Lenin had researched the agrarian development of Russia thoroughly, and was the leader of the RDSLP most concerned with the so-called peasant question. As we have seen, from at least 1905 Lenin was convinced that the abolition of feudal relations in agriculture would strengthen the development of capitalism in Russia. Before 1917 there is no suggestion that the solution of the agricultural question would require a workers’ socialist revolution.
Three points need to be made here about the 1905 theories developed by Lenin concerning the peasantry. For many years Lenin was iconised in public by the Soviet bureaucracy and its supporters, who presented him as a man who never made a political mistake, nor had to change his policies. See, for example, Sorin[64] and Hill[65]. The reality is different. In response to the peasant upsurge of 1903-1905, Lenin recognised that the then existing party programme, regarding the agrarian question, was inadequate. Lenin’s consistent use of the Marxist method, which required analysis of the actual, concrete circumstances of the given stage of the 1905 Revolution, caused him to make a significant change to this element of the party programme during the revolution itself.
The second point to appreciate is the manner in which Lenin presented the changes in policy and programme to the party. Until the Third (Bolshevik) Congress, the party’s agrarian programme consisted of little more than the return to the peasants of the so-called “cut-off lands”, the land which had been withheld from the peasants when the serfs were emancipated in the Peasant Reform of 1861. By 1905 the general sentiment among the peasants, clearly expressed in their spontaneous uprisings across most of Russia, was unquestionably in favour of seizing all the landlords’ lands and estates. In this respect the old party programme was well out of date.
Lenin re-drafted the agrarian programme to include the confiscation of all landowners’, government, church, monastic, and crown lands. In his address to the Congress on the Peasant Movement, Lenin was at pains to stress the continuity of his position:
“The Resolution speaks of measures that will not halt at the expropriation of the landed estates. It has been said that this formulation modifies our agrarian programme. I consider this opinion wrong. … we see nothing in our Resolution that modifies our agrarian programme. … Both Plekhanov and I have stated in the press that the Social-Democratic Party will never hold the peasantry back from revolutionary measures of agrarian reform, including the ‘general redistribution’ of the land. Thus, we are not modifying our agrarian programme”[66].
Lenin was quite correct to point out that both he and Plekhanov had never sought to impose limits on the revolutionary activities of the peasants, and to draw attention to the continuity of the Marxist method that led to the proposed change in the party programme, but he is stretching things a bit too far to say there was no modification of the party programme.
Indeed, Krupskaya in her Memories of Lenin tells just how Lenin was finally convinced that a change in programme was necessary. Lenin met Father Gapon in Geneva early in 1905. Independently present was a sailor from the Potemkin, Matinshenko, later to be a leading participant in the mutiny. Together they convinced Lenin that the ‘pieces of land’ slogan was inadequate and that a much broader slogan must be launched – one of confiscation of landowners’ estates, crown and church lands. The result was that at the December Conference in Tammerfors, Finland, Lenin tabled a motion to drop this point on the peasants’ land from the programme. In its place a paragraph was inserted on support for the revolutionary measures of the peasantry, including confiscation of landowners’ estates, crown and church lands[67].
As if to confirm that significant changes had, indeed, been made to the party programme, Krupskaya describes how Lenin addressed a fringe meeting, organised by the Bolsheviks, at a Teachers’ Congress. The meeting was attended by ‘a few score’ teachers. Lenin spoke on the agrarian question (which may be an indication of how important he felt this to be). The SRs present challenged Lenin on the changes in the RDSLP agrarian programme, quoting his previous writings against his new position and claiming that the Bolsheviks had adopted the SR land programme. Krupskaya says that Lenin made a “rather angry reply”[68].
It might be argued that Lenin was faced with a Congress dominated by committee-men and he had enough on his hands in persuading them to open the party to new members. Was stressing the elements of continuity, and downplaying differences, the best way to get the committee-men to vote to agree a new policy towards the peasants? As we shall see later, Lenin adopted a similar approach after 1917, when many times, he stressed the continuity of such key strategies as the revolutionary alliance between the workers and the peasantry as a pre-requisite for solving the agrarian problem, strategies which were integral to Bolshevik success in the 1917 October Revolution. Unfortunately, the stress placed on ‘continuity’ appears to have blinded some authors to the qualitative change in Bolshevik policy between the first (1905) and second (1917) Russian Revolutions.
