There exists a widespread impression that before 1917 Russia was a “feudal” country in which the Imperial Court, the Church, and a small minority of wealthy nobles owned the bulk of the land, while the peasants either cultivated minuscule plots or worked as tenant farmers. This condition is believed to have been a prime cause of the Revolution. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the image derives from conditions in pre-1789 France, where, indeed, the vast majority of peasants tilled the land of others. It was in such Western countries as England, Ireland, Spain, and Italy (all of which happened to avoid revolution) that ownership of agricultural land was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, sometimes to an extreme degree. (In England in 1873, for example, four-fifths of the acreage was the property of fewer than 7,000 persons; in 1895, only 14 percent of Britain’s cultivated land, exclusive of Ireland, was tilled by its owners, the rest being leased.) Russia, by contrast, was a classic land of small peasant cultivators. Latifundia here existed primarily in the borderlands, in regions taken from Poland and Sweden. At the time of their Emancipation, the ex-serfs received approximately one-half of the land which they had previously tilled. In the decades that followed, with the help of the Land Bank, which offered them credit on easy terms, they bought additional properties, mainly from landlords. By 1905, peasant cultivators owned, either communally or privately, 61.8 percent of the land in private possession in Russia.10 As we shall see, after the Revolution of 1905 the exodus of non-peasant landowners from the countryside accelerated, and in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, peasant cultivators in European Russia owned nine-tenths of the arable land.
Notwithstanding their intent, by 1900 Russia’s communes could no longer assure their members of equitable allotments: over time, larger, stronger households had managed to accumulate more of them as well as to acquire most of the land bought by peasants for private use. In 1893, 7.3 percent of the communal households had no land.11 These landless peasants, called batraki, were one of the four identifiable categories of peasants. The others consisted of peasants whose allotments were entirely communal (the great majority), those who had land both inside and outside the commune, and those (very few in number) who cultivated their own.* Peasants in the two last-named categories were sometimes labeled “kulaks” (“fists”). This term, beloved of radical intellectuals, had no precise economic meaning for the peasants themselves, being applied sometimes to the rich, those who employed hired labor, traded, and lent money, sometimes to the hardworking, thrifty, and sober.12
The physical distribution of land in the villages was exceedingly complicated, due partly to communal practices, partly to the legacy of serfdom. The pre-1861 Russian estate was not a plantation. The custom was for the landlord to divide his arable acreage in two parts, one of which the serf household cultivated for him, the other for itself. The halves were, as a rule, commingled. Under serfdom, the typical Russian village, especially in the northern and western provinces, consisted of a mosaic of long, narrow strips: the strips which the serfs cultivated for the landlord and those which they cultivated for themselves lay side by side. This arrangement, known as cherespolositsa, continued after Emancipation. Frequently, the land which the landlord retained as a result of the Emancipation settlement and now exploited with the help of hired labor remained wedged among the communal holdings. The land which the landlords subsequently sold to peasants, therefore, continued to be held and tilled alongside communal allotments, to the intense annoyance of communal peasants, who hated these private lots, which they called “baby-Ions” (vavilony) and wanted for communal distribution.13
Serfdom bequeathed yet another painful legacy. While allotting the emancipated serf generous quantities of arable land (about five hectares per adult male), the Emancipation Edict left pasture and woodland in the landlord’s possession. Under serfdom, the peasant had enjoyed the rights of grazing cattle and gathering firewood and lumber. These rights he lost once property lines had been drawn. Some landlords began to charge for the use of pasture; others collected tolls for letting peasants’ cattle cross their properties. At the turn of the century, one of the loudest peasant complaints concerned the shortage of grazing land. The peasant had to have access to adequate pasture—ideally, at a ratio of one hectare of pasture to two of arable, but at a very minimum one to five, below which he could not feed his cattle and draft horses.14 Much unhappiness was also caused by the lack of access to forest. In 1905 the most prevalent form of rural violence took the form of cutting lumber.
Russia was widely believed to suffer from an acute shortage of agricultural land. At first sight it may appear surprising that a country as large as Russia should have experienced land shortages (or rural overpopulation, which is the same). And, indeed, Russia had a long way to go to match the population densities of Western Europe. With 130 million inhabitants and 22 million square kilometers of territory, the Empire in 1900 had an overall population density of 6 persons per square kilometer. Even such a young country as the United States had at that time a higher population density (8 per square kilometer). And yet, while the United States suffered endemic labor shortages, which it met by opening its doors to millions of European immigrants, Russia suffocated from rural overcrowding.
The explanation of this seeming paradox lies in the fact that in agricultural countries population densities acquire meaning only by relating the number of inhabitants to that share of the territory which is suitable for farming. Viewed in these terms, Russia was hardly a country of boundless expanses. Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region.* But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.
Densities of this magnitude might have proven tolerable were it not for pre-revolutionary Russia’s extraordinary population growth. With an annual excess of births over deaths on the order of 15 per 1,000, Russia had the highest rate of natural increase in Europe.† The implications of such a rapid population growth for agriculture can be demonstrated statistically. In the Empire of 1900, three-quarters of the population was employed on the land. With an increase of 15 per 1,000 each year and a population of 130 million, 1,950,000 new inhabitants were added annually, 1,500,000 of them in the countryside. Allowing for the very high infant mortality rate, we are left with a million or so additional mouths which the countryside had to feed each year. Given that an average Great Russian household had five members and tilled ten hectares, these figures mean that Russia required annually an additional 2 million hectares of arable land.‡