Well-informed contemporaries, while conceding that the country faced serious agrarian problems, questioned whether these were caused by land shortages and whether the transfer of privately held, non-peasant land into peasant hands would significantly improve things. One such observer, A. S. Ermolov, a onetime Minister of Agriculture, formulated a cogent counterargument to conventional wisdom, the soundness of which subsequent events amply confirmed.25 Ermolov held that one could not reduce all of Russia’s agrarian difficulties to the inadequacy of peasant allotments: the problem was much more complex and had to do mainly with the way the peasant tilled his allotments. The peasants deluded themselves, and were encouraged in their delusion by intellectuals, that seizing landlord properties would greatly improve their economic situation. In fact, there was not enough private land to go around: even if all privately held arable land were distributed among peasants, the resulting increase, which Ermolov estimated at 0.8 hectare per male peasant, would not make much of a difference. Second, even if adequate land reserves could be found, their distribution would be counterproductive because it would only serve to perpetuate outmoded and inefficient modes of cultivation. The problem with Russian agriculture was not the shortage of land but the antiquated manner of cultivating it—a legacy of the times when it had been available in unlimited quantities: “In the vast majority of cases, the problem lies not in the absolute land shortage, but in the inadequacy of land for the pursuit of the traditional forms of extensive agriculture.” The peasant had to abandon the habits of superficial cultivation and adopt more intensive forms: if he could increase cereal yields by no more than one grain per grain sown, Russia would overflow with bread.* To prove his point, Ermolov noted the paradox that in Russia the prosperity of peasants stood in inverse ratio to the quality and size of their land allotments, a fact which he ascribed to the need of land-poor peasants to pursue more intensive forms of agriculture. In central Russia, at any rate, he saw no correlation between the size of communal allotments and the well-being of peasants. Furthermore, the elimination of landlord estates would deprive the peasantry of wages earned from farm work, an important source of additional income. Ermolov concluded that “nationalization” or “socialization” of land, by encouraging the peasant in his traditional ways of cultivation, would spell disaster and force Russia to import grain. The author suggested a variety of measures resembling those that would be introduced in 1906–11 by Peter Stolypin.
Such voices of experience, however, were ignored by intellectuals who preferred simplistic solutions that appealed to the
At the turn of the century, Russian industrial workers were, with minor exceptions, a branch of the peasantry rather than a distinct social group. Because of the long winters during which there was no field work, many Russian peasants engaged in non-agrarian pursuits known as
Russia’s first full-time industrial workers were serfs whom Peter I had bonded to state-owned manufactures and mines. To this group, known as “possessional peasants” (
The German economist Schulze-Gävernitz divided the 2.4 million full-time industrial employees in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century into four subgroups:27
1. Peasants seasonally employed in local industries, usually in time free from agricultural work; they slept under the open sky in the summer and in the shops, near the machines, in the winter.
