Lenin wrote this book in November and December 1907, in the wreckage of a defeat. The revolution of 1905 had been beaten back; in June 1907 Stolypin's coup dissolved the Second Duma and remade the franchise; the peasant risings that had shaken the countryside were over. Out of that quiet Lenin produced the most patient and statistical thing he ever wrote — not a pamphlet of the barricades but a book of land returns, a settling of accounts with the two years just past. Its ostensible subject is narrow: a quarrel inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party over the wording of its agrarian programme, the choice between nationalisation of the land (the Bolshevik demand — transfer to a democratic state), municipalisation (the Menshevik demand — transfer to local authorities), and the peasants' and Narodniks' own instinct for outright division among the tillers. (The Narodniks were Russia's agrarian populists; a dessiatin, the unit throughout, is about 2.7 acres.) The book's own fate was harsher than its subject. Printed in 1908, it was seized at the press and destroyed by the tsarist censor; a single mutilated copy survived, and the work was not published until 1917, when Lenin added the Postscript that closes it — written on 28 September, five weeks before he took power. This is the Progress Publishers edition, its text that of Volume 13 of the Collected Works.
What is strong in it is the refusal to argue from principle. "This is the course, and the only course, that a Marxist should take," Lenin writes at the outset, "unlike the petty-bourgeois socialist who proceeds from 'abstract' justice" — the course being to start from who owns what. And what they owned is the book's hammer-blow: a few tens of thousands of noble landlords held tracts to rival the holdings of ten and a half million peasant households. From that concentration Lenin builds his central figure, the "two ways" in which serfdom can be abolished in "a bourgeois country." One is the Prussian road — "the feudal-landlord economies slowly evolving into Junker-bourgeois economies," the peasant mass pauperised, capitalism arriving from above through the landlord's estate; "that is the path that the Black-Hundred landlords, and Stolypin, their minister, have chosen." The other is the American road, the "American type of bourgeois development as against the Prussian type" — the feudal estates broken up, a free farming peasantry, "the most rapid development of the productive forces." Nationalisation, Lenin insists with disarming candour, is a demand of this second, bourgeois revolution, not yet of socialism: "At best, the revolution can have no other result than the one I have drawn." Few revolutionaries have been so exact about the limits of their own maximum programme.
Where it is weak is where the wager shows. The whole edifice rests on the peasantry behaving as a revolutionary-democratic ally and reaching, through its own struggle, for nationalisation. History was less tidy. When the peasants finally settled the land question themselves in 1917, they did it by seizure and equal division — the Socialist-Revolutionary programme Lenin had spent this book arguing against — and Lenin, in power, ratified their choice in the Decree on Land rather than impose his own. The 1917 Postscript already registers the shift: under the pressure of the war, he now writes, nationalisation is "a step towards socialism," no longer only the last word of the bourgeois revolution. The specific programmatic quarrel of 1907 was overtaken almost as soon as it could be printed. What was not overtaken was the book's governing intuition — that in Russia, and in every country like it, the agrarian question was not a provincial appendix to the revolution but its axis: "The essence of this question is the struggle of the peasantry to abolish landlordism and the survivals of serfdom."
Did the state that canonised the book keep faith with it? Here the reflexive turn is almost unbearable. Lenin's method throughout is to insist that the transformation of the countryside must come through the peasants' own movement, from demands "expressed with at least some degree of freedom." Two decades later the state that printed his collected works did the opposite. The forced collectivisation of 1929–33 drove the peasantry into the kolkhoz at gunpoint, set out to liquidate the kulaks as a class, and produced the famine of 1932–33 that killed millions in Ukraine, the Volga and Kazakhstan. And the sharpest indictment of it lies in this very book. Lenin's portrait of the Prussian road — serfdom abolished "by forcibly keeping the masses down to a pauper standard of living," the peasant coerced from above so that a propertied power may modernise the land — describes Stalin's collectivisation far better than it ever described Stolypin. The muzhik who called the new collective farm a return of serfdom was reading Lenin's own category correctly. The road not taken was Lenin's last one: the New Economic Policy, the tax in kind, the smychka or worker-peasant alliance he spent his final years defending. That the book was reprinted as a classic of "the agrarian question" while the actual Soviet countryside — the passport-less peasant, the requisition, the mass grave — went unmentionable is the measure of the distance between the revolution and the apparatus that embalmed it. Trotsky named that apparatus in The Revolution Betrayed; the crushing of Bukharin and the Right for warning against exactly this violence was its political precondition. The degeneration lay not in Lenin's wager but in the bureaucracy's usurpation of it, and in the isolation and backwardness that made the countryside the regime's first victim.
Read back from that betrayal, the living core of the book is unmistakable. Its insistence that the peasant question is the hinge of revolution in an agrarian country was vindicated far beyond Russia — in China, in Vietnam, across the colonial and post-colonial world, wherever the land question and the national question fused into a single revolutionary charge. That fusion is the theory of permanent revolution: the democratic tasks of the agrarian revolution can be carried through only by a workers' movement leading the peasant majority, and pressed on into socialist ones — a thread Trotsky and Ernest Mandel carried forward against both imperialism and its Stalinist mirror. And the book leaves a warning its publisher could not heed: the peasant question can be solved with the peasants or committed against them, and the difference between the two is the difference between a revolution and a second serfdom. Lenin's own answer, before the icon was cast, was the alliance and not the whip. That is the Marxism worth keeping — concrete, self-critical, and clear that the land is won for the tillers or it is not won at all.