For Want of a Word – Stolypin endures
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That question is the very base of the whole discussion.
If land was worked before the war by the peasants, then this very same land can be handed over to the peasants.
That is my whole point.
But with you interrupting that question may never get answered so the discussion can not be resolved.
And the false nerrative that it was impossible to redistribute the land lives on.
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Please answers the question without running to a mod
Do you know that land was worked by peasants before the war?
Please answer that question.
Before the war land was worked by the peasants, just take this land and hand it over to the same peasants.
Now there is far less chance for a revolution because the peasants have what they want.
After the civil war the land was handed over to the peasants, but now in this scenario the same thing happens but without millions of dead, years of civil war, and tremendous damage to the land.
Also one generation of loyalty has been gained towards who ever does this. For example if a political party does this, then that party is almost guaranteed election victories for one generation.
There were about 250,000 major land owners, and there were more than 100 millions peasants. Just hand the land over.
During the civil war, the whites would promise land reform, and areas and cities would swing to the whites, once the whites got control over the area, those promises would quickly evaporate, and the people would then swing to the reds who promised land reform.
Do land reform without the millions of dead, and without a civil war.
You gain the votes of over 100 million and lose the votes of 250,000
Also forgive all debts the peasants have. Many peasants were in debt to landowners and the nobility who controled the land bank who sold peasants the worst land at exuberant prices. Forgive all the peasants debts.
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The report was NOT made by him.
You can either play be the rules or sit on the bench. Your choice.
Choose wisely.
Your comments here make it impossible to have a debate.
Because basically he has now been given a free pass to never acknowledge this whole issue.
And simply keep on saying what he has been saying unopposed.
The very same land that was worked by the peasants can be given to the same peasants.
But that can now never be pointed out because I need to "Choose wisely", which means basically surrender or get banned.
You tell me how to point out that fact, tell me exactly how to write it, and I will write it exactly as you say.
How do I point out that the very same land the peasants worked can be handed over to the peasants.
Tell me how to write that, and I will write exactly as you say.
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Zimbabwe tried the just hand the land over theory, result famine as the new owners crashed productivity for reasons including , not planning in a cooperative manner , lack of investment, not wanting to pay for joint infrastructure etc. As for forgiving debts, that's a policy that sounds good in theory but again usually just ends up wrecking the tax base and causes economic collapse. The Reds as they were going to destroy all the existing economic structures and repudiate foreign debt anyway just did not care ( and ended up grabbing harvests and causing famines )
Those are two different things.
In Russia the peasants worked the land, and their laborers went to the land owners.
In Zimbabwe the rulers took the land from farmers, and gave it to cronies and others who had no experience in farming.
And in addition to that, this about preventing a civil war, the people want land, so give it to them.
After the civil war in the original timeline the land was handed over, just skip the civil war part and hand the land over.
No what it means, specifically is stop treating every post like it is an artillery barrage.
You have managed to create a scenario that is so toxic that you can not even conceptualize how to continue a civil conversation. If you had asked the question I bolded in your quote above you would have been fine. You didn't. You tried, really hard, to pick a fight.
Don't pick fights.
Russian peasants already had land in communal ownership and stolypin famous reforms were about giving them individual plots of land
So @alexmilman argued the following
So for you to rebut this post, you need a source to confirm your counter claim. Not
But something in the lines of: I've read a source like
Economic Development of the late Russian Empire in Regional Perspective - Yale Economics
(Not sure if the source applies, but you get my point I hope)
Edit: this looks like a nice source to work with
Then Alex can offer his counter source and so on. Then you get a proper back and forth. @CalBear will applaud such a back and forth id imagine, while just doing blanket statements is counter productive. Let's look at it from a rather idiotic premise: if I was a flat earther. Imagine you saying the earth is round. And I go, "no, you are wrong on every issue". You then refer to some creditable sources that prove your point. I then ask in 3 different ways something along the lines of "you don't understand" or "you are not getting it". Who's answer is more creditable yours or mine? Is it an adult discussion or just a yes/no back and forth? Cause even if flat earth me would bring "facts" to prove the earth is flat, my sources never would be more creditable than yours.
So to circle back: if you want to discredit someone's point, you need to back it up with a source on which your claim is build. Then we can have a discussion on the accuracy of said source and decide whether that trumps the original claim. The original claim then produces the counter source and we decide on the merit of that source and so on and so forth.
That would be a mod friendly educational discussion.
Who owns that debt, who's going to pay for that debt to be voided, how will you be a reliable partner if you just change the rules?
Edit 3: FYI from 2nd link:
So I'd argue that this source suggest that the issue is ownership, but not individual ownership. It argues the commune system needs reform. Sounds very creditable to me. So I think Alex was right and even you are somewhat right. Hopefully we can now switch to a discussion on how to reform the communes, because they were not completely bad
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Tiptoeing cautiously into the crossfire...