The third point is to understand the development of Lenin’s ideas and just what he proposed as the policy of the RDSLP in 1905, and for twelve years subsequently. From very early in his political life Lenin studied the agrarian question; in 1899 he proposed some minor changes to the RDSLP agrarian programme[69], in 1901 he made his first serious attempt to elaborate his own agrarian programme in The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry[70], he developed these ideas in The Agrarian Programme of Russian Social-Democracy[71], and persuaded the RDSLP to adopt them as its agrarian programme at the Second Congress, in 1903. The central demands of this programme were, as we already noted, for the return of the ‘cut-off’ lands [which in some areas amounted to nearly 40% of the peasants’ land], and the abolition of feudal relations in the countryside.
Lenin always wanted any demands to be concrete and correspond as closely as possible to the actual needs and consciousness of the peasants. He had to defend himself against those who (correctly) objected that limiting the RDSLP demand to the restitution of the cut-off lands was far too meek an approach. He replied: “We maintain, and shall endeavour to prove, that the demand for the ‘restitution of the cut-off lands’ is the maximum that we can at present advance in our agrarian programme.”[72]. But the breadth and depth of the 1903-1906 peasant uprising made it clear that Lenin’s 1903 programme was far too conservative. Later (1907), Lenin was to admit that the fundamental mistake in the agrarian programme of 1903 was that the Bolsheviks had failed to appreciate that the political awareness of the peasant masses had risen to a level such that they could be directed against landlordism in general[73].
As Lenin became increasingly convinced that the only meaningful ally for the workers in their struggle to overthrow the autocracy consisted in the peasantry, his vision of the revolution became one of the broadest possible movements to overthrow Tsarism and establish a provisional revolutionary government which, without going beyond the limits of capitalism, would carry through the most radical and far-reaching democratic programme, first and foremost the confiscation of the big estates and “land to the peasants”. It is quite correct for Barnes, for example, to draw attention to Lenin’s emphasis on the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants as a whole, to carry through the bourgeois-democratic revolution[74]. Indeed it was a significant progression in Lenin’s thinking that, during and after 1905, he proposed an alliance not with the liberal bourgeoisie but with the “entire peasantry against the landlords”[75], and that the revolutionary peasant committees to be set up would be committees representing the peasants as an estate[76]. But Barnes and other writers are quite wrong to refrain from mentioning that in 1917, from the April Theses onwards, Lenin was at pains to emphasise the divisions between the wealthy and middle peasants (capitalists and petty capitalists) on the one hand, and agricultural labourers, wage-workers and poor peasants (the semi-proletarians), on the other, and that the aim of the Bolsheviks for the October Revolution was for the dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasantry[77] to hold state power. In 1917 the goal would not be a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry as a whole, but instead a dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the poor peasants and semi-proletarians in the countryside.
In 1905 Lenin was clearly arguing that the solution of the agrarian problem was achievable within capitalism and would strengthen capitalist development:
“A bourgeois revolution is a revolution which does not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois, i.e., capitalist, social and economic system. A bourgeois revolution expresses the need for the development of capitalism, and far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it does the opposite, it broadens and deepens them. This revolution therefore expresses the interests not only of the working class, but of the entire bourgeoisie as well. … Marxism has irrevocably broken with the ravings of the Narodniks and the anarchists to the effect that Russia, for instance, can avoid capitalist development, jump out of capitalism, or skip over it and proceed along some path other than the path of the class struggle on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism”[78].
