The process of agrarian reform.

Stolypin agrarian reform- a generalized name for a wide range of measures in the field of agriculture carried out by the Russian government under the leadership of P. A. Stolypin since 1906. The main directions of the reform were the transfer of allotment lands to the ownership of peasants, the gradual abolition of the rural community as the collective owner of land, widespread lending to peasants, the purchase of landowners' land for resale to peasants on preferential terms, and land management, which made it possible to optimize the peasant economy by eliminating striping.

General Description of Agrarian Reform

The reform was a set of measures aimed at two goals: the short-term goal of the reform was to resolve the "agrarian question" as a source of mass discontent (primarily, the cessation of agrarian unrest), the long-term goal was the sustainable prosperity and development of agriculture and the peasantry, the integration of the peasantry into the market economy.

If the first goal was supposed to be achieved immediately (the scale of agrarian unrest in the summer of 1906 was incompatible with the peaceful life of the country and the normal functioning of the economy), then the second goal - prosperity - Stolypin himself considered achievable in a twenty-year perspective.

The reform unfolded in several directions:

• Improving the quality of peasants' property rights to land, which consisted primarily in replacing the collective and limited land ownership of rural communities with full-fledged private property of individual peasant householders; measures in this direction were of an administrative and legal nature.
• The eradication of obsolete class civil law restrictions that impeded the effective economic activity of peasants.
• Improving the efficiency of peasant agriculture; government measures consisted primarily in encouraging the allocation of plots “to one place” (cuts, farms) to peasant owners, which required the state to carry out a huge amount of complex and expensive land management work to develop striped communal lands.
• Encouraging the purchase of privately owned (primarily landlord) lands by peasants through various operations of the Peasant Land Bank, preferential lending was predominant.
• Encouraging the buildup of working capital of peasant farms through lending in all forms (bank lending secured by land, loans to members of cooperatives and partnerships).
• Expansion of direct subsidizing of the activities of the so-called "agronomic assistance" (agronomic consulting, educational activities, maintenance of experimental and exemplary farms, trade in modern equipment and fertilizers).
• Support for cooperatives and peasant associations.

The reform was aimed at improving peasant allotment land use and had little effect on private land ownership. The reform was carried out in 47 provinces of European Russia (all provinces, except for the three provinces of the Ostsee region); the reform did not affect the Cossack land tenure and the land tenure of the Bashkirs.

Reform events in the general historical context

The emergence of the idea of ​​agrarian reform and its development was most of all associated with two phenomena - the activities of the first three State Dumas and agrarian unrest as part of the revolution of 1905-1907.

The situation in 1900-1904 seemed alarming to many observers, voices were heard from everywhere warning the government about the aggravation of the agrarian issue, the difficult situation in the countryside, the impoverishment and landlessness of the peasants, and their growing discontent. The government response was rather sluggish. The chain of successive governmental conferences on the agrarian question continued its unhurried activity, not leading to definite results.

On August 5, 1905, the Manifesto on the establishment of the State Duma was issued, and on October 17, the famous Manifesto "On the improvement of the state order", which proclaimed basic civil liberties and guaranteed that no law would be passed without the approval of the Duma.

This day was the end of the uncertainty in which the government found itself. The first two Dumas (often called "thoughts of popular anger") took a course in resolving the agrarian problem, which the Stolypin government considered fundamentally unacceptable. The struggle between the Dumas and the government, in which there was no room for compromise, ended in the victory of the government. The majority in the Duma was now controlled by the Octobrist party (in a bloc with moderate nationalists), who were determined to cooperate.

Unlike land management laws, all government bills for local government reform ( "Regulations on the volost administration", "Regulations on the village administration", "Regulations on the provincial government") failed to get through legislative institutions.

At the same time, the Duma was fully ready to cooperate in terms of increasing budget allocations for agrarian reform (all budget bills were generally adopted by the Duma on time and in an atmosphere of constructive interaction). As a result, since 1907, the government has abandoned active legislative activity in agrarian policy and proceeds to expand the activities of government agencies, increase the volume of distributed loans and subsidies.

Beginning in 1907, applications from peasants to secure ownership of the land were granted with great delays, caused by a shortage of staff of land management commissions. Therefore, the main efforts of the government were directed to the training of personnel (primarily land surveyors). At the same time, the funds allocated for reform are continuously increasing in the form of funding for the Peasant Land Bank, subsidizing agronomic assistance measures, and direct benefits to peasants.

Since 1910, the government's course has changed somewhat - more attention is being paid to supporting the cooperative movement.

On September 5, 1911, P. A. Stolypin was assassinated, and Minister of Finance V. N. Kokovtsov became prime minister. Kokovtsov, who showed less initiative than Stolypin, followed the outlined course without introducing anything new into the agrarian reform. The volume of land management work to allocate land, the amount of land assigned to the property of peasants, the amount of land sold to peasants through the Peasants' Bank, the volume of loans to peasants grew steadily until the outbreak of the First World War.

