The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

Lenin wrote this in November and December 1907, in the wreckage of a defeat. The revolution of 1905 had been beaten back, Stolypin's coup had dissolved the Second Duma that June, and the peasant risings were over. Out of that quiet came the most patient and statistical thing he ever wrote: not a pamphlet of the barricades but a book of land returns.

Its ostensible subject is a quarrel inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party over the wording of its agrarian programme - nationalisation of the land, the Bolshevik demand for transfer to a democratic state; municipalisation, the Menshevik demand for transfer to local authorities; and the peasants' own instinct for outright division among the tillers.

What is strong in it is the refusal to argue from principle rather than from who owns what. A few tens of thousands of noble landlords held tracts rivalling the holdings of ten and a half million peasant households, and from that concentration Lenin builds his central figure: the two roads by which serfdom can be abolished in a bourgeois country. The Prussian road, where feudal estates evolve slowly into Junker-bourgeois ones and the peasant mass is pauperised - the road Stolypin had chosen. And the American road, where the estates are broken up, a free farming peasantry emerges, and the productive forces develop fastest.

He is disarmingly exact about the limits of his own demand: nationalisation belongs to this bourgeois revolution, not yet to socialism.

The book's own fate was harsher than its subject. Printed in 1908, it was seized at the press and destroyed by the censor; one mutilated copy survived, and it was not published until 1917, when Lenin added the postscript that closes it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.