In striking contrast to Western Europe, Russian cities did not urbanize the rural newcomers: it has been said that the only discernible difference between the peasant in the village and his brethren in the city was that the former wore the shirt outside and the latter inside his trousers.22 The peasants who flooded the cities, lacking in institutional attachments of any sort, without steady employment, their families usually left behind, represented an unassimilable and potentially disruptive element.
This was the essence of the “land problem” which greatly exercised Russians in and out of government: there was a widespread feeling that unless something drastic was done, and done soon, the countryside would explode. It was axiomatic among the peasants, as well as among socialist and liberal intellectuals, that the crux of the problem was land shortage, and that this difficulty could be resolved only by expropriating all privately held (non-communal) land. The liberals wanted large properties to be taken with compensation. The socialists preferred either the “socialization” of land which would place the arable at the disposal of the cultivators or its “nationalization” on behalf of the state.
But historians and agrarian specialists have cast doubts on the evidence of a severe agrarian crisis and the remedies proposed for it.
One of the principal arguments of those who held that the Russian village was in a state of deep and worsening crisis was the fact that it was constantly falling into arrears on the redemption payments (mortgage money owed the government for its help in procuring land for the peasants in the 1861 Emancipation settlement). The question has recently been raised whether these arrears really prove the impoverishment of the village.23 Instead of making mortgage payments, the peasant steadily increased purchases of consumer goods, as shown by the rise in government revenues from sales taxes, which more than doubled in the decade 1890–1900. Citing this evidence, an American historian concludes:
If the peasants were the primary source of indirect tax income, then they must have been the major consumer of the goods taxed, that is, sugar, matches, and so forth. Therefore, since they
This argument is reinforced with evidence of a rise in peasant savings and an increase in farm work wages. It raises doubts whether the Russian village was indeed suffering from severe undernourishment as claimed by liberal and socialist politicians.*
