The Agrarian Question in Russia

Lenin’s article on bourgeois land reform. It was written on June 22, 1914, and published in Trudovaya Pravda (Laborers Pravda) No.22 on the same day. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 25 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Lenin attached great importance to the study of the agrarian question in Russia due to the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution, the need to revise the land programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, and the re-examination and analysis of the social and economic development in Russia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Only from 1907 to the time before the October Revolution, Lenin wrote works such as “The Land Programme of the Social-Democratic Party in the First Russian Revolution from 1905-1907”, “The Land Problem in Russia at the End of the 19th Century”, “The Land Occupation in Europe” and “Russia and The Essence of the Land Issue in Russia”. In these works, Lenin studied Russia’s land occupation at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, deeply analyzed Russia’s social and economic development, and discussed the relationship between the land issue and the Russian bourgeois revolution, the nationalization of land and other issues.

Firstly, Lenin pointed out that Russia’s land issue had great significance at present. The feature of the 1905 Movement was that all sectors of Russian society (liberal bourgeois parties, workers’ parties, landlord-bourgeois coalition government, etc.) regarded the land issue as a central focus. Lenin revealed the essence of the Russia’s land issue. He argued that the essence is to carry out bourgeois democratic reform of the existing serfdom. Such reform is to turn all land into public property and nationalize the land.

Lenin expounded his differences with left Narodniks on land reform. Left Narodniks (such as Mr. Vadimov in Brave Thought) stubbornly call the nationalization of bourgeois land “socialization” and blindly followed the purely bourgeois theory about “labor economy” and its development under the “socialization” background. Lenin pointed out that this showed that they did not understand Marx’s theories on political economics and exposed their shift towards bourgeois political economics. Lenin argued that all the land reforms realized in Russia were bourgeois reforms. He always used Marx’s views elucidated in Capital and his other works to analyze these reforms. He pointed out that the application of this method had progressive significance. This method includes complete abolishment serfdom, destroys the monopoly of land possession, eliminates absolute land rent, accelerate the development of agricultural productivity and paves the way for the class struggle by the wage laborers. He called on workers to oppose backward serfdom and support this progressive bourgeois democratic reform. However, for Lenin Marxists should not confuse bourgeois methods with socialist methods.

Lenin wrote many articles in ten years to demonstrate the position of the proletarian party on the land issue, which showed his continuous concern for this issue. He closely linked the land issue with the proletarian revolution and regarded the settlement of the land issue in the bourgeois-democratic revolution as the preparation for the socialist revolution. Such way of thinking not only guided policymaking on land issues, but also had an important methodological significance.