On April 10, 1907, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin presented the draft land reform to the Duma. This was only part of a comprehensive peasant reform that began with the emperor’s decree a year earlier. The creation of a powerful class of peasant-owners in Russia, the destruction – but gradually – of the peasant community as a collective landowner, the rejection of remnants of serfdom, and the end of World War II. He helped complete Alexander’s reforms. incomplete. And also, the organization and land management of the purchase of the landlords’ lands at the state’s expense for resale on preferential terms to the peasants, makes it possible to optimize the peasant economy by eliminating the so-called striped land (the lands in the process of regular redistribution of most common lands were dispersed and owned by different owners. happened). A Peasants’ Bank was established to lend to “new owners”. Among other things, he achieved an evolutionary redistribution of landed property without revolts and revolutions: he bought the lands of the “decadent” landed nobles, then resold them on successful terms to successful peasant owners (actually farmers).
Before the Stolypin reform, the peasant could not sell, mortgage or lease his share. This, among other things, limited the use of paid labor by productive farms.
As they will now say, it was a technocratic approach to solving the most painful problem for Russia – land. At that time, Russia was going through a period of rapid demographic growth, although the rural population made up three-quarters of the empire’s population. After the abolition of serfdom it increased more than one and a half times. Against this background, agriculture flourished along a “widespread” rather than a “busy” path. Meanwhile, after collectivization, the Soviet Union will repeat exactly the same “comprehensive path”, focusing on the most violent exploitation and robbery of the rural population. However, the country actually entered the “high road” only when market reforms began. And in this regard, post-Soviet Russian agriculture, with all its difficulties and problems, is a definite success story.
The Russian post-Soviet reformers were, in a sense, the successors of Stolypin’s work, and they were also destroying the “rural community” in the form of collective farms. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, viewed collective farms as a form in much the same way as the Russian tsars—including a form of appropriate control and subordination of the “taxable class.”
Agricultural practices in the late empire were backward. The old-fashioned three-field system of crop rotation prevailed, the mechanization, modern for that time, was practically not introduced. At the beginning of the 20th century, productivity in Russia was three to four times less than in Germany and the United States at best. The country also massively exported grain largely because they bought it by number (number of workers) rather than skill (technologies). With significant exports, there were epidemics of famine.
Lenin would ruthlessly criticize Stolypin, feeling that his undertakings rightly undermined Russia’s revolutionary potential. Soviet historiography also strongly emphasized the inconsistency and reluctance of Stolypin’s reforms, the fact that they produced very limited results at the start of the First World War. But the reforms were designed to be long-term. The war, as so often in Russian history, turned all plans upside down. By the time of the First World War – in the form of rapid growth of agricultural production – they began to show only the first results.
According to the planned pace of the same land administration, all work should have been completed just in time, in the early 1930s, when collectivization began in the USSR.
In fact, in terms of land use, Stolypin solved the same tasks that the Bolsheviks tried later (elimination of striped land, more efficient agriculture on the basis of credit, mechanization, development of new territories by settlers, etc.). to solve. For example, he began to create machine and tractor stations. However, there was an important fundamental difference that turned out to be decisive. Stolypin relied on powerful private owners who were interested in multiplying the results of their labor.
The Bolsheviks relied on the same forced “serfs”. Both Stolypin and Bolsheviks acted to destroy the archaic rural communal economy. But the results were fundamentally different.
Already in the first 6-7 years of the Stolypin reforms, more than 235,000 peasant allotments were transferred to private property. The use of agricultural machinery per one-tenth of the crop has tripled. At the beginning of the war, land management studies were carried out in an area with a total area of 27 million hectares (in hectares). By 1915, about 4 million hectares of land had been sold to the peasants from the land funds of the Peasant Bank. More than 3.7 million people moved beyond the Urals, and 70% of them settled in Siberia. Even under Soviet rule, there was no such large-scale development of the eastern lands in such a short time by free people who went there of their own free will. And not counting the “Gulag archipelago”. And even more so after the Soviet regime.
Now, as if by “Stolypin” methods, trying to attract people to the Far East by giving away one hectare as property, they forget an important component of this resettlement policy – freedom. From social archaic mutual responsibility, from payments imposed even after the abolition of serfdom, etc. It was the “Russian border”. It is possible even today, it is only necessary to raise the concept of freedom in accordance with modern ideas and the facts associated with it.
Let us repeat that the speed of Stolypin’s reforms was calculated over the long term. No one expelled anyone from the community with sticks, gendarmes and “Komsomol coupons”, as the Bolsheviks would later take people to collective farms.
By 1917, only a third of the peasants succeeded in owning land (or even a little more than a 30%) when the Provisional Government unwisely abolished the Stolypin reform to please the plebs (and the Russian liberals had difficult relations with Stolypin and were often hostile to him). little). The rest were archaic and did not want to break away from the community. This will be the very “combustible mass” for the revolution. Against the background of the strong demographic pressure during the war, as the end drew near, tension and even fear began to increase in the troops: how is it that another redistribution of the peasants’ shares in the common property is coming, and I rot in the trenches, it’s time to go home. There were also illusions that the Bolsheviks would add more land as there was no longer enough in the community.
A 30% share also draws attention. We will encounter it often later in our history, as it reflects the number that stands more determinedly for progressive changes in society.
What Stalin had either physically destroyed, or sent to camps, or dispossessed, dispossessed, allowed to roam the world, etc. this was the third (“kulaks plus strong middle peasants”). to the initially joyful booing of the “rural poor” during collectivisation, and to something just lazy and worthless in a generally peaceful life of the homeless. Then, as you know, do not indulge the most. It is interesting that at that time, the same approximately one-third of the population, before and after the collapse of the USSR, would most resolutely advocate democratic and market reforms. Then, the maximum possible size of voters who are conditionally “liberal” parties was estimated at this value. Then, of course, much less.
Stolypin wanted “20 years of peace” to transform Russia – that is, until about 1927. But war and revolution did not give them to him. And then, neither in the 20th century, nor now in the 21st century, the country (as of today) will not be able to live exactly those 20 uninterrupted years of peace. Is this Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev? But not 20, but 18. And in general, at the head of the 16 millionth army of the CPSU, he blew it up.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.