Say a word about the Russian peasant (continued)

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Part 1

The peasantry, the most numerous class of the population of Russia, remains completely defenseless even from the most insolent slander. This is the class in the mouth of whose representatives N. Nekrasov put the words:

… We were robbed by literate foremen, The bosses whipped, the need pressed …

We have endured everything, God's warriors, Peaceful children of labor”!

But in these words, far from everything is said, and having endured all of the above, the press, as in the old days, is constantly refined in slandering the peasantry, painting it with a bunch of some degenerates of humanity, okay, this is the opinion of foreigners who were brought up from infancy of rejection Russians, as pagans, but when this is echoed by the domestic press, it is a mockery. above oneself

In 1873, Pyotr Kropotkin expounded the principles of socialism and revolution, listeners spread the news of social equality throughout all parts of Russia. The wealthy Cossack Obukhov, almost dying of consumption, did the same on the banks of his native Don. Lieutenant Leonid Shishko entered one of the St. Petersburg factories as a weaver, in the form of the same propaganda. Two other members of the same society, Dmitry Rogachev, with one of his friends, went as sawers to the Tver province for propaganda among the peasants.

They and students and patriots of all classes returning from Europe told about the great struggle started by the Western European proletariat: about the International and its glorious founders, about the Commune and its martyrs. The Russian peasant did not remain indifferent or hostile to socialism. As a working people, mostly accustomed to associations for all kinds of industries and from time immemorial who jointly own the main instrument of production - the land, the Russian people are able to treat socialism more sympathetically and wiser than others. If he ever makes a revolution, it will be in the name of socialist demands. This was demonstrated by the peasants in the first revolution of 1905.

All peasants knew the communist community "Krinitsa" on the Black Sea coast, which existed for a quarter of a century. The landowner of the Chernigov province N. N. Neplyuev in the farm Vozdvizhensk, Glukhovsky district, founded a communist community, left her property, consisting of 16 thousand too dessiatines of land with forest, buildings and factories: two distilleries, a sugar and foundry. The value of the donated property is estimated at 1,750,000 rubles. In 1914, about 500 members, pupils and female students lived in the communist community of Neplyuev. The huge estates are cultivated mainly by hired workers, whose number reaches 800 people. The community lives and grows rich, gradually turning into a large cooperative. Income from estates in recent years extended to 112 thousand too much, the community's asset reached 2 million rubles. (I. Abramov "In the cultural skete" St. Petersburg 1914)

Back in 1880, in his first pamphlet: “The Historical Vocation of the Russian Landowner,” Neplyuev wrote: “alone (the landowners) remain the old pre-reform gentleman, all dissatisfied, bored in his grumpy inactivity or an irritated tyrant, from whom God took his horns; others - all the same rogues - contractors, cruel fists (!), unbearably pedantic, narrow-minded clerks, in a word, the same toy people as their life made them, which they will die in the minute when their miserable ghostly existence ceases …

Gradually defamation dominates historiography, portraying the Russian peasant as dark, lazy and drunk, but is that so?

The ability of a Russian person to quickly grasp any thought and craft is unanimously noted by all visiting foreigners. Fabre, who lived in Russia, characterizes the Russian commoner as follows: “The Russian people are gifted with a rare intelligence and an extraordinary ability to adopt everything: - foreign languages, circulation, arts, arts and crafts, he grasps everything at a terrible speed.”

“There is no people who would more easily grasp all the shades and who would be better able to appropriate them for themselves. The master, for good luck, selects several serf boys for various trades: - this one must be a shoemaker, the other a painter, the third a watchmaker, the fourth a musician. In the spring I saw forty peasants sent to Petersburg in order to compose an orchestra of horn music. In September, my village pentyuhi turned into very clever guys, dressed in green Eger Spencers and splendidly performing musical pieces by Mozart and Playl …

(Buryanov V. "A walk with children in Russia" St. Petersburg, 1839, p. 102)

After Neplyuev's words of gratitude, let it not bother you that most of the thieving contractors and kulaks are landowners who have brought the economic situation of the Russian countryside to a catastrophic deterioration. The government's fear of a "revolution from below", according to local reports, was already at the very beginning of the 20th century. led to the formation of a number of government commissions dealing with the peasant question. No sooner had the “Editorial Commission for the Revision of the Law on Peasants”, chaired by A. Stishinsky, finished the work, as in 1901 the “Commission for Investigation of the Causes of the Center's Depletion” was established, chaired by V. N. Kokovtsev. On January 22, 1902, the "highest order" followed to form a "Special Conference on the Needs of the Agricultural Industry" under the chairmanship of S. Yu. Witte.

