment of cultivable land, the Soviet Power must come to their aid with its surveyors and its agricultural experts.
For sowing, the Russian peasants commonly use unselected seed, just as it might have been sent to the mill. If they sowed selected seed, they would get much better crops, even though the conditions were unchanged in other respects. Still better harvests could be obtained by the use of better varieties of seed. These, however, the peasant can only secure from the State, which alone is in a position to purchase them from abroad, or to provide the farmers with what they need out of the small stock of improved seeds which has been saved from destruction on the soviet farms.