As I understand it, there were two major problems with late-Tsarist Russian agriculture and they were pushing in opposite directions.
The economic problem was that the bulk of the land, whether formally owned by peasants, communes, landlords, estates or the government, was divided up into individual plots too small to be efficient and worked by peasants too poor to afford tractors, fertilisers or modern tools. Some sort of land consolidation was therefore necessary if productivity was to be improved.
The political problem was that the peasants both wanted to own their land and vigorously opposed consolidation, which they saw as peasants losing their land and being forced back to a modernised version of the old estate system. There was visceral opposition to the idea of a free market in land, which was seen as leading inevitably to consolidation and the peasants being reduced to landless labourers while "capitalists" or "speculators" reaped the profits. Many of the peasants were communal in outlook, but their communism stopped at the village boundary - they were happy to see the village commune administering the village lands "fairly", but they resented any attempts by outsiders - be they landlords, officials or commissars - to stick an oar in.
Stolypin and other Tsarist ministers attempted to square the circle with a land-reform system which allowed peasants to purchase land outright, hoping to turn them into smallholders with a stake in the system and an incentive to develop their holdings. It didn't really succeed at either level - productivity did not greatly increase because the holdings were still small and the peasants were still poor (especially after having to buy the land - hence the complaint that the system just replaced peonage with debt-slavery). And while it somewhat defused peasant hostility towards the government it increased tensions at the local level (no-one wants to see their neighbour get above themselves, and complaints that the kulaks were enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow-peasants were not a Soviet fabrication).
Then there's the wrinkle that while everyone was focussing on land-reform and the condition of the peasantry, they were ignoring the most disaffected and potentially dangerous faction in society - the industrial workers. This was one of the reasons the government was caught on the hop by the Revolution - the countryside was mostly quiet in 1917, the uprising came from workers and soldiers in Petrograd.
As I understand it, there were two major problems with late-Tsarist Russian agriculture and they were pushing in opposite directions.
The economic problem was that the bulk of the land, whether formally owned by peasants, communes, landlords, estates or the government, was divided up into individual plots too small to be efficient and worked by peasants too poor to afford tractors, fertilisers or modern tools. Some sort of land consolidation was therefore necessary if productivity was to be improved.
The political problem was that the peasants both wanted to own their land and vigorously opposed consolidation, which they saw as peasants losing their land and being forced back to a modernised version of the old estate system. There was visceral opposition to the idea of a free market in land, which was seen as leading inevitably to consolidation and the peasants being reduced to landless labourers while "capitalists" or "speculators" reaped the profits. Many of the peasants were communal in outlook, but their communism stopped at the village boundary - they were happy to see the village commune administering the village lands "fairly", but they resented any attempts by outsiders - be they landlords, officials or commissars - to stick an oar in.
Stolypin and other Tsarist ministers attempted to square the circle with a land-reform system which allowed peasants to purchase land outright, hoping to turn them into smallholders with a stake in the system and an incentive to develop their holdings. It didn't really succeed at either level - productivity did not greatly increase because the holdings were still small and the peasants were still poor (especially after having to buy the land - hence the complaint that the system just replaced peonage with debt-slavery). And while it somewhat defused peasant hostility towards the government it increased tensions at the local level (no-one wants to see their neighbour get above themselves, and complaints that the kulaks were enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow-peasants were not a Soviet fabrication).
Then there's the wrinkle that while everyone was focussing on land-reform and the condition of the peasantry, they were ignoring the most disaffected and potentially dangerous faction in society - the industrial workers. This was one of the reasons the government was caught on the hop by the Revolution - the countryside was mostly quiet in 1917, the uprising came from workers and soldiers in Petrograd.
@Merrick very productive comment.
As I see it, the Stolypin Reforms didn't fail and neither succeed. There was simply to little time to judge them. After all, they were moderated after 1910. Basically there were 4 years of trying to square thr circle as you put it and 4 years of a very moderate reformist drive. Eight years in total -one of which was during insurrection- is way too little time to actually judge the success of the reforms.
Stolypin had to rely on the zemstva to enforce his reforms. He needed local authorities to work with him, since at the beginning had tried to use central government agents that ended as a scandal: too few, not well trained and above all, not familiar with the local conditions of each commune. Suffice to say that a lot of zemstva resisted to assist him and took the central governments money with the intent to invest in the communes. Stolypin's agrarian policy was firmly opposed by both conservatives and left, while he received support from progressive conservativesand liberals. Now that a lot of the nobles who were in control of a lot of zemstva are dead due to being an officer class, perhaps there will be less opposition.