The old estate community, the attachment of the peasants to the land, the routine of the semi-serf village came into sharpest conflict with the new economic conditions. Strengthening the peasant bourgeoisie, the government hoped in its person to have protection from repetitions of agrarian unrest, from "black redistribution", from violations of the inviolability of private property.

The Stolypin agrarian reform is inextricably linked with the reform of 1861. If 1861 was the first step towards the transformation of the feudal autocracy into a bourgeois monarchy, then the Stolypin agrarian reform marked the second step along the same path. Stolypin's agrarian policy was the second bourgeois reform carried out by the serf-owners, “the second large-scale mass violence against the peasants in the interests of capitalism”, the second landlord “cleansing of the land” for the new system.

To appease the peasantry, according to the tsarist manifesto of November 3, 1905, from January 1, 1906, the redemption payments collected from peasants in favor of the landowners were halved, and from January 1, 1907, the collection of these payments was stopped altogether. On November 9, 1906, the main tsarist law was issued under the modest title "On the addition of some provisions of the current law concerning peasant land tenure and land use." On the basis of this law, communal land tenure was completely destroyed.

Here we come to the main episode, which is hushed up in history: the peasant allotments were 15 - 25 versts from their place of residence! The poor equipment of the peasantry with agricultural implements and draft power under the conditions of the individual introduction of the economy would have left them below the poverty line and would have forced many to lose their land plots and go to the kulaks of the landowners to farm. And many incomplete families, whose husbands were drafted into the army, will not only be deprived of their land plots, but also be poor.

It was not by chance that the agrarian question was the arena for political maneuvers of tsarism. It was the most pressing issue in the entire socio-economic development of Russia. And while the agrarian question remained unresolved, the new bourgeois-democratic revolution was invariably on the agenda of Russia's social and political development.

It was agrarian “riots” that gave a bloody harvest to punitive detachments … In 1906, more than 1 million people passed through Russian prisons, that is, every 120 inhabitants or every 30th adult man went to prison. The investigative authorities worked on the same scale: during the same period, 45% of those arrested were under investigation, that is, about 500 thousand people. (K. Nikitina. "The Tsar's fleet under the red flag". M. 1931, p. 195).

The Russian peasantry, on the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, turned out to be more prepared for social changes and for a new life than all individual European peasants, which contributed to the success of the victory of the Bolsheviks.

The line of the Bolsheviks on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution on the agrarian question was clearly defined by V. I. Lenin in his April theses and in the decisions of the VII (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (b). The resolution of the conference on the agrarian question said:

one. The party of the proletariat is fighting with all its might for the immediate and complete confiscation of all landlord lands in Russia (as well as appanage, church, cabinet, etc., etc.).

2. The party is resolutely in favor of the immediate transfer of all lands into the hands of the peasantry, organized in the Soviets of Peasant Deputies ….

“To prove to the peasants that the proletarians do not want to majorize them, not to command them,” wrote V. I. Lenin, characterizing the decree on land, “and to help them and be their friends, the victorious Bolsheviks did not insert a word of their own in the“decree on land ", But copied it, word for word, from those peasant orders (the most revolutionary, of course), which were published by the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper" (VI Lenin. Soch. T. 30, p. 241).

V. I. Lenin, speaking before the delegates of the committees of the poor of the Moscow region on November 8, 1918, said: “We, the Bolsheviks, were opponents of the law on the socialization of the land. Nevertheless, we signed it because we did not want to go against the will of the majority of the peasantry. The will of the majority is always obligatory for us, and going against this will means committing treason to the revolution.

