The Peasant Revolution
Land Tenure and the Russian Revolution

Martha Raup

HIST 20 – History of Russia

Foothill College, Winter Quarter 2007

Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Dolores Davison

 

 

The Russian revolution was fought on behalf of the Russian peasants, was won by the agrarian revolts of the peasants, and its first official act (the decree “On Land”) was constructed for the peasants – but does that mean it was a revolution of, by, and for the peasants?  To what extent, I wondered, was this actually a peasant revolution?  It’s not an idle question, nor was it my original question.  Still, it will pop into mind as we pursue my topic – land tenure and the Russian revolution.  So, we had best acknowledge it right from the beginning.

This paper, paper #2 for a course in the History of Russia, has been quite a challenge.  It stands in marked contrast to my first paper, on Nil Sorskii, the Non-Possessor, for which I found scant material, either online or in the library.  This topic – land tenure and the Russian revolution – provides a surfeit of information, both online and at the San Francisco public library.  The only question is one of whittling it down and digesting it!  So, I’ll have to admit at the outset I was barely able to cultivate my topic.  Instead, I have surveyed the field, and selected my resources; here I will simply present a few morsels of a harvest that is overabundant, and suggest what lies ahead for a more complete study.

As I researched this topic of land tenure and the Russian Revolution, I discovered that it is only a small part of a much larger avenue of inquiry.  Referred to variously as the Peasant Question (see Riasanovsky, pp. 402-407 ) or the Agrarian Question (see J.V. Stalin, 1906 ), the issue involves what it is the peasants want, and what is their condition.  We will start our inquiry here.

Why Do Peasants Matter?

We have read, in Riasanovsky’s text, A History of Russia, of the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of the Russian economy, and of the serf and peasant basis of this society. Even in 1897, over 3/4ths of the population in Russia were still peasants.   Maurice G. Hindus, in the Preface of his 1920 publication called The Russian Peasant and the Revolution , sheds light on this issue:

pp. ix-xii: “Of all the elements that make up the Russian masses, the peasant is by far the most important. Actually and potentially the peasant is the mightiest force in Russian life and, therefore, in the Russian Revolution, and bids fair to become the supreme power in the future of the nation.  He constitutes the vast bulk of the population, about eighty per cent of the total.  The soldier and the proletariat though propelled in their revolutionary crusade by motives largely grown out of their particular social environment, have, nevertheless, very much in common with the mouzhik in the struggle for self-assertiveness.  Most of the soldiers are peasants, and they are as vitally interested in peasant reforms, especially in the distribution of the land, as are their folks at home.  And nearly all of the proletariat have originally sprung from the peasantry.  Many of them through years of sojourn in the city have lost all contact with the village, and have developed a class individuality of their own.  Many others, however, have remained linked to the village and all of its problems, either through blood-ties or through the continued possession of a parcel of land.  Tens of thousands of Russian mouzhiks flock to the cities only for winters, and in spring as soon as the ground thaws out, they rush back to their homes to work the land.

            Russia is, indeed, primarily a peasant country, not only in its economic structure, but in the qualities of its native genius…Indeed, without the following of the unkempt mouzhik no political party in Russia ever can hope to attain national prominence, and no government ever can expect to maintain itself in power long.  Although not the direct driving force of the Revolution – the city proletariat has assumed that rôle for the present – he is, nevertheless, the power that pushes on, or else beats back this force.  He is, in other words, the court of last resort, the final decisive element in the Revolution.”

…Many of us seem to be under the impression that the peasant is ignorant, docile, easily swayed into following this or that party, easily manipulated by clever leaders for this or that purpose, a man without a will and a goal of his own.  This impression is utterly and thoroughly false…On the contrary, in his own way the peasant is highly intelligent.  And not only has he a will and a goal of his own, he has fought desperately for years, for generations, for the realization of this goal.  To understand the peasant, his turn of mind, his aim, his wishes, his ideals, the part he has played in the revolutionary movement, and the part he is destined to play in the future of Russia, it is necessary to become acquainted with his world, his economic condition, his political status, his educational opportunities, his social environment, for it is in these that his state of mind has been molded, and his revolutionary aspirations reared.

