Reliable statistics indicate a much more modest result. Figures compiled by the Commissariat of Agriculture in 1919–20 showed that peasants received a total of 21.15 million desiatiny (23.27 million hectares).12 This land was very unevenly distributed. Fifty-three percent of Russian communes gained no land from the Revolution.13 This nearly corresponds to the number of villages (54 percent) that, according to the same source, said they felt “unhappy” over the results of land redistribution.14 The remaining 47 percent of the villages acquired arable land in very unequal shares. Of the thirty-four provinces for which figures exist, the communes in six received less than one-tenth of one desiatina per member; those in twelve gained between one-tenth and one-quarter desiatina; in nine they obtained between one-quarter and one-half; peasants of four acquired from one-half to a full desiatina; and only in three provinces did the peasants secure between one and two desiatiny.15 Nationwide, the average communal allotment of arable land per peasant, which before the Revolution had been 1.87 desiatiny, rose to 2.26.16 This would represent an increment of 0.4 desiatina of arable land per communal adult (edok) or 23.7 percent. This figure, first cited in 1921, has been confirmed by recent studies, the most authoritative of which somewhat vaguely says that the land which the average peasant received “did not exceed” 0.4 desiatina, or approximately one acre*—far below what the peasant had expected from the Black Repartition.
But even this modest figure overstates the economic benefits of the repartition, for a good part (two-thirds) of the land which the peasants seized in 1917–18 they had previously leased. The “socialization” of that land, therefore, did not so much increase the arable land available to them as absolve them from the payment of rent.17 In addition to being freed from such rents, estimated at 700 million rubles a year, the peasants also benefited from the cancellation by the Communist regime of their debts to the Peasants’ Land Bank, amounting to 1.4 billion rubles.18
The peasants viewed their title to the new land skeptically, for they heard that the new government intended someday to introduce collectives: the Decree on the Socialization of Land issued in April 1918 stated that the transfer of land to the communes was “provisional” or “temporary” (vremennoe). They wondered for how long they would be allowed to keep it and decided to act as if it were only until the next harvest was over. Hence, rather than incorporate the acquired land into communal holdings, they kept it separate, so that if required to surrender the new land, they could still hold on to their old allotments. 19 † As a result, the much-lamented strip farming (cherespolositsa) intensified. Many peasants had to travel fifteen, thirty, and even sixty kilometers to reach their new allotments: if the distance was too great, they simply abandoned them.20
So much for the economic benefits which the Russian peasant derived from the Revolution. They were by no means free. Historians usually ignore the costs of the agrarian revolution to the peasant, although they can be shown to have been considerable. These costs were of a twofold nature: the loss of savings due to inflation and the loss of land held by peasants in private (non-communal) ownership.