We did not want to impose on the peasantry the idea, alien to them, of the futility of an equalizing division of the land. We thought that it would be better if the working peasants themselves, with their own hump, on their own skin, saw that the equalizing division was nonsense. Only then could we ask them, where is the way out of that ruin, out of that kulak dominance, which is taking place on the basis of the division of land? (V. I. Lenin. Works. T. 28, p. 156).

The "Law on the Socialization of the Land" was prepared by the "Left" Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were then part of the Soviet government. The Bolsheviks insisted on the inclusion in this law of an article indicating the socialist path of agricultural development. Article 35 of the law noted that the RSFSR, in order to achieve socialism as soon as possible, "provides all kinds of assistance (cultural and material assistance) to the general cultivation of the land, giving an advantage to communist labor, artisanal and cooperative farms over individual farms." By this, the Bolsheviks once again emphasized the need to orient the peasants towards socialist forms of labor in agriculture.

An organic part of the decree on land was the Peasant Mandate on Land, which was attached to it, which also received the force of law. The seventh point of this order dealt with the issue of land use and its forms.

“Land use,” it said, “must be equalizing, that is, land is distributed among the working people, depending on local conditions, according to the labor or consumption rate” (V. I. Lenin. Soch. T. 26, p. 227) …

This clause of the Peasants' Instruction reflected the mood of the broad peasant masses, who at that time saw in equalizing land use the most just way of resolving the agrarian question.

It is known that the peasantry, relying on the old communal experience of redistribution of land, distributed among themselves the lands confiscated from the landlords on an equalizing basis. Carrying out for the most part the distribution of the entire land area of a village or volost by arithmetic division by the total number of souls, it was able to more or less fully fulfill only one task - to redistribute privately owned lands. It was not possible to equalize the land plots, as expected: neither the population density, nor the size of private land that made up the total land fund could be the same in all places.

V. I. Lenin, responding to Kautsky, pointed out that “the idea of equalization has progressive and revolutionary significance in a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This coup cannot go further. When he reaches the end, it is the clearer, the sooner, the easier it is to reveal to the masses the inadequacy of bourgeois-democratic solutions, the need to go beyond them, to go over to socialism … equalization of land use is idealizing capitalism from the point of view of a small producer."

(V. I. Lenin. Works. T. 30, p. 286).

The practice of land distribution was very diverse in the system of land distribution according to their quality, terms of use, and allocation units, etc. This is due to the composition of local Soviets with a large number of persons from the tsarist administration. For example, in the Buisk district of the Kostroma province, only the allotment land was distributed, and the bill of sale was left with the previous owners. In the Borovichesky district of the Novgorod province, all lands were distributed, with the exception of landowners and monasteries, which were allegedly left in a reserve fund for allotting those most in need.

The distribution of landowners' meadows and hayfields in many places was based on the number of livestock. As a result of this division, the well-to-do peasants, who had the overwhelming number of livestock, received more land and meadows than the poor.

The propaganda work of the party after the October Revolution aimed the peasantry at social cultivation of the land, in the forms most accessible to the peasants, explained to them that “communes, artel cultivation, peasant associations are where the salvation from the disadvantages of small-scale farming is, this is the means of raising and improving the economy, economy forces and the fight against the kulaks, parasitism and exploitation (VI Lenin. Works. Vol. 28, p. 156).

The creation of the first state rental points for agricultural implements was also of great importance. In I. Lenin pointed out that there are few agricultural machines and implements in the country, that it is not enough for all fragmented individual farms. As a result of the assistance of the Soviet state, the number of various peasant associations grew from year to year. This is evidenced by the following figures:

Modern historiography asserts that equalizing land use served as a means of limiting and ousting the kulaks, that it did not allow the kulaks to concentrate the land in their hands. But at the same time, historiography for some reason passes over in silence the position that immediately after the liquidation of landlord property, the kulaks, using their influence on the village Soviets, were able to seize a significant amount of land confiscated from the landowners.