            To understand these is to understand the peasant, and to understand the peasant is to understand the destiny of the Revolution.”

 

What Did the Peasant Want?

 

In a wonderful chapter called “Battling for Land” , Hindus continues to describe the peasant basis of the Russian Revolution:

p.179:  “Strange how revolutions occur!  Many of us are under the conviction that they are the creation of leaders, agitators, who after insidious planning and plotting issue a secret order, and a revolution stalks forth in full blast like an army to battle when the command is given…Fortunately, however, leaders can do nothing without followers – and it is only a truism to say that there can be no followers, unless there is a cause and a will to follow. Now leaders may be instrumental in rousing this will, in transmuting it into burning words, in formulating it into concrete issues, but they can neither create nor destroy it.”

 

Hindus then continues of a litany of peasant revolts over the preceding century, beginning with the one led by Stenka Razin: “The first and one of the most sanguinary peasant revolutions,” which “occurred in 1669-1670;” (p. 181) and of another attack led by Cossack Yemelyan Pougatchev, during the time of Katherine II: “…when Katherine no longer required the nobles to render army service to the state, the peasant demanded his liberation.  He saw no reason why it was necessary that he should continue in bondage to the nobles when it was no longer necessary to compensate them for special service.” p. 193  From there Hindus recites the multitude of insurrections staged by the peasants: “Though in the interval between the Pougatchev uprising and the revolution of 1905 there was no nation-wide insurrection of peasants, yet scarcely a year passed but was marked by sanguinary uprisings here and there in various sections of the country.” pp. 196-197

 p. 198: “In all of these manifestations of mutiny we must note the absence of formal revolutionary organization in the village, and for the most part also the absence of revolutionary leaders.  Agitators of various shades of political opinion were not lacking, but at best they only accelerated the process of revolutionary activity.  In fact when agitators had first made their appearance in the village in the seventies, the peasant looked upon them with distrust and scorn, drove them from the villages and often actually turned them over to the police.”

 

pp. 198-199: “Then came the Revolution of 1905.  The uprisings of the peasant were a surprise to the revolutionary parties as much as to the government, for though all knew that the peasant had been in a rebellious mood, none had reckoned upon the widespread, determined war which he had suddenly launched against the landlords.  Not in 130 years, since the days of Pougatchev, had there been such commotion and riotousness in rural Russia.  With every conceivable weapon at hand the peasant hurled himself upon his ancient enemy – burned castles, hay and grain-stacks, seized produce, stock, implements, and land.  Particularly desperate and sanguinary were the uprisings against landlords who offered resistance.”

 

p. 199: “The Revolution of 1905 in city and village failed.  But the government realized the menace of the rebellious village, and to ward off future outbreaks, it proceeded to introduce reforms.”

 

p. 200: “Most interesting was the new economic policy of the government, fathered by the astute Stolypin.  His aim was to render impotent the revolutionary movement in the village, and to achieve this he resolved to break up the commune so as to destroy the social unity of the peasant and thus prevent concerted action, and also to create a class of prosperous peasant land proprietors, who in defense of their economic interests would gravitate to the support of the landlords and the government against the poor and rebellious peasant.  To this end he promulgated the now famous and elaborate homestead act, according to which a peasant might upon application separate himself from the commune, build up a homestead, and enjoy all the privileges and comforts that go with individual ownership of land.”

 

pp. 200-201: “If the government had thrown open vast areas of new lands to the peasant, free, or at a small price, Stolypin’s scheme might have proved successful.  The peasant would have acquired a homestead, grown attached to it, and might have forgotten the Revolution.  But since the area of land available for homestead purposes was very limited, Stolypin’s policy could not but result in failure.  In all, 2,400,000 heads of families applied for permission to separate from the commune…Only 1,140,000 heads of families had built homesteads.  But many of these soon discovered that owing to shortage in land their separation from the commune was a decided disadvantage.  They had neither woodland, nor pasture, nor tillable land sufficient to raise summer feed for their stock and bread for themselves.  In consequence many of them were compelled to dispose of a portion of their stock…”

 

p. 202: “During the last few years prior to the Revolution there was a tendency on the part of many homesteaders to return to the commune, while the number of applicants for separation had slumped heavily.  In 1915 it was only one-seventh of what it had been in 1908, the year in which the homestead act had proved to be most popular.

