Russia under the Old regime

167

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.