Free The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone Page A

prevented from passing a revolutionary resolution and the nobles of the south seceded in protest. * Production, both on noble and small-holder land, declined. In 1916, less than two-thirds of noble land sown in 1914 was sown with rye and wheat; and some of the most prosperous regions of small-holding farming cut back their output even more. Stavropol, for instance, one of the most fertile regions of Russia, produced only a fifth of the grain in 1916–17 that it had produced in 1913-14.16 More and more, the nobles rented out their often useless land. In Tula, for example, 105 of 138 estates were renting out two-fifths of their land, and would no doubt have sold it if a universal conviction that land would soon go the peasants had not deprived them of buyers. 17
    Food-supply therefore came to depend on the peasant plot. In 1914–15, it had supplied sixty per cent of the army’s grain, and the proportion rose thereafter: sometimes bought directly by military authorities, but usually purchased through middle-men, and latterly banks. The Russian agrarian question is more encrusted with legend than any other subject in the country’s history; and much of the legendry attaches to the question of food-supply in 1916–17. It was suggested that deliveries to the towns and the army were running down because less grain was being produced. This was not at all true. Peasant Russia was not affected by the same factors that affected private land-lords. The peasants were less dependent on sophisticatedmachinery, and they had seldom used fertiliser before 1914—if only because, in Russian circumstances, it blew away. In general, the productive peasant plots did not suffer from a shortage of labour anywhere nearly comparable to that suffered by the private estates. This occurred for reasons that were, by 1914, almost peculiar to Russia. 18 Most of the country’s twenty million peasant households lived in communes, either formal or informal. It was the commune that owned the land; peasant families took it over, usually for a dozen years or so, according to their needs. A large family had mouths to feed, and hands to work the land. It would be assigned a much larger number of strips of land than a smaller household. Natural catastrophe—for instance, famine, destruction of the family house by fire, or pestilence—could literally wipe out a peasant family; and in any case, the father of the family would, one day, have to contemplate the day when his children would grow up, have families of their own, and demand their due share of the communal lands. After a dozen years as substantial farmer, he might find the communal assembly re-partitioning his lands; and in a great many communes throughout Russia, men who had farmed sufficient land for them to be known as ‘prosperous’ peasants * would find themselves reduced to the status of ‘middle’ or even ‘poor’ peasant within a few years. A dimension was thus added, in Russia, to the standard peasant problem of sub-division by inheritance; and although reputable economists rubbed their eyes in disbelief, the system suited Russian conditions surprisingly well. The Tsarist régime supported the system for most of the time, because it made administration easier once emancipation of the, serfs had been proclaimed. The peasants, or most of them, welcomed it as ensuring some kind of equalisation of chances, and most of them stoutly resisted attempts to abolish it: indeed, according to Professor Shanin, even quite wealthy independent small-holders were sometimes anxious to join communes, because they could get even more land that way than they already had.
    This was not a system likely to suffer from labour-shortage. Members of the family might go to the towns, or the army, for some of the year, but they could come back at harvest-time to help the women and old men, and hundreds of thousands seem to have done so—to the factory owners’ eternal lamentation. Moreover, the withdrawal from the