 

Stolypin’s scheme, then, while it benefited greatly a small number of peasants, failed on the whole to bring relief to the vast bulk of the peasantry.  Fully seventy per cent of them continued to suffer from land-shortage and all that the term implies.”

 

What emerges from Hindus’ view is a very clear picture of the role the peasants played.  They were the backbone of the revolution, the heart of the revolution, and the arm of the revolution.  They were not, it is true, the head – the ideas and ideology came from men such as Lenin,  Stalin, and Trotsky, and women such as Vera Figner, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and  Alexandra Kollontai. Nevertheless, without the peasants, there would have been no revolution in Russia.

            Ten years later, in 1930, George Pavlovsky published Agricultural Russia on the Eve of the Revolution.  He too saw the problem of the peasants as a key to the revolution.  Furthermore, he identified the crux of the matter - Land:

p. 61: “Among the issues of Russian politics on the threshold of the twentieth century the agrarian problem stood easily foremost.  In the programmes of all the advanced political parties Land was placed in a position of honour, enjoying precedence over Freedom, which could never appeal to the peasant’s heart in the same way as the promise of an addition to his holding of a few acres.  In the political strife the agrarian problem has been exploited for all it was worth as a revolutionary factor.  As a ferment of the revolutionary movement, its value, indeed, could hardly be over-estimated.  Presented in its simplified form of ‘land-hunger,’ the agrarian problem thus formed the principal plank of most political platforms, and it was this simplicity of presentation, which made a very clear-cut issue of a highly complex economic problem, that enabled politicians to use it to the greatest advantage.”

 

p. 62: “Meanwhile, though the ‘land-hunger’ of a large section of peasants was real enough, and the unsatisfactory condition of the Russian countryside could not honestly be denied, the agrarian problem implied much more than the mere insufficiency of peasant holdings, and to cope with it the situation had to be grasped as a whole.”

 

pp. 62-63: “To appreciate the nature and origin of the Russian agrarian problem, as it presented itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the Emancipation of peasants in 1861, it is essential to bear in mind that, at the time of the great reform, Russia was practically a purely agricultural country, whose well-being depended, in the first instance, on the prosperity of the peasant class, which ultimately supported the whole structure of the State and society. This characteristic of Russia, which distinguished her profoundly from such countries as England, Germany or France, where even in the Middle Ages industrial activities and urban centres were highly developed, was responsible for certain important peculiarities in the attitude of the State to the peasants.  Through the history of Imperial Russia, with the exception of the greater part of the eighteenth century, when, under the Empresses Anne, Elizabeth and Catherine II, the landowning class acquired great influence on the policy of the State, the latter consistently upheld the interests of the peasants.”

 

As is evident here, Pavlovsky writes with a different point of view.  Described in the book as “Gold Medalist and sometime Research Scholar of the Imperial University of New Russia, Odessa, late of the Russian Ministry of Agriculture,” Pavlovsky packs his book with economic and agricultural analyses that add decidedly to the field of inquiry.  Most authors I’ve read blamed much of the peasant’s persistent rancor as having been, if not a cause of the Revolution, certainly a precipitating factor.  Pavlovsky does not do so.

p. 66 – “…whatever the shortcomings of the land-settlement at the Emancipation, it is not to them, in the first instance, that one has to turn for the causes of Russia’s agrarian distress.  A comparison of the Russian peasant’s position with that of the peasantry in almost any country of Western Europe in the second half of the last century would show that, in spite of the far less favourable conditions of their land-settlement after the final abolition of feudal agrarian relations, they were comparatively prosperous, and no agrarian problem, such as that which arose in Russia, had been heard of in those countries.  It is in Russia, in spite of the generous terms of land-settlement at the Emancipation, the agrarian situation became so bad as to threaten the whole social and political structure of the State, it was surely not to the great reform, but to other causes that one should look for explanation.”

