What is the Agrarian Question?

It seems perfectly clear to us that the organized public mind must use all the power of the state and public authority to direct the agrarian reform to the state solution of the social and economic tasks that we face.

The national economy of Russia outgrew its previous subsistence forms long ago. Our national economic organism is a single whole. The agrarian need is the need of this very national, economic whole and not of individual villages or peasants.

Individual farms and areas are different parts of the same economic mechanism. They do different work but are connected by the unity of joint movement.

Therefore, our land reform, the transfer of land to the working peasants, should be carried out not by unorganized seizures, but according to the state plan of a land-use system. This plan takes into account households and economic features of different regions of our country and is systematically and orderly implemented without disrupting the production cycle of our national economy.

The last circumstance is evident for all of us, who painfully survived the severe food crisis. Once again it stresses the need to conduct the agrarian reform in an organized and state form. We cannot afford a single unsown desiatina and a single smashed and destroyed herd.

What are the main ideas of Russian public opinion considering the state solution for the agrarian question?

The idea of land socialisation to the greatest extent contradicts the basis of the existing agrarian system. According to this idea, land is a public domain. We emphasize that it is a domain and not a property. It belongs equally to everyone, like light and air. The peasant labor economy is only a user of this free element.

To organize this use, the working peasantry unites into special bodies of land self-government and land communities. The state transfers land for distribution to these bodies according to the economic and social order, in the form of communal or households' land tenure. It can also introduce a large-scale, collective farm on the whole territory.

If land is free, if it cannot be owned, and does not have value, then every farmer should use it for free. State and local taxes are imposed on the economy, not on land.

However, the difference in soil fertility and in the position of farms should be taken into account by taxation that must put all workers in the same conditions of labor productivity. For temporarily weak and inefficient farms, the land community should organize public plowing and harvesting.

Buildings, implements and livestock should remain in private property together with agricultural products.

The idea of land nationalization is based on quite different creative grounds. Land rent and land value are not excluded from the existing social categories claiming that land can and should be a property. But land is to have one owner -- the state.

As an owner, the state gets (1) the right to all land rent, which is the main source of public finances, and (2) the right of disposal of all the country's lands in national interests.

According to the latter right, the state gives a part of land to the labor economy on terms similar to rent and makes sure that the usable land of each family does not exceed the labor standard.

24 And the state does not interfere in the internal structure of the economy and allows the possibility of wage labor.

Forests and special types of economy can stay in state and public use or be exploited on capitalist terms if it corresponds to the national economic interests.

The supreme command of land is in the hands of the state; at the local level, land is managed by local land authorities based on the principle of self-government.

One of the forms of nationalization, in which all local lands are at the autonomous disposal of the zemstvo self-government (its rights are limited only by the national law on land), is called land municipalization. Under municipalization, the local, self-government bodies collect land rent.

These are the basic ideas of the land system that are most common in our socialist circles. These ideas are somewhat similar to the ideas of the followers of Henry George. They recognize the right of all people to land and the right of every person to the products of his labor. They seek to establish these rights by taking away the unearned income from land (rent) in favor of all the people.

The single land tax in the amount of land rent is sufficient to solve the agrarian question, because land without rent will lose its value and, therefore, attractiveness for capital.

Capitalist land tenure will lose its meaning, and we will have only a labor economy and such a capitalist economy that is intensive and rational enough to survive under the tax equal to rent. This type of capitalist economy is of great value for the national economy.

Thus, the single tax system is similar to land socialization and nationalization by giving all land rent to the state bodies. But it is different for it does not suggest to the organized public mind to dispose of land. This system claims that without state intervention, the labor economy regime will establish itself on the lands free of rent.

This idea is particularly interesting, because it implies a solution for the agrarian problem not by an active state reorganization of the existing system of land tenure, but rather by creating a land regime in which the spontaneous process of economic evolution itself would lead to the sought-for ideals.

This idea is most developed in the system of state regulation of land tenure suggested by some economists. Under this regime, private land property remains, but the free sale and purchase of land are completely destroyed. Land ceases to be a free commodity. It can be sold only to the state and be bought or received only from the state. All lands at the disposal of the state form a land fund, which the state uses in the national economic interests by giving land either for use or into possession of farmers. Moreover, the state organizes and carries out the reclamation of lands at its disposal.

