Finally, the land settlement contained inequities which over the long run produced very pernicious economic consequences. The Emancipation settlement left in the hands of landlords the bulk of the meadow land and forest which under serfdom the peasants had freely shared with them. Whereas a well-balanced rural economy in Russia required that
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every two acres of arable be matched by one acre of meadow, in Russia around 1900 the ratio was 3:1 and in places 4:1. Lumber and firewood were a constant bone of contention between peasants and landlords.
Common to all the human flaws in the Emancipation settlement was an excess of caution. The settlement was, if anything, too carefully thought out and therefore too rigid; it allowed too little scope for self-correction. A more liberal, more flexible arrangement might have caused more trouble at first but in the long run it would have been better able to absorb the kind of pressures outside human control which in the end undermined it altogether; little revolutions might have prevented the big one.
Of these natural pressures the most devastating was the sudden spurt in population; a phenomenon which affected not only the one-time serfs, but all who made their living off the land. In 1858, Russia had 68 million inhabitants; in 1897, I25 million. Its compounded annual rate of population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century was i-8 per cent; the corresponding figure in south-western Europe was 0-4-0-5 per cent and in north-western Europe, 0-7-1 -i per cent. The overwhelming majority of the new people, of course, was born in the rural districts of European Russia, where between 1858 and 1897 the population increased by some 50 per cent without a corresponding increase in resources, as yields remained pitifully low. At the turn of the century, the average net income from a desiatina (2-7 acres) of land (arable and meadow) in Russia was 3-77 rubles, or not quite $2.00 in the then US currency. In the province of Moscow in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, where the average net per desiatina was about 5.29 rubles and the average peasant holding 7.5 desiatinas (about 20 acres), the net income was just below 40 rubles a year, or 4 ($20.00). If one counts the peasant's labour as wages, and adds to it his outside earnings, the most generous estimate of a farming family's net income in the Moscow region in the 1890s would come to 130-190 rubles ( 13-20 in British currency of the time) which fell far short of its needs.24 The imperial government which alone had the capital to invest in the amelioration of Russian agriculture preferred to place it in railways and heavy industry, although it drew the bulk of its revenues from the countryside.
The combined pressure of excessive fiscal burdens, social and economic disabilities and an uncontrollable population growth created a situation which made it increasingly difficult for the Russian peasant to support himself from agriculture. In 1900, it was estimated, he covered only between a quarter and a half of his needs from farming; the remainder he had to make up in some other way. The solution readiest at hand was to hire himself out to landlords or rich peasants as a labourer,
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or else to lease land and till it either on a sharecrop basis or in return for various services; in the latter event, he reverted to the status of a semi-serf. In 1905, peasants residing in European Russia held outright (mostly communally) 160 million desiatinas, and leased another 20-25 million, leaving only 40-45 million of cultivable land in non-peasant hands. (The state and crown owned, in addition, 153 million desiatinas, but nearly all of this land was either forest or soil unsuitable for cultivation; the arable was largely on lease to peasants.) Still, they did not have enough. The Russian peasant knew no other way of augmenting his food supply than by putting more land under the plough, and there simply was not enough unclaimed land to accommodate a population growing at so fast a rate. The peasants' belief in an imminent national 'black repartition' aggravated their plight, because they often refused to. buy land offered them for purchase on advantageous terms. Some of them preferred to till the land until it was utterly exhausted than to pay for that which would be theirs before long for nothing.
The northern peasant suffered from an additional handicap. He had traditionally earned a large portion of his supplementary income from household industries. This source of income began to dry up with the development of modern mechanical industries. The crude cloth, shoes, utensils or hardware produced in cottages during the long winter months could not compete either in quality or price with machine-made products. Thus at the time when the peasant stood in greatest need of supplementary income he was deprived of it by industrial competition.
Finally, the rural crisis was exacerbated by a spontaneous social development, the dissolution of the joint family. As soon as the personal authority of the landlord and official over them had been lifted peasants split up their common properties and broke up into individual households. This was decidedly a regressive step from the point of view of rural productivity. The peasants apparently knew this to be the case, yet they not only did not want to live under the same roof with their parents and kin but preferred not to work joindy with them. The authority of the bolshak waned and with it weakened an important stabilizing force in the village.
As can be readily seen, there was no easy solution to die Russian agrarian crisis as it unfolded towards the end of the nineteendi century. The problem was not, as is often thought, mere shortage of land; nor was the solution to take land away from landlords and state and turn it over to the peasants. The entire rural economy was enmeshed in interrelated difficulties. The economic crisis enhanced the peasant's anarchist proclivities. The muzhik, whom foreigners at the end of the eighteenth century described as naturally gay and good natured, travellers around 1900 depict as sullen and hostile.
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This ugly mood, exacerbating the peasants' instinctive hostility to the outside world, created at the beginning of the twentieth century a situation ripe for violence. It needed only some outward sign of weakening of state authority for the village to explode. This signal was given in the winter of 1904-5 by the liberal intelligentsia which through the Union of Liberation launched an open campaign of meetings and assemblies to demand a constitution. The government whose forces were tied down on the Far Eastern front against the Japanese had to temporize, and by so doing created the impression it was not averse to some kind of constitutional arrangement. In the confusion which ensued, the bureaucracy alternated concessions with brutal shows of strength. In January 1905, after troops had fired on the peaceful procession of workers marching to the Winter Palace, the cities were thrown into turmoil. The village, held in the grip of winter, had to await the coming of the thaw. As soon as the snow had melted and the ice on the rivers had broken, the peasantry went on the rampage, looting and burning estates and appropriating what they had so long coveted, namely the landlord's land. Once the situation was brought under control (1906-7) the government undertook a belated agrarian reform. Redemption Payments were abolished. Disappointed in the commune's failure to act as a stabilizing force, the government issued an edict on 9 November 1906 which allowed peasants to consolidate their holdings and leave the commune without its permission to set up individual farmsteads; the commune's authority over peasant movement through passport control was abolished. The government now appropriated large sums to finance the resettlement eastward of peasants from the overpopulated black earth provinces. Money was also set aside to help them purchase land from landlords. The consequences of these measures were indeed gratifying. In 1916, self-employed peasants (i.e. those who did not use hired labour) owned in European Russia outright about two-thirds of the cultivated land in private possession; with the leased land included, they had at their disposal nearly 90 per cent of such land. They also owned nine-tenths of the livestock.25