 

He then proceeds to do just that:

 

p. 81 – “The development could be described, in general terms, as a rapid growth of rural population unaccompanied by a simultaneous progress in the yield of the agricultural industry and in the opportunities of employment of the excess of hands in the countryside.”

 

p. 81 – “Among the causes of agrarian overpopulation a prominent place must be given to the condition of peasant tenure.”

 

At last we come to the heart of this investigation: land tenure.  Pavlovsky next describes two forms of land tenure, communal tenure (mir) and tenure in perpetuity (podvornoie vladenie).  However, before we begin with this, let us examine just what is land tenure.

 

What is Land Tenure?

I found a good essay online that defines it like this: “Land tenure refers to the bundle of rights and responsibilities under which land is held, used, transferred, and succeeded.”   The essay by Sumner J. La Croix goes on to survey land tenure arrangements throughout the world since the Roman Empire, paying particular attention to six forms of land tenure, and examining how they emerge, function, and change. The six forms of land tenure analyzed are (1) owner cultivation of small, private lands; (2) squatting on public or private lands; (3) large estates or latifundia; (4) feudal tenures with bound and unbound labor; (5) communal tenures; and (6) smallholder leasing from private landowners.  Russia’s form of land tenure is mentioned two times in the essay.  First, Russia is mentioned under a section on “Feudal Tenure with Bound and Unbound Labor”:

 “Serfdom was partially reformed in Russia in 1861 – the workers remained bound to the commune – and was finally ended by the Stolypin Reforms of 1906-1911 which freed Russian laborers from bondage to the commune, established private titles, and consolidated peasant holdings.”

 

 Under the section on communal land tenure, the author has this to say:

 

 “After the 1917 Russian revolution, the Soviet government under Lenin abolished private property rights in land but in the early 1920s promulgated a pragmatic system of agricultural production (‘New Economic Policy’) that retained many features of smallholder-owner production.  Beginning in the late 1920s, Stalin began forced collectivization of peasant landholdings and established central government ownership of farmlands and control of agricultural production.”

 

The tale of Russian collectivization is best left for another.  Here, I shall limit myself to discussing the first form of land tenure, and the transition from Emancipation to Revolution.

            Pavlovsky has an interesting assertion about the institution of serfdom:

            p. 98 – “Monstrous as Russian serfdom was in the middle of the nineteenth century, considered from the moral and social view-point, economically it was the only system under which progressive large farming could exist in Russia in those days.  The landowning gentry, as a rule, had no capital to invest in farming.  The whole economic organization of the country, from top to bottom, was still only just feeling its way towards commercialization, of which farming, based on serf labour, and the grain trade, intimately connected with these beginnings of agrarian capitalism, were the first pioneers in Russia.”

 

He then goes on to explain that “The progress of the agricultural industry accomplished in the first half of the nineteenth century had been due entirely to the existence of serf labour, which was always at hand and reduced the capital expenditure of the landowner to a minimum.” p. 98. Furthermore, the cost of equipment was also minimal, because “the cultivation of the fields and the cartage of produce [was] being done by the peasants with their own stock.” p. 99. All this changed with Emancipation:

 pp. 99-100 “Since the Emancipation everything changed completely, and the problems of labour and of capital assumed an enormous importance, especially in those localities in which the population was relatively sparse, the peasants’ holdings more or less sufficient or easily supplemented by leases, or where other sources of earnings diverted the peasants from employment on the land.  Moreover, the peasants had still to get used to employment as hired labour, while the landowners had to learn to handle free labour over which they did not possess the disciplinary powers which made the management of serf labour relatively easy.”

 

Pavlovsky goes so far as to say that the peasant is no worse off than the old landlord used to be!

 

p. 103 – “In other words, with regard to his costs, the peasant was, and generally is, in a position somewhat analogous to that of the old farming landowner under serfdom, who also was not faced with the necessity of including labour in the costs, and whose net income from farming was, accordingly, larger and more elastic.  As a result the peasant farmer, generally, is better able to bear the effects of agricultural depression, and though he certainly suffers and gets poorer, he can stand for a long time a price level at which the large farmer has to abandon cultivation.”