To speed up the transition of private farms into labor economies, a system of land tax is introduced. It reduces taxes for the labor economy, raises taxes for small and medium-sized private farms up to the alienation of land rent, and raises taxes for large farms even above land rent. In addition to this tax pressure, the state reserves the right to compulsory alienation of any land if it is necessary for the land system of a particular region.

When comparing the above-mentioned land systems, we should first note that their main differences are determined by motivation and justification rather than by specific conditions of land use.

Under all the systems, the farmer pays to the state or local self-government bodies a part of his income equal to or about the same as land rent. The difference in the names of payments or their justification does not matter from an economic point of view. Furthermore, using various state measures, all systems seek to turn the economy into the labor type.

We can arrange them in the following order of the increasing impact of the organized public mind on everyday economic life: socialization, nationalization, state regulation of land tenure, and, finally, a single tax system.

Land socialization simply prohibits wage labor in agriculture. If some types of economy cannot manage on their own with the labor efforts of the family, this system imposes on the society the organization of work on a labor partnership basis.

Land nationalization approves the labor principle by a compulsory restriction of land use by labor standards; however, it allows the use of wage labor in special types of agricultural production.

State regulation of land tenure places the capitalist economy in extremely difficult tax conditions. It forcibly directs all land resales in the interest of the labor economy.

The single tax system considers it sufficient to destroy land rent as the only source of landed property and capitalist farming.

In fact, all these systems aim at the same goal but use instruments of different power to achieve it.

The implementation and maintenance of land socialization requires the exceptional activities of all the organized forces of the public mind and an extraordinary amount of work. The implementation of the single tax system requires minimal state efforts, because it leaves all the work on the development and strengthening of the labor economy to the spontaneous process of economic evolution free of rent.

The basis of all organizational skills is the ability to correctly scale the estimated means to the sought-for goals and the means for achieving it to the possibility of their implementation.

A successful solution of the problem is the one that is based only on necessary and, at the same time, sufficient means. Therefore, to choose one or another way of approving labor economy, we should clearly answer the question of whether the planned set of measures is really necessary for the desired effect or can it be achieved with less effort and less waste of resources.

On the other hand, the opposite is also true: for example, when assessing the single tax system, we have to answer the question of whether the selected means are sufficient to introduce and maintain the labor economy. Considering quite a number of other measures, e.g., the prohibition of wage labor, we have to decide if such measures are feasible at all.

Only after evaluating the above-mentioned systems from the organizational-technical point of view, we can accept them as the guiding principle of real work.

However, we must remember that they are presented here as ideal schemes. And we have to do a lot of work to turn these schemes into reality and concretize them according to the conditions of the Russian village.

Therefore, I ask all those wishing to purposefully choose and implement any system of land use to imagine a well-known rural district (volost) , for instance, the Shchipovatovskaya volost of the Volchansky uezd¹¹ of the Kharkov province, or the Murikovskaya volost of the Volokolamsky uezd of the Moscow province. Then, consider the possible outcomes of the implementation of a particular system of land use for these familiar villages and farms.

The above described schemes can be fully understood only if translated into a whole world of concepts and living representations. We can confidently say that they will be differently turned into reality by residents of Samara, the Mogilev province, Vologda, or by the Cossacks from the Don.

Our vast fatherland has absorbed countries that are so diverse in their economic and everyday life that by enumerating them inwardly one can trace the economic history of all mankind.

The Siberian taiga reminds us of the period of hunting life, the steppes of Central Asia represent a nomadic economy, the Akmolinsk region and the Orenburg steppes preserve examples of a fallow economy. We know the belt in the Samara and Saratov provinces, where the three-field economy is only developing; we know all the phases of the decay of the communal three-field economy; we witness the rise of the grassland economy near Moscow, and observe the western regions of intensive farming and dairy cattle breeding in the Vologda province and near Moscow.

According to the differences in the organization of production, there are different production relations and ideals. In the northern Siberian regions, land is as free an element as light and air, and there are no grounds to introduce any right to it.

In some regions of Siberia, there is still a grabbing right to land: the farmer who cultivated a new land will be its owner as long as he works on it. Here, the right to land is the “right of labor” spent on its cultivation.

If population density increases, the grabbing right to land leads to conflicts and determines the need for some social regulation of agrarian relations. Thus, the land community develops. Its regulating activities lead to, according to the figurative expression of K.R. Kocharovsky, the “`right to work,” i.e., the right to get land to work on. The workforce becomes an allotment unit for land redistribution.

