Peasant bank and people in the Russian Empire

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

On April 10, 1883, the Peasant Land Bank started operating in Russia. The new financial institution was called upon to solve the land issue, helping peasants to acquire plots for private ownership. Over the 35 years of the bank's existence, with his help, land was purchased with a total area of one and a half modern Bulgaria, but on the scale of the tsarist empire, this turned out to be not so much. About the successes and failures in the work of one of the largest credit institutions in Russian history - in the material RT.

On April 10, 1883, the Peasant Land Bank began to issue loans in Russia, the regulation on which was approved by Emperor Alexander III a year earlier. A new financial institution was needed to resolve the land issue. It was supposed to help the peasants in the acquisition of private land plots. After all, the reform of 1861 did not solve all the problems facing Russian society.

Free, but not quite

In Russia, as in a number of other states of Eastern and also Central Europe, serfdom was delayed for a long time and was a serious brake on the country's socio-economic development.

“In the last 20 years, works began to appear whose authors are trying to prove the effectiveness of the serfdom system and the absence of grounds for carrying out peasant reform. This is nonsense, Valentin Shelokhaev, chief employee of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences, said in an interview with RT.

According to the expert, in a situation where a significant part of the country's population was deprived of all fundamental rights and freedoms, the state failed to effectively develop the economy. People were not interested in the due measure in the results of their labor.

"As a result of the reform of 1861, the peasants received mobility, this liberated huge market forces," explained the former Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Economics Leonid Kholod to RT.

But even after the reform of 1861, the peasants, in fact, did not become completely free. Until 1903, they could not determine their fate without the approval of the rural community, and until 1905-1907 they paid landowners a “ransom” for land that was several times higher than its real value. In addition, due to the lack of free funds, the peasant could not afford to purchase a land plot suitable for him for farming. And the lack of land significantly depreciated the status of their personal freedom, consolidating the actual dependence on landlords and wealthy countrymen who had managed to acquire large allotments.

In this situation, the bank began its work, which gave the peasants a chance from partially free people to turn into independent landowners.

By "mortgage" according to the old order

Lending in Russia appeared long before the 1861 reform. Borrowed funds for the "arrangement of estates" began to be issued on the initiative of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in the middle of the 18th century - more than a hundred years before the events described.

But such loans were only available to representatives of the privileged estates. Moreover, the payment discipline of the Russian landowners was not up to par, and lending developed slowly.

The peasant reform dramatically changed the situation. Millions of people appeared in the country who were in dire need of funds to get on their feet. Considering that peasants even actively resorted to short-term lending in rural banks and savings banks, the authorities came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to create a financial institution that could provide people for a long time with significant amounts of money sufficient to purchase land plots.

The tsar also supported the idea. On the project, which was developed by the Ministers of Internal Affairs (Nikolai Ignatiev), State Property (Mikhail Ostrovsky) and Finance (Nikolai Bunge), Alexander III, after discussion in the State Council, issued a visa: "Therefore, to be."

The peasant bank was under the administration of the Ministry of Finance. For its device, 500 thousand rubles were allocated from the funds of the State Bank. Initially, it consisted of only nine branches. The loan could be issued for a period of 24.5 to 34.5 years. The funds were allocated at 7, 5-8, 5% per annum and could not be more than 80-90% of the assessed value of the acquired site. The authorities believed that the peasants, having personally saved part of the money to buy land, would be more responsible in their use.

However, in practice, collecting even such a sum, without having their own allotment, for a significant part of the recent serfs was a completely unbearable task.

And in practice, the bank in the first years of its existence worked mainly with peasant associations - communities and partnerships. The Peasant Bank attracted funds by issuing bonds with a yield of 5.5%, which were sold through the State Bank on the stock market.

In the event that the borrower did not pay the bank on time, a penalty of 0.5% of the amount owed per month was collected from him. Penalty interest was not charged if the peasant farm suffered from a natural disaster. In this case, the borrower could be entitled to defer payment for two years.

The new financial institution developed quite rapidly. In 1895, 41 branches of the Peasant Bank were opened in Russia. By this time, he had issued almost 15 thousand loans for a total of 82.4 million rubles. on the security of 2.4 million acres of land. As of the last decade of the 19th century, it accounted for 3.8% of mortgage loans issued in the country in cash and 4.5% in land. About 12% of all mortgage transactions were made through it.