The peasants already in the first years of Soviet power began to organize agricultural collectives for public cultivation of the land. The Soviet state provided these farms with all kinds of material and organizational assistance, sought to turn them into exemplary farms, so that by their example the peasants could be convinced of the need for a transition to social cultivation of the land. Collective farms were primarily supplied with seeds, machines, implements, and financial assistance was provided to them. On November 2, 1918, the Soviet government adopted a decree "On the establishment of a special fund for measures to develop agriculture." The Soviet government allocated one billion rubles for the reorganization of agriculture on a socialist basis. The decree explicitly stated that “benefits and loans from this fund are issued:

a) agricultural communes and labor associations, b) rural societies or groups, subject to their transition from individual to general cultivation and harvesting of fields "(" Economic policy of the USSR. Vol. 1, p. 282 State Political Publishing House 1947).

In the first half of 1918, Ya. M. Sverdlov pointed out the contamination of some Soviet organs in the countryside by kulak elements in his speech at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on May 20, 1918. “The reports of a whole series of congresses, both provincial congresses of Soviets and uyezd ones, show,” he said, “that in the volost Soviets the leading role belongs to the kulak-bourgeois element, which sticks one or another party label, mainly the label of“Left”Socialist-Revolutionaries. and tries to enter the Soviet institutions and through them to pursue their kulak interests "(Ya. M. Sverdlov" Selected Articles "p. 80 Gospolitizdat 1939). Describing the command of the kulaks after the initial equalization of the land was carried out, V. I. Lenin said: "These vampires have picked and are picking up landlord lands, they are again and again kabalyat poor peasants." V. I. Lenin bluntly stated that that on the basis of an equalizing division of land in the countryside, there was a kulak dominance (V. I. Lenin. Works. Vol. 28, p. 156). Despite opposition from such Soviets and kulaks, Soviet power on the lands of landowners and monasteries were organized state farms with 100% state funding:

It is known that the Bolsheviks, carrying out equalizing land use, deliberately made concessions to the peasantry on the question of land use forms, seeking the main thing - to strengthen the confidence of the working peasantry in the working class and Soviet power, and thereby strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. "Being a major tactical maneuver," wrote VM Molotov, "the Soviet decree on equalizing land use achieved at that time the main goal set for itself by our party and the Soviet government."

(V. Molotov. "Party line in the peasant question." M. 1925, p. 4.

Agrotechnical assistance to artels, communes, TOZs from state farms, the number of which reached 5,000, most of which were converted into purely livestock farms, collective farms of industrial crops, MTS, etc. All these forms of agricultural production existed before the notorious "Collectivization of 1930" and, absolutely not considered cooperation, which was of tremendous importance in supplying the state with food and the formation of collectivization of the peasantry.

“A cooperative, like a small island in a capitalist society, is a shop. A cooperative, if it embraces the entire society, and in which the land is socialized and the factories and plants are nationalized, is socialism”(Lein, Soch., Vol. XXII, p. 423).

Under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, cooperation in general, and especially agricultural cooperation, embraces the broadest masses of the working people. By the end of 1928, the cooperation of the USSR in all its forms covered about 28 million people. Agricultural cooperation by 1927 covered 32% of peasant farms. In areas of special and industrial crops, this percentage was even higher. Thus, among tobacco growers, the percentage of cooperatives rose to 95%, while the average cooperativeness of the entire peasantry was 32%. In dairy and livestock regions, the percentage of cooperation also reached 90%. The development of production cooperation in the form of collective farms covered by 1936 - 89% of all peasant farms. The share of the sole sector of sown areas was equal to only 2 - 3%.

In the early years of the NEP, agricultural cooperation developed mainly in the form of credit agricultural cooperation. partnerships. From this form, special production and distribution systems are distinguished, covering the sale and supply of individual agricultural sectors. So, in August 1922, a special center for flax growers, the Flax Center, separated from the Selskosoyuz, which then headed the entire agricultural cooperation. Until 1927, the following separated from the Selskosoyuz: Oil Center, Livestock Union, Ptitsevodsoyuz, Tabakovodsoyuz, Plodovinsoyuz, Khlebocenter, and others. In 1927, the Kolkhoz Center separated from the Selskosoyuz.