Today, in some parts of the Astrakhan province and the southeast, we witness only the emergence of this regime and land ideology. But, in the regions where the land community is alive, the number of workers is the land redistribution unit, and the “right to work” is still the main idea of egalitarian redistribution.

In land-hungry areas, where the available land is too small to provide work for all under the existing field crop cultivation, because the land is barely enough to feed the population, the idea of the “right to life” spontaneously develops, and the land redistribution unit is the number of mouths to feed rather than the number of working hands. Consumer redistribution was discovered by zemstvo statisticians in a number of land-hungry areas.

Finally, when commercial agriculture develops and land becomes value and capital, the egalitarian community begins to disintegrate, and the ideology of private landownership begins to win the minds of farmers. Here and there we see only the start of this process, whereas the entire west and southwest of Russia have long ago switched to household land tenure.

Undoubtedly, such a diversity is not accidental; it has deep economic and everyday-life roots. Therefore, it is absolutely clear that we have to coordinate the content of our plan of land reform with the features of the local economic order.

A member of the land community from Samara willing to transfer his entire agrarian ideology will probably be greeted with stakes in the Mogilev province. Not a better fate will befall the fanatic from the Mogilev province in the Balashovsky district. And no matter how deeply we, the leaders of democratic Russia, are convinced of our agrarian ideals, we cannot follow the path of “enlightened absolutism” and forcefully introduce a single land regime in all areas of Russia regardless of their everyday and economic order.

Thus, our agrarian ideas are preliminary guiding schemes, and the task of local land committees and local departments of the League for Agrarian Reforms is to turn them into specific plans of the new land system.

Land reform

The ideas of land socialization, nationalization, and municipalization as the bases of the ideal land regime do not clarify the essence of land reform. They allow us to imagine a land system after the reform but say nothing about how the reform will be implemented and what the path will be from the existing land regime to the ideal one.

28 Meanwhile, this is exactly the question that can cause great discrepancies and even irreconcilable confrontations between us, repre- sentatives of democratic Russia. Therefore, special attention must be paid to this question.

Actually, in many party programs, we find some indications of the path of agrarian reform. However, we can confidently say that these sections of programs are the least developed and strongest parts of them. Only some issues of the agrarian reform have become sufficiently clear.

First, for most of us, it is clear that the future land system should be based on the interests of the state as a whole, and in the same way, the paths to this new system should follow the interests of the state. There can be no regional or local ways to solve the agrarian question.

We must take into account household and economic features of different regions. We cannot impose on the local life recipes for those aspects of the agrarian organization that concern them and only them. However, in the course of our agrarian reform we must not for a minute forget the interests of our national economy as a whole.

One example will be enough to prove the importance of what was said above.

Imagine our southeastern provinces. Peasant and Cossack economies there still have large enough plots for extensive grain farming of almost a fallow type. There are also large private and state lands in these provinces. Perhaps, for Samara and Orenburg peasants, the best solution will be to divide these estates among peasant farms, thus, increasing their size by ten or fifteen desiatinas each.

However, such a solution is unacceptable for the state, because an increase in the already large plots would strengthen for years the most extensive forms of farming and would not contribute to the growth of the productivity of our national economy. From the state's point of view, it is much more valuable to use these alienated lands to settle settlers from land-hungry provinces.

In the Kiev and Podolsk provinces, in some parts of the Poltava province, overpopulation is so enormous that, despite exceptionally intensive farming, the people's labor cannot be used even in half.

The outmigration from these provinces to the southeast will reduce their population and, undoubtedly, will intensify our southeastern economy and, thus, significantly increase our national income. However, we are equally certain, that the settlers will encounter a very hostile attitude and the serious opposition of the local population.

Here, the interests of the whole are confronted with the interests of the units. The key secret of agrarian reform is the ability to reconcile these interests, which is an extremely difficult task. Local interpretations of the state issues are the most dangerous pitfalls of the agrarian reform.

In one of the chapters I pointed out that every social phenomenon consists of an element and reason. These two manifest themselves not only in the future agrarian system, but, unfortunately, in the very implementation and discussion on the reform.

One element that does not take into account arguments of reason and does not accept the laws of logic will play an important role in our future agrarian development. Nevertheless, reason should not lay down its arms. It must exert all its power to direct the resultant force of the historical progress closer to the state course of the reform.

