Free The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone

autumn.
    In theory, agriculture, which supplied the most necessary produce of all, should have profited from inflation, and been able to charge what it liked. No doubt, too, had the various legends about Russian agriculture been true, this would have occurred: that is, if the country’s agriculture had been controlled by capitalist farmers and great estates fully integrated in the buying-and-selling network. But it is a legend that Russia was dominated by great estates. Only about a tenth of the land sown in Russia belonged to such estates, and even then some of that was peasant land in disguise, farmed on ancient manorial principles. 12 Some of the nobles had made something of a living from exploiting their estates—the Yusupovs in Poltava gained a return of eight per cent per annum on their capital—but many of them, in the face of transport-problems and peasant recalcitrance either sold off the land to banks and peasants, or rented out their huge tracts at tiny sums: the Counts Orlov-Davydov, for instance, renting out 250,000 acres on long leases at three roubles per acre per annum. 13 The quantity of grain coming onto the market from such sources was not great: even taking into account the rôle of land-owners as middle-men for their peasants’ produce, it amounted to only thirteen per cent of army purchases in 1914–15, and declined thereafter. Independent small-holders formed a comparable case. They were of course better-placed to exploit their land than the great estates. But there were not many such small-holders, and they hardly supplied more than the great estates: fifteen per cent of army grain in 1914–15.
    Both sets of private land-owners suffered from wartime disabilities that made it impossible for them to increase their production. There was, first of all, the question of labour. It was said that conscription had bitten into the stock of labour, but conscription alone was not the answer, for even the absence of eleven million young peasants in wartime could scarcely dent a rural population known to have a surplus of at least twice this. No doubt conscription, by removing a proportion of the able-bodied young workers, caused more damage than the numbers in question warranted; but the heart of this problem was not conscription alone, but the general drift of the rural population towards the towns, where they could sometimes assemble enough money to return to their communes without having to work again for the land-lord or small-holder. Moreover, neither set could expand production by other means, machinery or fertiliser. Resources had been placed, inevitably, in heavy industry; and imports, whether of machinery or fertiliser, had had to be curtailed for similarreasons. In 1916, only thirteen million roubles’ worth of agricultural machinery was sold, as against 110 million roubles’ worth in 1913, and agricultural machinery as a whole formed about a tenth of all machinery produced in Russia. The stock of machinery on the land aged, and was not replaced. Fertiliser came mainly from abroad, and was reduced, partly because the transport-system had other priorities, partly because foreign exchange could not be made available for it. In 1916, 5,600 tons were used (mainly phosphate) as against ten times as much before the war; the Trans-Siberian railway could accommodate only six waggons of it per day in 1915, and less thereafter. 14 There was even a lack of such items as sacks, allegedly because of speculators, in reality because cottage-industry production had declined. Faced with lack of labour (which half of Russia’s provinces complained was ‘acute’ in 1916), with a three-fold rise in agricultural wages, and a general inability to expand their production by other means, land-owners and small-holders alike found it impossible to produce as much as before. Many nobles faced real hardship, as inflation bit into the rents they collected; a Congress of the United Gentry in November 1916 was only narrowly