The major differences in the living standards of the peasantry were in fact geographic. Commercial farming had taken root in a circular band of regions around the periphery of the old Muscovite centre of Russia during the nineteenth century. In parts of the Baltic the Emancipation of the serfs in 1817 had enabled the local landowners, with access to the Western grain markets, to turn their estates into capitalist farms worked by wage-labourers. In the western Ukraine, too, the nobles had established huge sugar-beet farms. Meanwhile, in the fertile regions of south Russia, the Kuban and the northern Caucasus a wealthy stratum of mixed farmers had emerged from the peasants and the Cossacks. The same was true in western Siberia, where the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway had made it possible for the smallholders to grow rich producing cereals and dairy products for the market. These regions accounted for the national rise in peasant living standards — reflected in their increased spending-power — which recent historians have detected and used to refute the old historical orthodoxy that the peasants were becoming increasingly impoverished before 1917.28 What was emerging, in fact, was a growing divergence in the economic position of the peasantry between the new and relatively affluent areas of commercial farming in the west, the south and the east, on the one hand, and, on the other, the old and increasingly overpopulated central agricultural zone, where the majority of the gentry’s estates were located, and where backward farming methods were unable to maintain all of the peasants on the land. It is no coincidence that after 1917 the richer agricultural regions became strongholds of counter-revolution, whereas the impoverished central zone remained loyal to the revolution.
In the central agricultural zone of Russia there were few signs of commercialism and the main inequalities in the living standards of the peasants were explained by local differences in the quality of the soil or by historic legacies stretching back to the days of serfdom. So, for example, villages made up of former state peasants (i.e. peasants settled on state land) tended to be more land-rich than villages of former serfs. The market economy was weak in these regions and most peasants were engaged in a natural system of production. They sold a small amount of produce and perhaps some handicrafts, the product of their winter labours, in order to pay off their taxes and buy a few household goods, but otherwise their production was geared towards the basic food requirements of the family. According to a zemstvo survey of the 1880s, two out of three peasant households in the central Russian province of Tambov were unable to feed themselves without getting into debt. ‘In our village’, recalled Semenov, ‘only five or six families managed to survive the whole year on their own. As for the rest, some got by until the Mikhailov holiday [in early November], some until Christmas, and some until Shrovetide, but then they had to borrow to buy grain.’ It was the tragedy of millions of peasants that constant debt and taxes forced them to sell off their grain in the autumn, when supplies were plentiful and prices were low, only to buy it back in the hungry spring, when prices were at their peak. Every volost township had its handful of usurers and merchants — the peasants called them ‘kulaks’ — who bought up the peasants’ grain cheaply in the autumn and, six months later, sold it back to them at twice the price. Theirs was a hard and cruel greed, the sort to be found, as one contemporary put it, in ‘a thoroughly uneducated man who has made his way from poverty to wealth and has come to consider money-making, by whatever means, as the only pursuit to which a rational being should devote himself.’ Whole villages were indebted to these ‘kulaks’, and many were forced to sell part of their land to repay them. If this was ‘capitalism’, as the Bolsheviks insisted, it was of a primitive kind.29
The number of ‘capitalist’ peasants (those employing permanent wage-labour) was probably no more than 1 per cent.30 That more of them did not emerge had much to do with the periodic redistribution of the communal allotment land; and with the fact that the richest peasant farms, which also tended to have the most members, customarily divided their property when the adult sons were married and ready to set up new family households of their own.fn11 In other words, the peasants failed to become capitalists because they rarely held on to their property for more than a generation.
Nor did peasant poverty have much to do with the development of capitalism. The basic problem in the central agricultural zone was that the peasantry’s egalitarian customs gave them little incentive to produce anything other than babies. The birth-rate in Russia (at about fifty births for every 1,000 people every year) was nearly twice the European average during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the highest rates of all were in the areas of communal tenure where the holding of land was fixed according to family size. The astronomical rise of the peasant population (from 50 to 79 million during 1861–1897) resulted in a growing shortage of land. By the turn of the century 7 per cent of the peasant households had no land at all, while one in five had only a tiny plot of less than one desyatina (2.7 acres). This may seem odd in a country the size of Russia. But in central Russia, where most of the peasantry lived, the density of the population was similar to that of Western Europe. The average peasant allotment, at 2.6 desyatiny in 1900, was comparable in size to the typical smallholding in France or Germany. But Russian peasant farming was much less intensive, with grain yields at barely half the level reached in the rest of Europe. The light wooden scratch plough used by the majority of Russian peasants with a single horse, or a pair of oxen, was similar to the aratrum used in the Roman Empire and vastly inferior to the heavy iron ploughs used in Western Europe with a four-or six-horse team. The small hand sickle was still being used on most peasant farms in Russia on the eve of the First World War, more than a half-century after it had been replaced by the scythe and the heavy reaping hook in the West. Sowing, threshing and winnowing were all done by hand, long after they had been mechanized elsewhere. The application of manure, let alone of chemical fertilizers, was far behind European standards. And the advanced field rotations, root crops alternating with cereals, which had been introduced into Western Europe during the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, were still largely unknown in backward peasant Russia.31
Under these circumstances, lacking the capital to modernize their farms, the only way for the peasants to feed the growing number of mouths was to bring more land under the plough. The easiest way to achieve this within the three-field system was by reducing the size of the fallow land — and thousands of villages did just that. But the long-term effect was only to make the situation worse, since the soil was exhausted by being overworked, while livestock herds (the main source of fertilizer) were reduced because of the shortage of fallow and other pasture lands. By the turn of the century one in three peasant households did not even have a horse.32 To cultivate their land they had to hire horses or else attach themselves to the plough. There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.
The most tempting solution to the peasantry’s hunger for land could be seen every day from their villages — in the form of the squire’s estate. ‘Every single peasant’, wrote Prince Lvov, ‘believed from the very bottom of his soul that one day, sooner or later, the squire’s land would belong to him.’ One-third of the arable land in Russia was owned by nobles in the 1870s. By 1905 this proportion had declined to 22 per cent, mainly as a result of peasant communal purchases (the peasant share of landownership had increased in these years from 58 per cent to 68 per cent). Moreover, by this time about one-third of the gentry land was rented out to the peasantry. Yet this should not deceive us into thinking, as so many rightwing historians have claimed, that there was no land problem. Most of the peasants who rented land from the gentry did so under the pressure of poverty rather than of wealth: with the rapid rise of the peasant population they had come to depend on renting extra land to feed themselves and their families. For this reason, they were often prepared to pay a much higher rent than the land was worth in strictly economic terms. It was the readiness of the peasant family to work itself into the ground in order to feed itself that fuelled the seven-fold increase in rental values, on which the late-nineteenth-century gentry lived.33