What does reason tell us? How does it portray the desired course of the agrarian transformation?

First, it tells us that the organized egalitarian redistribution of state and private land in the interests of the working people requires an infinite number of the most difficult statistical, land-surveying, and organizational activities. Even if there are no social difficulties and social resistance to the reform, such a huge work will require many years to finish it.

Therefore, whatever regime we take for an ideal, we will approach it only after a long transition period.

Only systems of the single tax and state regulation of land ownership can be introduced almost immediately, because they establish new conditions for economic life and do not create a land system. This is especially emphasized by the fact that, for example, the state regulation of land ownership as we described it in the previous chapter, can be both an independent land regime and a transition stage for land socialization, nationalization, or municipalization, depending on the policy of regulation.

The state regulation of land ownership is such a powerful instrument of the Organized Public Mind that, provided the strong pressure of the state, it can force the spontaneous process of agricultural evolution to automatically come to nationalization or municipalization in one or two decades.

It is our deep conviction that three means of the state regulation system--progressive land taxation, abolition of free land purchase and sales, and the right to expropriate any land -- are necessary and sufficient for the state to get full control of land reform. However, we admit that political conditions and the understandable impatience of the broad democratic masses can force the state to speed up the reform by a violent method of implementation. At the same time, we must clearly realize that the immediate issuance by the Constituent Assembly of a decree declaring that, from some date, all land is state property is not yet a land reform.

The state should not only declare that all land constitutes its property but it must also organize this transfer of land into its hands. The very fact that the decree was issued does not really make land a public domain.

If the law on land nationalization is issued without a system of measures for the transition period, we will have only a dangerous state fiction. That is why we will have a long transition period in all cases.

During this period, we have to be extremely careful in two respects.

First, with respect to those relatively few private estates, which are centers of culture. Livestock-breeding farms, plant-selection farms providing the country with seeds, horticultural economies, stud farms, dairy farms, and other similar types of economy are the cul- 30 tural treasures of our country and a public domain. It is our deep conviction that almost all these types of economy can become labor eco- nomies on a cooperative basis.

Today necessary cooperatives have not yet matured, and we do not have organizational forces to transfer all these types of economy into the hands of the peasantry. Therefore we should take special care to ensure that the fine thread of our cultural agronomic tradition does not tear.

Cherry orchards should not be cut down, stud farms and breed herds should not be sold and destroyed, fields of selection farms that produce new varieties of plants should not be sown with a poor grade of oats. All these cultural values are our common cultural heritage. In the name of our future we must save them from being plundered and destroyed.

The second issue that requires a particularly cautious approach is land privately owned by peasants. Over the last decade, our peasantry has bought from other classes about 27 million desiatinas of land.

This land is scattered among thousands of peasant farms and often bought with hard-earned money. It is not uncommon that this land exceeds the labor standard. Quite often it exceeds allotments of whole land communities and even districts (the Cossack lands). Therefore, we consider it dangerous for the state to be pedantic in the implementation of the reform and to begin immediately to alienate all peasant land above a certain labor standard. Such a measure is acceptable only after socialist ideas penetrate deeply into all minds of our village and become firm beliefs. Otherwise, violent strife among peasants and Cossacks is inevitable, which will pave the way for a counter-revolutionary strike. Thus, although logically this measure is a correct conclusion from the idea of land socialization, politically its premature implementation will be fraught with terrible dangers.

The same or nearly the same applies to the question of refundable or gratuitous alienation of private land. If one believes that landed property is an accidental social mistake, then this question can be easily solved by the gratuitous alienation of private land.

However, for us, who believe that even though it does not correspond to our social ideals, landed property is a fruit of the historical development of national economic life with sufficient social roots, the question of alienation of private land cannot be so easily solved.

We cannot consider the existing landowners as invaders and usurpers. They and their property are the consequence of the existing economic system, which has developed historically and is now close to destruction by virtue of the same historical necessity.

Land reform is the reform of our economic system and not the division of wealth between different groups of the population.

When we consider agrarian reform a complex organizational-economic task, we are interested in only one question: what is the easiest way (i.e., with the fewest difficulties and costs) to socialize land and give it to the labor economy?

From this point of view, we have to oppose, on the one hand, several billions of rubles of gradually paid-off state debt resulted from the state's payment of compensation for the alienated land. On the other hand, we must oppose a severe financial crisis determined by the denial to pay mortgage debts and aggravation of social antagonism, which paves the way for counter-revolutionary movements. We solve this opposition in favor of refundable alienation.