He continued this theme until at least 1915, stating clearly that the outcome of the democratic revolution (land reform) would be a bourgeois state. In chronological order, there follow are a number of passages to show that Lenin had a consistent overall appreciation of what the bourgeois-democratic revolution meant for Russia. In March 1906 he wrote “… In its social and economic aspect, the impending agrarian revolution will be a bourgeois-democratic revolution; it will not weaken but stimulate the development of capitalism and capitalist class contradictions”[79]. In 1907 he wrote:
“… the aims of the revolution that is now taking place in Russia do not exceed the bounds of bourgeois society. Even the fullest possible victory of the present revolution – in other words, the achievement of the most democratic republic possible, and the confiscation of all landed estates by the peasantry – would not in any way affect the foundations of the bourgeois social system. …
… This struggle for the land inevitably forces enormous masses of the peasantry into the democratic revolution, for only democracy can give them land by giving them supremacy in the state … the complete victory of the peasant uprising, the confiscation of all landed estates and their equal division will signify the most rapid development of capitalism, the form of bourgeois-democratic revolution most advantageous to the peasants. … It is just as advantageous to the proletariat. The class conscious proletariat knows that there is, and there can be, no path leading to socialism otherwise than through a bourgeois-democratic revolution. … The more complete the victory of the peasantry, the sooner will the proletariat stand out as a distinct class, and the more clearly will it put forward its purely socialist tasks and aims”[80].
Lenin continued this theme and in May 1914 re-affirmed that anyone acquainted with even the ABC of political economy must have known that Russia was undergoing a change-over from the system of serf-ownership to capitalism, that there was no third economic system for Russia, and that there was no way of achieving the ideals of labour democracy other than by ensuring the most rapid elimination of serfdom and the rapid development of capitalism[81]. In June of the same year he wrote:
“What is the economic essence of the agrarian question in Russia? It is the reorganisation of Russia on bourgeois-democratic lines. … Capitalism will develop more widely, more freely and more quickly from such a measure. This measure is very progressive and very democratic. … But, we repeat, this is a bourgeois-democratic measure. … Marx advised class-conscious workers, while forming a clear idea of the bourgeois character of all agrarian reforms under capitalism (including the nationalisation of the land), to support bourgeois-democratic reforms as against the feudalists and serfdom. But Marxists cannot confuse bourgeois measures with socialism.”[82]
Before 1917 Lenin considered that the effective solution of the land question would strengthen the growth of capitalism in Russia. The RDDPP would gain most for the working class by ensuring land distribution was achieved by the revolutionary seizure and distribution of the land by the peasantry – to whom, and in what proportions, was left undecided until 1917[83],[84]. The organisational form of the revolution could well be Soviets supported by peasant committees but these would be temporary institutions which yielded power to a bourgeois-democratic Constituent Assembly.
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Sorin, V., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) Marx Engels Institute, Moscow, USSR, 1936
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Hill, C., Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Pelican Books, London, 1971
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Resolution on the Support of the Peasant Movement CW 8:400-404
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Krupskaya, N., op cit, p108 – 110
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Krupskaya, N., op cit, p137
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Lenin, V.I., A Draft Programme of our Party, 1899, CW 1:227-254
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Lenin, V.I., The Workers’ Party and the Peasantry, 1901, CW 4:420-428
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Russian Social-Democracy, March 1902, CW 6:107-150
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, March 1902, CW 6:116
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905 – 1907, November – December 1907, CW 13:257-258
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Barnes, J., Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today, Fall 1983, New International, Vol. 1 No 1 pp9-89.
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletariat and the Peasantry, Nov 12, 1905, CW 10:43
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Lenin, V.I. On Our Agrarian Programme, March 16, 1905, CW 8:250
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Lenin, V.I., Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power, Oct 1, 1917, CW 26:87-136
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Lenin, V.I., Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, July 1905, CW 9:48-49
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Lenin, V.I., Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers’ Party, March 1906, CW 10:193
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Lenin, V.I., Fifth Congress of the RDSLP. May 1907, CW 12:466
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Lenin, V.I., Left-Wing Narodism and Marxism, June 1914, CW 20:299
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Question in Russia, June 1914 CW 20:376
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Lenin, V.I., Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement, Sept 1905, CW 9:236-237
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918, CW 28: 313