Now there is a great opportunity to enforce participation of smallholder kulaks in local government as the nobility is decimated. However, I am afraid that Stolypin and his progressive conservatives did not envision such a radical break with tradition. As I see it, giving local political power to the freeholders would assist in the reforms, but who was willing to do such thing?
At the same time, there was another movement in the russian countryside: the formulation of cooperatives. To quote "
Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914"
There is a silver lining though: a whole new class of agronomists will be ready to get to work with peasant agriculturalists. Enrollment in agronomic schools increased from a few hundred in 1906, to 20,000 in 1914.
In general it seems there were a lot of local variations and developments. The agrarian issue is a difficult one to address even with a century of academic research on the topic. I am very interested to see what the author is planning.
As I see it, the Stolypin Reforms didn't fail and neither succeed. There was simply to little time to judge them. After all, they were moderated after 1910. Basically there were 4 years of trying to square thr circle as you put it and 4 years of a very moderate reformist drive. Eight years in total -one of which was during insurrection- is way too little time to actually judge the success of the reforms.
Stolypin had to rely on the zemstva to enforce his reforms. He needed local authorities to work with him, since at the beginning had tried to use central government agents that ended as a scandal: too few, not well trained and above all, not familiar with the local conditions of each commune. Suffice to say that a lot of zemstva resisted to assist him and took the central governments money with the intent to invest in the communes. Stolypin's agrarian policy was firmly opposed by both conservatives and left, while he received support from progressive conservativesand liberals. Now that a lot of the nobles who were in control of a lot of zemstva are dead due to being an officer class, perhaps there will be less opposition.
Now there is a great opportunity to enforce participation of smallholder kulaks in local government as the nobility is decimated. However, I am afraid that Stolypin and his progressive conservatives did not envision such a radical break with tradition. As I see it, giving local political power to the freeholders would assist in the reforms, but who was willing to do such thing?
At the same time, there was another movement in the russian countryside: the formulation of cooperatives. To quote "
Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914"
There is a silver lining though: a whole new class of agronomists will be ready to get to work with peasant agriculturalists. Enrollment in agronomic schools increased from a few hundred in 1906, to 20,000 in 1914.
In general it seems there were a lot of local variations and developments. The agrarian issue is a difficult one to address even with a century of academic research on the topic. I am very interested to see what the author is planning.
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Both of you are making very good points. Here are some additional background. Author whom I quoted, Professor A. Tchelintsev, was Russian and then Soviet specialist in the agriculture and proponent of the individual peasant landownership (for which he was, predictably "criticized" by the Soviets). His conclusion was that by 1916 Russia had an overwhelmingly peasant agriculture (in the terms of landownership, possession of a livestock and agricultural production) to a degree greatly exceeding Britain or France. Taking into an account that he was using the official statistics of 1905 and 1916, this conclusion is hardly disputable.
Here goes the fundamental problem. During the reign of NII population of the empire grew by 60 millions, mostly peasants. As a result, an average land slot per male peasant decreased from 4.6 десятин (*) in 1860 to 2.6 in 1900 (in the Southern Russia even to 1.7). For comparison, for the settlers in Siberia a norm per household was 15 десятин. After all lands of the imperial family ( 6M десятин) had been added to the pool in 1906 (?) by the evil NII the private non-peasant ownership amounted to less than 40M десятин. Disregard impracticality of the idea (the SRs and Narodniks were not the brightest apples on any tree), divide it by 100M peasants and you are getting 0.4 десятин per head while the need at least 7-11. Now, there were landless peasants (in 1905 up to 40M according to https://von-hoffmann.livejournal.com/704858.html) who either worked as the hired hands (on various levels of skills and compensation) or had been renting the land (a popular example, the non-Cossacks on the lands of the Don Cossack Host). Divide land between them and rest of the peasants gets nothing while these landless peasants are still getting close to nothing. This arithmetic applies to 1905 when the peasants owned 143M десятин, non-peasants - 35M and imperial family - 6M. Between 1905 and 1916 the imperial 6M had been gone and a share of the estates dropped so that the peasants owned 89.3% of the agricultural land. In other words, share of the confiscation per household would be even less. Not to mention that it would be impossible to divide that land equally among al, peasants because it was not spread equally in all European Russia. Of course, mostly illiterate peasants could not knew the details but this was not the case with the educated leadership of the revolutionary parties who simply used slogans to achieve their political goals.
In OTL after elimination of the big landownerships (including those well under 50 hectares) had been done in 1919 (17.2M) and 1920 (23.3M) the peasants ended up with a pretty much fat big nothing.
Another aspect of the confiscation was financial. Most of the estates (aka, plots greater than 50 десятин) were mortgaged in the banks and the peasant uprisings and lootings of the February of 1917 resulted in a crush of the ruble.