Our private land for the most part is mortgaged to the eyeballs in state and private land banks. Therefore, the value of private land largely belongs not to landowners, but to depositors of land banks and holders of mortgage bonds. In other words, gratuitous confiscation of private land aimed against landowners, in fact, misses the aim and, for the most part, falls on our financial system and on holders of mortgage bonds scattered among diverse social strata.

As of January 1, 1916, the amount of money lent by land banks on land and real estate in cities and districts (uezd) reaches five and a half billion rubles. If we subtract from this amount loans secured on city property and mortgage bonds of the Peasant Bank, we will get about two and a half billion rubles issued to landowners as loans secured on about fifty million desiatinas of land.

This money was given by depositors of land banks and holders of mortgage bonds scattered among diverse social strata. Suffice it to say that the deposits of our savings banks amounting to more than eight hundred million rubles are placed in securities of land banks. These few figures clearly indicate the possible financial danger and social discontent with that would occur with the refusal to pay land debts.

The idea of gratuitous confiscation with paying mortgage debts does not stand up to scrutiny from the point of view of elementary justice. This system implies paying debts of the squandered nobility at the expense of those cultural enterprises that managed to survive without indebtedness and had a large positive impact on our national economy.

Moreover, it is necessary to take into account the political outcome of this measure, because it will affect a huge number of small peasant landowners who have bought approximately 27 million desiatinas of land in private ownership since the reform of 1861. We consider it very difficult to carry out socialization of these lands in the near future, and yet their alienation without compensation will encounter extremely strong resistance and is fraught with political dangers.

When accepting the idea of refundable alienation, we involuntarily ask ourselves: in the end who will pay the landowners for their alienated lands? We suggest the following financial plan for the land reform. To our state debt, which by the end of the war will exceed 50 billion rubles, another 5 or 6 billion will be added to compensate for the alienation of private land.

The owner of the alienated land will receive government liabilities for an amount equal to the real value of land and not to its marketprice. The state will annually pay interest on these liabilities and gradually repay them by extending the repayment period for 50-100 years.

Payments will be made from the general state budget. Because its revenue part is democratic, i.e., based on income and rent taxes, the propertied classes will bear the main burden of land reform. Certainly, the peasantry will also participate in paying rent and income taxes, thus contributing to the financing of land reform.

However, it should be remembered that according to the basic idea of income taxation, families with income below the statutory subsistence level are not taxed at all. A large number of land-hungry and weak peasants have incomes below this level. That is why only the well-to-do strata of the village will have to pay income taxes, and will thus pay the compensation for the alienated land.

The financial plan of land reform can be developed in different ways, but we have to bring to the fore the principle stating that the need for land is not the need of individuals or classes but the need of the state as a whole.

Land reform should be carried out according to the plan and at expense of the state as a whole.

Conclusion

In the previous chapters, we considered almost all the key issues of the agrarian problem. We did not seek to offer final solutions for these issues but rather tried to correctly formulate questions and outline some directions for their possible solution. We think that, at the present moment, when these lines are being written, we cannot take on any other task. We expect many months of hard work by many hundreds of local land committees, the State Land Committee, and League for Agrarian Reforms.

By no means can such work be considered predetermined; otherwise the very existence of local land committees would lose all meaning. It is our deep conviction that only they alone are capable of transferring agrarian reform from the world of abstract ideas and concepts to the real world of live representations and of making the reform a fact.

This painstaking and difficult work will gradually lead us to the solution of all the above questions. Such decisions will take into account local experience and follow the idea of social development. The creation of local and central bodies of land reform as its efficient apparatus, which is deeply rooted in the local life, will be the main token of the success of the undertaken reform. It clearly feels the heartbeat of local life and at the same time uses the full power of Russian economic science and the state's creative thought. However, the work of these bodies can be fruitful only if comprehensively supported by the living public opinion of the general Russian public.

Agrarian reform is the long overdue need of our entire state; therefore, it is every citizen's business and a direct duty for each of us. The

basic law of citizenship ethics tells us that participation in state affairs is everyone's responsibility. The most serious reproach to our civil conscience is that we did not do what we could do in our state building.

That is why we believe that we have the right to call all citizens to participate in the solution of the agrarian question and to remember that each of us is responsible for its successful solution.

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