Unable to get a living from their small and comparatively unproductive
farms, and equally unable to find work elsewhere, the peasants clamor
loudly for more land; and when, as the result of a bad harvest,
their situation becomes intolerable, they are seized with a sort of
berserker madness and break out into fierce bread riots, which
frequently end in regular campaigns of pillage and arson. In 1905 they
attacked and plundered the estates of more than two thousand landed
proprietors and inflicted upon the latter a loss of more than
$15,000,000. The disorder extended to one hundred and sixty-one
districts and covered thirty-seven per cent. of the area of European
Russia.
Such alarming evidences of wide-spread distress and discontent
naturally forced the agrarian question upon the attention not only of
the government but of the people's representatives in parliament. The
Constitutional Democrats in the first Duma proposed to obtain more
land for the common people by following the example set by Alexander
II. when he emancipated the serfs, namely, by expropriating in part,
and at a fixed price, the estates of the nobility, and selling the
land thus acquired to the peasants upon terms of deferred payment
extending over a long time. The government of Nicholas II., however,
would not listen to this proposition, and the Stolypin ministry is now
trying to satisfy the urgent need of the peasants by selling to them
land that belongs to the state or the crown; by making it easier for
them to buy land through the Peasants' Bank; and by facilitating
emigration to Siberia, where there is supposed to be land enough for
all. None of these measures, however, seems likely to afford more than
partial and temporary relief. Most of the state and crown land in
European Russia is not suitable for cultivation, or it is situated in
northern provinces where agriculture is unprofitable on account of
extremely unfavorable climatic conditions. According to Professor
Maxim Kovalefski, the crown lands of European Russia comprise about
22,000,000 acres. Of the 4,933,000 acres that are arable and well
located, 4,420,000 acres are already leased to the peasants upon terms
that are quite as favorable as they could hope to obtain by purchase,
and the remaining 513,000 acres would afford them no appreciable
relief. In order to give them the same per capita allowance of land
that they had at the time of the emancipation, it would be necessary
to add about 121,000,000 acres to their present holdings, and no such
amount of arable state or crown land is available.[38]
From the operations of the Peasants' Bank little more is to be
expected. In the twenty years of its history it has bought about
17,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, but has disposed of only
3,600,000 acres to peasant communes. The rest it has sold to
associations or land-speculating companies. The extreme need of the
people, moreover, has so forced up the price of land in the black-soil
belt as to make acquisition of it by the poorer class of peasants
almost impossible. Between November 16, 1905, and August 31, 1906, the
bank bought about 5,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, at an
average price of $23.30 per acre, and resold it on bond and mortgage
to individuals, companies, or peasant communes at an average rate of
$24.44 per acre. Comparatively little of this land, however, went into
the possession of the class that needed it most. The 4,997 peasant
families in the district of Voronezh, who can make both ends meet only
by limiting themselves to a per capita allowance of a pound and a
third of rye flour a day, are not financially able to buy land at
$24.44 per acre, and this is the economic condition of hundreds of
thousands of families in the central provinces.[39]
Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing
population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the
government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if
unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of
cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior,
openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was
not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the
bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the
distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that
nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to
their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to
1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands
in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901
and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In
other words, more than half of the peasants who made a journey of
fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could
not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had
hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]
If the government fails to relieve the land famine by selling its own
land reserves, by making loans to the people through the Peasants'
Bank, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, it will find itself
threatened by two very serious dangers. On the one hand, the
diminishing power of the peasants to pay taxes will ultimately affect
the national revenue and impair the revenue of the state; and, on the
other hand, the discontent and exasperation of the great class from
which soldiers are drawn will sooner or later infect the army and
lessen the power of the autocracy to enforce its authority. The
government is now drafting about 460,000 recruits a year, and these
conscripts not only share the feelings of the peasantry as a whole,
but belong largely to the very class that has recently been in revolt.
Tens of thousands of them either participated in or sympathized with
the agrarian riots of 1905-6; and not a few of them, remembering how
the troops were then sent against them, solemnly promised their
fellow-villagers, when they joined the colors, that they would never
fire upon their brothers, even if ordered to do so by the Czar
himself. An army of this temper is a weapon that may become very
dangerous to its wielders; and if the discontent and hostility of the
peasants continue to increase with increasing impoverishment, and if
the hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits carry their discontent and
hostility into their barracks, the government may have to deal with
mutinies and revolts much more serious than those of Cronstadt,
Sveaborg, and the Crimea. Certain it is that an army is not likely to
remain loyal when there is wide-spread disaffection in the population
from which it is drawn; and in the present condition, temper, and
attitude of the peasants we may find reasons enough for the "trouble
to come" that Mr. Milyukov predicts.