 

I fear I had not done this book justice.  It is written with a point of view and a quantity of data and deliberation that make it both fascinating and invaluable.  With more time, I would definitely want to explore this further.

            The next book consulted, chronologically, was written in 1937.  The Russian Peasant Movement 1906-1917, by Launcelot A. Owen , reminds us again how recent was the change in status for the peasants:

pp. xv-xvi “To appreciate the agrarian problems of twentieth-century Russia…it should be remembered that the formal abolition of serfdom took place as late as February 1861.  On that date approximately ten million serfs belonging to some 103,000 squires (pomeshchiki) were officially set free from personal dependence upon their owners.  It must be remarked also that another ten millions of peasants who were under the direct tutelage of the Government or of the Imperial Family were shortly afterwards given the status of tenants upon State lands.  In both cases redemption payments, eventually made compulsory, were instituted to provide compensation to the former owners and the State for the freedom and land granted to those peasants.  The final cancellation of these payments was one of the main achievements of the peasant disturbances of 1905.

The social dependence of the Russian peasant communities, while formally abrogated in 1861, and financially alleviated in 1905, left traces upon peasant character which were evident in the great land expropriation of 1917.

Whereas serfdom was a decaying force in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Russia that condition of social inferiority was then reaching its zenith.

Russian serfdom passed through three phases.  First was the “personal contractual” – a kind of debt-bondage which tended to become “hereditary war service,” emerging under the code of 1649.  Registration of a peasant now tended to imply his formal enserfment in the military interests of the State.

At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries Peter the Great’s autocratic will strengthened this tendency.

By Katherine II’s reign (1762-96) serfdom reached the “fiscal-police” stage.  The peasant was a chattel – slave of such type as the ancient Mediterranean had known and to which the contemporary Orient was no stranger.

Katherine’s husband, the hapless Peter III, had, in May 1762, freed the Russian serf-owners from State service.  Large numbers of peasants were ‘farmed out’ to them in return for a revenue royalty.

When Alexander II, in February 1861, promulgated the Emancipation Edict and instituted his Great Reforms of the ensuing years, great hopes were raised for Russia’s regeneration.  But various features, such as the already-mentioned Redemption Payments and the strengthening under Alexander III (1881-94) of the legalized communal or collective ownership of the village land, served to remind everyone that, while much was changed, yet much remained the same.

Though the former squires sold a lot of their land and the peasant communities acquired increasing amounts, rural congestion was a menacing problem, causing a decline in that ratio of pasture to arable land so necessary to the maintenance of the balance of a primitive and extensive farming economy based upon draught animals and wooden ploughs.

Many famines occurred in the ‘nineties.  The condition of agriculture became a problem to the Government.  Russia’s industrial revolution gathered momentum in the early twentieth century.  Was it the key to the peasant question or did it threaten to complicate it?  It was difficult at that time to say.”

 

Thus Owen has summarized for us the transfer of land tenure from a situation of serfdom to a strengthening of the mir, the “legalized communal or collective ownership of the village land,” which occurred in the period preceding the great revolts in 1905 and 1917.

 

In an interesting chapter called “Why the Government Changed Its Traditional Attitude toward the Peasantry (pp. 1-21), Owen reports at length from the official government report presented by S .S. Hrulov, Procurator of the Harkov Appeal Court.  After the revolution of 1905, the government was perplexed as to what was the peasant problem, and what should be done.  The new Central Government solicited a number of reports from government officials, and this one is particularly insightful.  As Owen reports on page 2:  “The significance of the document lies as much in its expression of an official view of the past history of the peasantry as in its foreshadowing of the agrarian changes inaugurated by Stolypin in 1906 which, with their later additions, were styled the ‘Stolypin Reforms.’”   Here are excerpts:

p. 2: “In ancient Russia, both before and during the Moscow Period, ‘peasants were free, and cultivated land either as actual owners or leaseholders.’ Gradually the Moscow State, from taxational and military reasons, at first limited and then abolished the right of peasants to move from one particular piece of land to another, and bound them to the soil, making them dependent upon the ‘service-gentry,’ who were themselves a ‘service-class’ bound, on that account, to aid the State.  But the binding of the peasantry for State ends did not shake their consciousness that the land which was in their possession belonged to them. ‘We are yours but the land is ours’ was a common peasant refrain during the period of bondage. Furthermore, at the liberation of the peasants by the Act of February 19, 1861, considerably less than the total of the cultivable land which was actually in their possession was given to them as an allotment…”

p. 3 – “Therefore there did exist among the peasantry a real basis for considering that a certain amount of land, belonging to them under bondage conditions, had been taken from them and transferred to the squires.”

 

Next Owen delineates the distinguishing feature of the mir:

 

pp. 4-5 – “The land of service-gentry and peasant community was usually not separately delimited, owing to the prevailing strip system.  Peasant and squire had common, pasture lands for cattle and common forest rights to timber. It was very difficult…for the peasant to acquire any idea of ‘private’ ownership when he used the land in common with his social superior.”

p. 6 – “Owing to the growth of population for the period of more than forty years since the Emancipation, the average size of peasant’ allotments had diminished by one-third. The peasant felt a special need not so much of arable or ploughland, as of meadows, pastures and woodland which, under the terms of the original statue charters of Emancipation, had been left to the squires…”

p. 7 – “The insufficiency of land compelled the peasants to supplement their earnings by renting land from the squires, by working on the squires’ estates and by extra employment outside the confines of the village.”

p. 12 – “Poverty and lack of education provided an admirable soil for the socialist anti-governmental propaganda which was continually increasing.”

p. 13 – “When the narodniki (populists), filled with Chernyshevsky’s economics and Dobrolyubov’s logic, implementing Hertzen’s messianic faith in the peasant mode of life at last moved among ‘the people,’…they met no resurrected Pugachovs or Stenka Razins as they had hoped.  Trust in the Sovereign Tsar baffled their dreams of a great peasant rising by which to change the existing constitution.”

p. 14 – “Yet such a rising occurred with apparent spontaneity at the beginning of the twentieth. An intelligentsia, such as went to the people in the ‘seventies, was, in 1905, no longer necessary.  There were already established in each locality permanent residents of that type, ready ‘to propagate socialist or anti-governmental ideas.’”

p. 14 – “Secondly, the composition of the peasantry had changed considerably.  A certain portion of the younger peasantry had become accustomed to seek extra work in the south…where revolutionary ideas were very pronounced.”

p. 15 – “Revolutionary organizations therefore took advantage of this seasonal or periodic migration to distribute leaflets or even funds. The discontent of the peasants was ‘capitalised by the various revolutionary groups among which the Social Revolutionaries were prominent.’ [quotation of Hrulov]…The dangers of the utilization of peasant disabilities in the urban political struggle were shown by the various, generally-known, conferences of Zemstvo representatives and trades-unions.”

p. 16 – “The agrarian question and the position of the peasants led to consideration of measures for the nationalization of land (whether privately-owned, Treasury, Appanage or monastic) and of the necessity of converting to general ownership not only land but also factories, works and capital.”

p. 17 “Even in Zemstva Assemblies, the inadequacy of peasant land-allotments was the object of discussion.”

pp. 17-18 – “Among the causes of the Peasant Movement of 1905, Hrulov found it necessary to add that the ‘unfortunate war’ was ‘misunderstood,’ and was ‘unpopular’ among the peasant masses, and that the general troubles (such as, presumably, the industrial-political strikes in St. Petersburg and Moscow during 1905, together with the cleavage among the various urban classes, generally affecting the country) found a ready response in their ranks.”

 

Clearly, the government had all the information they needed!  Here’s a little more:

p. 20 – “But it was October which, with its spectacle of government impotence amid general disorder, brought matters to a climax.  The peasants were certainly not backward in presenting their demands in a much more radical guise.