These centers of agricultural cooperation fully covered the supply of the village with agricultural machinery and implements, mineral fertilizers, almost 100% covered the procurement of special crops and took up to 30% of the specific weight in the procurement of grain.

Through the organization of centers of agricultural cooperation, the Soviet government exercised a planned influence on the developing small-scale commodity production, pursuing a line of limiting and ousting the capitalist elements in order to prepare the masses of the peasantry for collective farming. The planned leadership of the proletarian dictatorship in the presence of a dispersed small-scale economy found its highest form in the form of contracting agricultural enterprises. products through the centers of agricultural cooperation.

“Until there was a mass collective farm movement, the“main road”(the socialist development of the villages - Ed.) Was the lower forms of cooperation, supply and marketing cooperation, and when the highest form of cooperation, its collective farm form, appeared on the scene, the latter became the“main road”of development (Stalin. Problems of Leninism, 10th edition, pp. 295-290).

To strengthen the leadership of the agricultural sector. Credit cooperation and systematic assistance to poor and middle peasant farms, the Central Agricultural Bank is organized.

“Among the measures taken by the party in strengthening the connection between town and country, agricultural credit should take one of the central places” [VKP (b) in resolutions …”Part 1, 5 above., 1930, p. 603].

In his article “On cooperation”, VI Lenin wrote: “As a matter of fact, we have“only”one thing left: to make our population so“civilized”that it would understand all the benefits of universal participation in cooperation and establish this participation. it. We do not need any other wisdom now in order to pass to socialism”(Soch., 4 ed., Vol. 33, pp. 429-430). In order to achieve the participation of the broadest peasant masses in the building of socialism, V. I. Lenin set the task of drawing these masses into cooperation.

The main role in cooperative trade has always belonged to consumer cooperatives. So, for example, in 1929 the number of cooperatives in cities - 1403, in villages - 25757; consumer cooperation accounted for 58.8% of the retail trade in the USSR. In 1927, through consumer cooperation, workers and employees purchased 83.7% of bread, 77.1% of cereals, 59.8% of meat, 69.8% of fish, 93.9% of sugar, 92.2% of salt.

With the help of consumer cooperatives in 1926-27, peasants bought 70.1% of manufactory, 49.9% of sugar, 45.1% of kerosene, 33.2% of metal products. Consumer cooperatives in 1926-27 covered the supply of the countryside by 50.8 percent, while cooperative and state bodies covered the marketing of agricultural products. products by 63%.

Handicraft cooperatives in 1929 united 21% of all handicraftsmen and artisans and 90% of tradesmen (fishing, hunting for fur animals).

In the human diet, 30% are vegetables, as a necessary source of biologically active compounds and vitamins. Consumer cooperatives in 1929 had an area of 44 thousand hectares of land for vegetables, in 1934 - 176 thousand hectares.

From all of the above, it is clearly seen that the involvement of the peasantry in the active life of the country was not forcible, it was voluntary. The income of an average peasant - a collective farmer did not differ from the earnings of an individual farmer, as evidenced by a scan from the brochure "Cash incomes, expenses and payments of the village in 1930-1931", published by the People's Commissariat of Finance in 1931.

Note: In historiography about the Soviet period, rations are described with a very negative connotation - which were received only by nomenklatura workers. But in reality, it is a cooperative share that all members of the cooperative received.

Cooperative share (PAEK) - is returned to the members of the cooperative in the form of food products for contracting collective and state farms for the development of production.

CONTRACTING - according to Soviet law, the system of agricultural procurements. products, carried out according to the plan approved by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, on the basis of contracts concluded annually by procurement organizations (contractors) with collective farms, collective farmers and individual peasant farms (reproducers). Under the contract, the collective farm undertakes to produce certain products and hand them over to the contractor in the amount, type, quality established by the contract, and within a certain time frame. In turn, the contractor is obliged to provide assistance to the collective farm in the production of agricultural products. products, as well as accept and pay for it.