Peasants

Was the period 1880-1917 one of Improvement for the Peasantry?

• Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861 and provision made for them to buy their land, but this had strings attached.
• Peasants subjected to the discipline and influence of the commune of which they had been members.
• Land was allocated through these units which also paid taxes collectively and exercised power over the peasantry through an elected council of elders.
• Landowners had to be compensated for the value of the services they had lost, serf freedom had in effect to be bought.
• Economically they were worse off, income falling by up to 50% because the average redemption charges higher than the market value of the land.
• Area of land worked by peasants fell by 18-40%.
• In most areas landowners could keep 1/3 of the best land, and as the commune could repartition the holdings, peasants had little incentive to increase productivity by making improvements.
• End result coupled with higher taxation was increased peasant impoverishment, with an extension of redemption payments needed in 1896.
• Many had to rent land from landowners at rising rents or higher themselves as labourers to earn enough to survive.
• So peasant revolts continued.
• Assassination of Alexander in 1881 - an era of reaction set in.
• Some attempt to aid the peasants with their redemption payments, but they were vigorously subjected to the authority of the peasant commune and to the land captains who were a type of magistrate drawn from the nobility.
• Peasant mobility was hindered - they were being reduced to the level of serfs again.
• 1881 to 1905 an era of agricultural stagnation and poverty.
• Peasant society was dividing into distinct classes.
• Firstly, there was the sale of land of the nobility.
• 1877 - 1905 a third went to the wealthy kulaks, a third to town dwellers or cooperative groups, and only a third to the peasants who were the vast majority.
• Emergence of an agricultural proletariat as more and more poor peasants had to take work as paid field workers to the nobles and kulaks.
• The situation was made worse by the increase in population from 74 million in 1860 to 133 million in 1900 thus putting more pressure on the land.
• Price of grain fell between the 1870s and 1890s, and with it fell peasant purchasing power despite an increase in production of 70% from 1880 to 1897.
• Peasants taxed twice as much as the nobility and also affected by indirect taxation.
• Recurrent famines as in 1890-2 which exaggerated the already high death rates even further.
• Hard for peasants to find work in industry because of Russia’s late industrialisation and communal restrictions on mobility, but 100,000 a year in the 1890s migrated to Siberia and the Far East.
• Interest rates on loans to peasants were reduced in 1894, and the period for redemption payments was extended to 1896, but although redistribution was popular it could not end poverty.
• The defeat by Japan and the Revolution of 1905 led to a fundamental rethink regarding Russia’s direction.
• Peter Stolypin was appointed President of the Council of Ministers in July 1906.
• His plan was ‘suppression first…then reform’
• He believed that the latter was a way of reducing the social bitterness on which opposition fed.
• Realised that industrial progress alone could not solve Russia’s greatest problem, namely how to feed the ever growing population.
• The peasants felt insecure and constituted a dangerous social force.
• One of the reasons they had joined Revolution was their fear that the government was about to seize the land of those who had fallen behind with their mortgage payments.
• When the government found out they announced that outstanding payments would be cancelled.
• This tactic is known as ‘de-revolutionising’ the peasants.
• In 1906-7 he implemented measures to restore a sense of security.
• Farmers encouraged to replace strip farming with fenced fields on the Western European pattern.
• Land Bank was set up to fund the independent peasant in the purchase of his land.
• Stolypin called his policy a ‘wager on the strong’ that would establish a class of prosperous productive peasants whose success would make them natural allies of the tsarist system.
• Schemes for the large-scale voluntary resettlement of the peasants to populate remote areas such as Siberia and convert them to food-producing regions and solve the problem of feeding the ever expanding population.
• The reality though was that he had little chance of succeeding because there was so little time and because the peasants were backward and quite resistant to change.
• Strong strata of strong peasant farmers, and the tax returns of the time reveal that a significant number of peasants were paying increasingly higher taxes from their rising profits.
• Conclude that the traditional picture of depressed peasant population fails to acknowledge that there were advances being made in some parts of the country.
• Stolypin estimated that he needed 20 years to achieve what he wanted.
• In the event he got 5; he was assassinated in 1911.
• Russia had 8 years because war erupted in 1914.
• There would still have been problems even if he had lived and even if there had been no war.
• The peasants were suspicious of change and resisted it.
• The strip system was still widespread in 1914, only 10% had been turned into farms as the security of the commune seemed preferable to the risk of farming alone.
• Ministry of Agriculture had begun to lose confidence in the policy.
• By 1916, 2 million peasant households (25% of the total) had left the communes and took legal title to their own land.
• They were further helped by the rise in food prices and the assistance of the Peasant Bank.
• Partly because of these reforms there was a 15% expansion of in land under cultivation between 1901-13.
• Siberia was becoming an important grain growing area.
• Grain exports expanded between 1910-13.
• Expansion in cotton-growing, flax, sugar beet, potatoes and livestock.
• Still much to do however; there were only 166 tractors in Russia.
• The standard of living was still low too; average peasant income being £26 p.a.
• The war in 1914 was to lead to the breakdown of the economy.
• 7 million died in the offensives of 1915-16 and by 1917 15 million peasants had been conscripted. This, plus the taking of resources for the war effort and the closing of the Straits, and the devastation and loss of territory led to food shortages in the countryside and towns.
• Bread riots followed.
• In March 1917, following the fall of the Tsar there were growing seizures of land by the peasants.
• Bolsheviks attracted support by promising ‘peace, bread and land’ and a ‘a republic of Soviets (councils) of Workers, Poor Peasants and Peasants’ Deputies’
• Some peasants were to see improvements in their lot during the period in question, while many more did not.
• Their own conservatism and suspicion of change, and the motivation of the ruling elite in instigating reform to bolster their own position certainly did not help the situation.
• Had peace been maintained there would have been a gradual evolution.
• War being ‘the midwife of revolution’, as Lenin put it, the communist system imposed on Russian agriculture would prevent the modernisation seen in the West until the collapse of that system in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
• Under communism some peasants would be better off, while others would not.