In OTL the government came with a program which was intended to resolve the crisis (at least temporarily):
1. Legal clarification of the land holdings.
2. Transfer to the peasants lands owned by the imperial family (6M десятин)
3. Massive resettlement of the peasants to the lands of Siberia and Far East which became accessible due to the completion of the Trans Sib (IIRC, Stolypin planned to resettle up to 30M but in a reality 2.8M relocated between 1908 and 1913 with a total between 1890 and 1914 of over 10 million.
4. Government investments into the infrastructure and the railroads
5. Creating attractive climate for the investments into Russia (became possible after Witte's financial reform of 1897 )
It was expected that implementation of that program would require 20 years.
Needless to say that majority of the peasants did resist the Stolypin reforms and in February 1917 the "peasants" had been looting not only the "estates" (**) but also the peasants who used reform to get an individual land slot. Promotion of the advanced methods, elimination of the communal ownership, creation of the cooperatives were the way to go even within the "peasant model".
_______
(*) Десятина was a rectangle 80x30 or 60x40 саженей, approximately 1 hectare.
(**) This was just a destruction pure and simple: according by the contemporary reports they were destroying agricultural equipment, looting the houses (how about Rachmaninov's piano and Block's library, sure these were clear instruments of oppression), etc.
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Well, we are getting to the "semantics". In pre-revolutionary Russia "kulak" was, usually, a "rural capitalist" who owned mills, shops, was buying and reselling agricultural products, used the hired help and, generally, was a "мироед" ("exploited" the community by providing services it needed). These people had been hated, especially by the poorest peasants who were glorified by the liberal writers as "he is working to death and drinks himself half-dead" (perhaps without that "half-dead" part the poor peasant would be at least somewhat better off).
The Soviets eliminated this class and assigned the label to a well-off peasant who used a hired help but also worked themselves on the land. But you are right: it is enough to read the Soviet writers of that period to find out that these new "kulaks" had been hated. When the officials said that this is OK, they were plainly looted (see, for example, "Podnyataya Tselina" where one of these kulaks is a former Red Army soldier who took the promises of the Soviets seriously and worked hard, unlike his more "conscious" friends who considered his hard work as a betrayal of the ideals and came to confiscate his property).
Would it be plausible to send settlers in northern Manchuria that Russia still controlled? What about Turkestan?
I remember reading that a count Pahlen had proposed a slow rural colonization of Turkestan along with organizing zemstva for the settlers.
I remember reading that a count Pahlen had proposed a slow rural colonization of Turkestan along with organizing zemstva for the settlers.
marathag
Banned
At this time, my Grandfather was farming with horses in the upper Midwest.
However, there were cooperatives that could be joined to get better prices on Seed, and all the rest.
2nd, There were Steam Traction engines around( gas tractors just recently being introduced) had by wealthier Farmers who had the cast to purchase one of those Iron Monsters
So to the advantage of both, he would offer to plow his neighbors fields, for a percentage of the crop at harvest.
That way, more land could be plowed, at a far faster rate, getting your crops planted sooner.
More growing time, better yields. More crop acres, bigger harvests
Same for harvesttime. Combines rather than hand harvesting. Faster, one Farmer could effectively work far more land without killing himself and his sons from the extra work.
In a few years, IC Tractors were a fraction the price of the Steamers, so more individuals could finance tractors on their own. More machinery replaces horses, so lessens the need for set aside acre for fodder to feed the horses, so that land could be used for sellable crops
Production raised the amout, and as economics go, too much supply, prices drop
So the '20s wasn't a great time to be a farmer.
But he owned his own land, even if in debt.
There was no need to send them to Manchuria because the agricultural potential of the Siberia and Russian Far East had been exploited to, at best, 20 - 30%. Speaking of which, the process was going other way around: the Chinese and Korean farmers had been settling in the Russian Far East region and there was a growing number of the Chinese workers and small businesses all over the Russian Empire (something like 10,000 of them had been deployed at the construction of the Murmansk RR during WWI so you may get an idea of how widely did they spread).
As for the CA, the Northern Kazakhstan (Southern Siberia) was one of the big resettlement areas. As for the rest, after completion in 1906 of the Tashkent RR and opening of the direct communication with Orenburg there was a considerable influx of the Russian settlers handled by a special Resettlement Commission in St-Petersburg. Can't tell anything about the numbers but squeezing the local population out of the limited resources of water and agricultural land resulted in 1916 in Basmach Uprising which was cruelly suppressed with the migration of some locals into China.
Thank-you, I didn't know that. You clearly know more about Russian rural society of the period than me - I've only read popular Western histories and they tend to skip over everything between the peasants and the ruling class.
It occurs to me that traditionalists, liberals and socialists alike all had their own rather idealised images of the peasantry and none of them fitted particularly closely to reality.