            There began a general peasant rising which, during October, November and December, embraced 300 districts of 47 provinces.  More than 1,000 manorial houses were ravaged and burned…The peasant cry this time was reported to be: ‘Drive out the squires and transfer the land to the people.’ Among the ‘intellectuals’ a demand was also raised for the political freedom of the people.  In many places tax-payments were withheld and the cantonal authorities were displaced.

As a result of the increased strength of the peasant movement in the closing months of 1905, the Government under Witte’s control found itself faced with a renewed and consolidated activity on the part of the Peasants’ Union.  The second conference of this body took place on December 6 and lasted until December 10.  The Imperial Manifesto of October 17 envisaging a parliamentary constitution, and the declaration of the cessation of the Redemption Payment System (November 3), had deprived the revolutionary movement of some of its impetus.  Even so, the Peasant Union reaffirmed its former programme, going as far as to advocate its attainment by exercising a ‘right of seizure.’”

 

p. 21: “This revolutionary body resolved to demand a new local self-governing institution on the basis of universal suffrage.  No bargains were to be made with squires. No complaints were to be lodged through the usual local legal channels.  No taxes were to be paid and no recruits provided.  The new Duma was to be boycotted and a Constituent Assembly demanded.”

Despite the development of the Union in 60 local conferences and the extension of the Duma suffrage by Witte on the day following the Moscow Conference, when the December rising in Moscow was in progress, the forward revolutionary movement was over.  Reaction and repression began. The ensuing January of 1906 saw the Government no longer at the mercy of events.  The Union was broken up and the Peasant Movement of 1905 crushed with no uncertain hand during the winter of 1906.”

 

            It is clear from the above that the Revolution of 1905 was a peasant revolution – for the peasant, of the peasant, and by the peasant.  But they were crushed.  It was not until the Great War that the opportunity appeared again.  By then, the proletariat was ready.  They emerged as the leaders and agitators, and they organized the soldiers who toppled the government that had not only failed to read between the lines, but failed to read the lines of evidence clearly spelled out by officials such as Hrulov many years earlier.

            So what role did land tenure play in all of this?  As Owens describes it, the people of Russia who were once free peasants had been enserfed by historical processes that left them tied to the land as much as they felt the land was tied to them.  When Emancipation came in 1861, the transfer of land was from the gentry landlords to the village mir, a communal arrangement in which the village owned the tools and the forests, the streams and the pastures, and the peasants purchased inadequate strips of land at exorbitant prices.  It was not a solution that worked for them.

            As Pavlovsky points out, the population soared in the second half of the 19^th century in Russia, and the double impact of more people holding smaller plots of land led inexorably to a situation of desperation.  As Hindus wrote, by 1905 following the famines of the late 1890s, the peasants needed no agitators nor did they need ideology.  They needed, and they took, land.  The leaders, like Lenin and Stalin, scrambled furiously to catch up with them, to contain and re-direct the passion of desperation into the creation of a communist state, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.  And the rest, as they say, is history…

            As I said when I began this essay, the amount of information available is simply overwhelming.  I venture to say that it’s possible the Russian Revolution is one of the most studied events in history.  Largely because it happened when it did, and how it did, and that it affected as many as it did, this was bound to be so.  Going back to what Hindus wrote, p. vii – “The Russian Revolution came at the wrong hour.  It should have come before or after the war, but not in the midst of it.”  Writing in 1920, he was very concerned that the Allies were making a big mistake in their response to the revolution.  From his perspective, it was considered a necessity by the peasants, and the fact that the revolution was communistic was almost beside the point.  What was necessary then was the economic support of an entire country that desperately needed our help.  Who’s to say what would have happened had the Allies heard his plea.  Clearly he was wrong when he forecast that the peasants would never allow anyone to ever take the land from them.  In fact, his book is very refreshing with the faith in which it was written!  Nevertheless, just as it’s sad the imperial family and their advisors never understood the situation, so too is it sad that the outside world failed to respond in a constructive manner. 

            Thus I arrive at the end.  Have I achieved my goal?  Have I answered the question of what role land tenure played in the Russian Revolution?  I hope so.  Have I learned a lot in the process?  Undoubtedly so!  As they say, it is the journey that counts, as much as or more than the goal.

 

 

Annotated Bibliography and References Cited