In 1895, Sergei Witte, who at that time held the post of Minister of Finance, endowed the bank with the exclusive right to buy up land plots sold by landowners, forming its own land fund in order to then sell it to peasants. Thus, the Ministry of Finance fought against the activities of speculators who sought to buy up noble estates cheaply, in order to then create a land rush and earn super-profits.

By 1906, with the participation of the bank, about 9 million acres of land were sold (which corresponds to almost the entire area of modern Portugal).

Its operations accounted for over 60% of the total increase in the area of peasant land ownership since 1883. In 1905, almost 30% of mortgage loans in the country were issued through the Peasant Bank.

However, the position of the peasantry in Russia, despite all the efforts of the Ministry of Finance, remained difficult. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, more than a third of the peasants were unable to pay the ransom to their landowners. According to Field Marshal Joseph Gurko, at the end of the 19th century, about 40% of people from peasant families in the army ate meat for the first time in their lives. From 1860 to 1900, the number of the country's population increased sharply, as a result of which the area of the peasant allotment was approximately halved. All this led to the unrest of 1905-1907 and, as a result, to agrarian reforms.

Stolypin reform

At the beginning of the first Russian revolution, Pyotr Stolypin was the governor of the Saratov region, on the territory of which one of the largest peasant unrest in Russia took place, so he was well versed in their causes. When in 1906 Stolypin was appointed Minister of the Interior, and then also the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Russia, he already had his own program of steps that had to be taken to solve the problems of the peasantry. In the summer of 1906, he began a large-scale reform, in which an important role was assigned to the Peasant Bank.

“It was that rare case when reforms in the country were carried out to everyone's joy. For example, fencing and industrialization in England proved to be quite painful for the people. The Stolypin reforms, on the contrary, generally corresponded to the aspirations of the people, Leonid Kholod told RT.

After the expansion of the civil rights of the peasants and the decision to sell them state land, they were also assigned the right of ownership to their communal plots.

The peasant bank was ordered to more actively issue loans and buy up noble lands. In the meantime, the bank was given state land for sale to the peasants. Loans to landless and land-poor peasants were allowed to issue not at 80-90%, as before, but immediately at 100% of the value of the land plot. The bank had to help the peasants who moved to new lands to pay for the old plots, allocating money for this on the security of new allotments.

In 1906-1908 the priorities of the Peasant Bank were completely revised. He practically stopped working with societies and partnerships and now credited mostly sole proprietors.

By 1915, the Peasant Bank was already ranked first in the Russian Empire, both in the number of mortgage loans issued and in their volume. It accounted for almost 75% of the total number of loans issued. Over the entire period of its existence, it has issued loans for the purchase of almost 16 million acres of land, which approximately corresponds to one and a half of the total territories of modern Bulgaria.

However, Stolypin's agrarian reforms and the activities of the Peasant Bank did not become a panacea for all the socio-economic problems of Russia.

Experts differ today as to how reasonable these transformations were.

“Stolypin was a monarchist. And in the first place for him were not economic transformations, but the stability of the tsarist regime, economist Nikita Krichevsky expressed his opinion in a conversation with RT.

In his opinion, the reforms should have been directed not at increasing the area of peasant land holdings, but at increasing the efficiency of agricultural production, which in Russia was lower than in other countries. According to Krichevsky's calculations, the mechanical enlargement of peasant plots did not give the expected effect, about one and a half million of the enlarged farms went bankrupt, and the peasants joined the ranks of landless laborers and urban proletarians.

Leonid Kholod, on the contrary, believes that the Stolypin reforms allowed the Russian agrarian sector to develop in the right direction, and there was simply not enough time for their full implementation - the revolution, which led to the processes that took place among the proletariat, not the peasantry, interfered.

“Stolypin was a good business executive, but you can't jump above your head,” Valentin Shelokhaev noted in an interview with RT. In his opinion, one should be realistic in assessing the agrarian reforms and the activities of the Peasant Bank.

“The country had a certain budget, from which it was necessary not only to buy land and give loans to peasants for its purchase, but also to pay for defense, health care, education. They allocated as much money as they could, there was nowhere else to take it. It cannot be said that the government did not want to solve the problems of the peasants - it did, and it carried out certain correct reforms, but in those conditions it could not do more. Today, some researchers take one factor and try to prove that everything was bad in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, or, conversely, only good. This is an unscientific approach. It is necessary to look at the problem comprehensively and, based on this, answer the question why the reforms did not work, why the revolution took place. How comfortable was life for the people? Could he normally study, be treated, eat, acquire new technologies abroad? There were many factors that led to the revolution. Until now, they have not been fully investigated,”summed up Valentin Shelokhaev.