abc123
Banned
As far as I understand, the increase was due to communal land being distributed as private land in the big land reform of 1906 - free peasants in communes became private owners of the land they had always worked on. There was no re-distribution of land. the land given to this class when the serfs were emancipated in 1861 was too small to grow any cash crops or surplus grain enough to gain capital for investment.
In average, the increase of land held by a free farmer household was 1/8 of a desyatin (a desyatin is about 10 000 square meters), so about 1 375 square meters 1861-1915.
In Russia 1914, the Tsar and the Imperial Family held 143 million desyatin of land, free peasants 170 million desyatin, the nobility 42 million desyatin. The church also held substantial lands, probably about 30 millioon desyatin.
50% of the free peasants still lived in communes (about as effective as later Soviet kolchoses). Only about 15% of the free peasants were wealthy enough to use artificial fertilizer (these were the Kulaks), the others barely managed to feed themselves and had no surplus to invest in their farming.
In 1913, 6,5 million wooden ploughs were used, and 4,5 million iron and steel ploughs. That tells quite a bit of how little money the Russian peasantry had to invest in better tools.
Well, I did said that the process will go SLOW. But from 1914. until today is 100 years, that's pretty big amount of time. And Bih estates aren't nescesarry a bad thing for some country. Slowly they will be transformed in pretty modern farms...
The bottom thing is- Imperial Russia was a net exporter of grain, and would most likely stay so. Vommunist Russia didn't had enough food to feed it's population.
So, better than OTL.