Chapter XIV · CONCLUSION: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FAMINE.
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The conclusions drawn from the previous discussion of the economic structure of the Russian village must be taken with a threefold limitation.
In the first place, the science of statistics is essentially a science of large numbers. There are many questions, by no means unimportant, which it has been impossible even to touch upon, their discussion being feasible only where large agricultural areas are concerned.
In the second place, inasmuch as the facts and deductions have only a local basis, the question arises whether the conclusions drawn would also hold good when applied upon a larger scale.
In the third place, the conditions prevailing some five or ten years ago must inevitably have undergone by this time great modifications.
It is no exaggeration to say that the round thousand[176] communities in the section submitted to examination represent an equal number of varying combinations of the fundamental agencies of rural economy. Nevertheless, we observe a certain regularity as soon as a complex, sufficient and necessary, of units is taken as a basis for examination. Thus we notice that all the figures relating to the district of Ranenburg are copied with a remarkable constancy in the district of Dankoff in the gubernia of Ryazañ. The same similitude is observed between the districts of Korotoyak and Nizhnedevitzk in the gubernia of Voronezh. It points to a certain uniformity of economic constitution as prevailing under like conditions over a still wider area. In a region confined mainly to agriculture, landholding is the determining factor of economic life. Should we find the same condition of landholding amidst similar surroundings, physical, geographical and legal, we might be justly entitled to assume throughout identity of economic structure. Such is virtually the case as regards the “central black soil, prairieless zone,” which has been the main seat of famine.
It may, therefore, reasonably be assumed that economic conditions in middle Russia about 1881 were essentially the same as in the region here described, allowance being made for numerical fluctuations. It was at this date that revolutionary peasantism had reached its climax, and to cope with it, a new era of “national policy” was inaugurated by Count Ignatieff. The question now arises as to whether counter-influences had arisen which exercised a neutralizing effect upon the economic tendencies that developed during the reign of Alexander II. A full discussion of the economic policy of the present Russian government would carry us beyond the limits of the present treatise.[177] I shall confine myself, therefore, to a few remarks relative to the two state institutions created for the encouragement of agriculture, viz: The Nobility’s Crédit Foncier, and the Peasant’s Crédit Foncier.
Hundreds of millions were appropriated in the course of a few years to prevent the complete ruin of the landholding nobility. No such liberality was allowed in the conduct of the Peasant’s Bank, which was founded with the express object of providing the money needed by the peasant for the purchase of land.[178] Amidst the jubilations with which the peasantist press greeted the birth of this still-born child, Mr. Lobachevsky (pseudonym), one of the broadest minded of the Russian statisticians, raised the sole dissenting voice. He advanced the opinion[179] that to establish a Bank with a stock of a few millions for tens of millions of peasants, was to create a small peasant bourgeoisie that would inevitably take advantage of the poverty of the more helpless members of its class, and that the poor householder would infallibly succumb if he accepted the services of the Peasant’s Bank. This opinion received a speedy confirmation in the actual practice of the Bank, which soon proved itself to be merely a supplementary department of the Nobility’s Bank.
Says Mr. Herzenstein, a Russian Catheder-Sozialist, “It is universally known that the peasants’ purchases enabled the landlords to get rid, at a high price, of those tracts which yielded them no income, and that, taking it all in all, the peasants paid more for their land than it was worth.”[180]
It was again the same truly Russian system which had been tried with such splendid success on the occasion of the emancipation of the serfs. Furthermore, the interest levied by the Bank, viz: 7½ per cent., exceeds that charged by any of the private mortgage banks (6 per cent.), whereas, with the Nobility’s Bank, the interest is less than that charged by private banks.[181]
It is therefore by no means surprising to find that speedy ruin is the debtor’s fate. In the period from 1887 to 1890, 8.8 per cent. of all the land purchased with the aid of the Peasant’s Bank, was relinquished by the mortgageors, the failures amounting to 7,637,034 rubles, or to 14 per cent. of all the loans granted by the Bank.[182] The operations of the Bank necessarily suffered a diminution.[183] However, all these inconveniences are but matters of secondary importance. Had everything gone smoothly, the Bank would nevertheless have effected no actual change in the economics of the village.
As may be remembered, the village community needs about one-half more land in order to enable all its members to hold their position as farmers. To put peasant landholding upon a proper footing in the famine-stricken region, many times more land would be required than that purchased by all the peasants throughout Russia with the aid of the Peasant’s Bank.[184]
It may be questioned whether the operations of the Bank have been even sufficient to counterbalance the further parcellation of peasant holdings which has resulted from the growth of population. The economic tendencies prevalent in the village during the first year of the present reign may be regarded as being even more pronounced to-day.
The present catastrophe was consequently by no means unexpected, and there has been no lack of alarming symptoms within the past ten years. In 1883, 1884 and 1885 famine stalked alternately through western Siberia, through the northeast, and through certain of the central provinces of European Russia (Vyatka, Kazañ, Kursk, etc.). Famine was again reported in 1889.[185] To such an extent was the peasantry already exhausted that even the extraordinarily good harvest of 1890[186] was unable to prevent a subsequent failure of crops from resulting in a famine.
It is only in the area affected that the present failure is distinguished from its precursors.[187] The cause of the various famines is at bottom always essentially the same, viz: the backwardness of Russian agriculture. The surface of the soil has become finally exhausted and the wooden plough of the Russian peasant is unable to reach down to the deeper layers where the soil is yet virgin. Deep ploughing is impossible with only one horse, and that horse fed on straw. It is further not only the peasant land, but also the major part of the landlord’s fields, that is cultivated with the peasant’s stock and implements. Thus the crisis of peasant agriculture is at the same time the crisis of Russian landlord farming.[188] The famine has brought about at one single stroke the dissolution which had been slowly going on in the village since 1861.
The Russian papers have published a multitude of letters from their correspondents telling of the loss of some 50% of the horses owned by the peasants. This means the complete ruin of the weak groups of the village, and the further concentration of the communal land into the hands of the strong, who alone survived as the farming class.[189] The class of small farmers in Russia is evolving into a peasant bourgeoisie similar to the French peasantry after the great Revolution, or to the American small employing farmers. The transitional groups of half farmers, half laborers, by whom the major part of the landlords’ estates were formerly cultivated, have sunk through the famine into the proletarian class. The laborer having become a proletarian, it is by proletarian labor that the estates must be tilled, and agriculture upon a large scale becomes a regular capitalistic pursuit.[190] The nobility with its estates under mortgage can not possibly afford the capital needed.[191]
The land is destined to be divided between the large capitalist and the small farmer—the homo novus of the village.[192]
Thus the present famine must be considered as a genuine turning-point in the economic history of Russia.
Family co-operation, village community, nobility, and natural economy—such was the economic constitution of Russia in the past.
The Russia of the days to come will have for its basis a peasant bourgeoisie, a rural proletariat, and capitalistic agriculture.[193]