Although the prime ministers following Kokovtsov did not express significant interest in agrarian reform, the inertia gained by the state apparatus was great, and even during the war, agrarian reform measures continued to be carried out, albeit at a more modest pace. With the outbreak of the First World War, about 40% of the land surveying personnel were called to the front, and the number of applications for land management also decreased. In 1915, it was decided to abandon the most conflict-generating type of land management work - the allocation of plots of individual peasants to one place in the absence of the consent of more than half of the rural gathering.

Russian agriculture in the central regions was characterized by low yields (the average yield of the most important grains in Russia was 8.3 q/ha versus 23.6 in Germany, 22.4 in Great Britain, 10.2 in the USA; in the non-chernozem central regions, the yield was even lower, reaching 3-4 q/ha in lean years). The yield on peasant allotment lands was 15-20% lower than in adjacent landlord farms, 25-30% lower than in the Baltic provinces. The backward three-field system of agriculture prevailed in the peasant economy, modern agricultural implements were rarely used. The rural population grew rapidly (annual increase in 1913 was 1.79%), the population growth rate continued to increase. In almost all regions, there was a surplus of workers in the countryside.

Land ownership in European Russia. The lands of European Russia were divided according to the nature of ownership into three parts: peasant allotment, privately owned and state. In 1905, the peasants had 119 million acres of allotment land (not counting the 15 million acres of Cossack land not affected by the agrarian reform). Private owners had 94 million acres of land, of which 50 million belonged to nobles, 25 million to peasants, peasant associations and rural societies, 19 million to other private owners (merchants and petty bourgeois, foreigners, churches and monasteries, cities). The state owned 154 million acres (including specific and cabinet lands). It should be noted that peasant allotment lands consisted only of arable land, meadows and pastures (with a clear lack of the latter), with a small amount of inconvenient land and almost no forest. The composition of the noble lands included more forests and inconveniences, and the vast majority of state lands were forest. Thus, according to the estimate of the Minister of Agriculture A. S. Yermolov, all private owners of non-peasant origin had approximately 35 million acres of sown land, and the state - no more than 6 million; while the peasants owned 143 million acres of allotment and private land.

Rural community and forms of land tenure

In post-reform Russia, there were various forms of land use and the participation of rural communities in it.

Community ownership of land. The most common form was communal land ownership, in which all peasant allotment land was owned by the community (the so-called "worldly land"), which redistributed the land among peasant households at arbitrary times, according to the size of families. These redistributions also took into account the creation of new peasant farms and the disappearance of existing ones. Part of the land (primarily meadow, pasture land and forests, inconveniences), as a rule, was not divided among the peasants and was jointly owned by the rural society. According to custom, the peasants evaluated the economic usefulness of each plot in conventional units, “taxes”, how many “taxes” were at the disposal of the peasant economy, it had to contribute the same proportional shares to the total amount of land taxes paid by the rural community.

Rural society could at any time redistribute worldly land - change the size of the plots in the use of peasant families in accordance with the changed number of workers and the ability to pay taxes. Since 1893, redistribution was allowed to be carried out no more than once every 12 years. Not all peasant societies practiced regular redistributions, and some societies made them only once when they were freed from serfdom. According to the 1897 census, the rural population was 93.6 million people, while the peasant class included 96.9 million people, while out of 8.3 million "foreigners" (a concept that included the population of Central Asia and all the nomadic peoples of Siberia and the Far North), the vast majority also lived in rural areas.

In addition to the general redistribution that affected the entire land of the community, “discounts” and “capes” were very often made - an increase in the allotment of one farm by reducing the other, which did not apply to all others. As a rule, the land was cut off from widows, aged people, no longer able to cultivate it, and cut off to strong, enlarged families.

Communal ownership of land was compatible with allotment rent - the lease by some peasants of the allotment land of others. Peasants who moved permanently to the city could not sell their plots. Given the choice of either resigning from a rural society without land and money, or continuing to be a member of the society and renting out their land, they invariably found the second option more profitable. As a result, millions of city dwellers continued to be formally considered members of rural societies; the 1897 census found that 7 million peasants live in the cities. .

The community as a collective owner of secular land was very significantly limited in the right to sell land. Such transactions had to go through a long chain of approvals, up to approval by the Minister of the Interior (for transactions worth more than 500 rubles). In practice, the sale of land by the community was possible only on the condition of a counter purchase of another plot. The community could also not pledge the land, even if the ransom was completed.

In 1905, in European Russia, 9.2 million peasant households owned 100.2 million acres of allotment land in communal ownership.

Yard land ownership. The second widespread form of land tenure in rural societies was household (district) land tenure, in which each peasant household received a plot allocated once and for all, inherited. This form of ownership was more common in the Western Territory. The hereditary plot was a limited private property - it was inherited, and could be sold (only to other persons of the peasant class), but in no case could it be pledged. Like communal ownership, household ownership could be combined with communal ownership of non-arable land (meadows, pastures, forests, inconveniences).

Rural society had the right at any moment to switch from communal use of land to household use, but the reverse transition was impossible.

"Manor settlement" of peasants (house plots) were in limited (with the right to transfer by inheritance) property of peasants. The common lands of the villages (streets, driveways) have always belonged to the rural society as a whole.

In 1905, in European Russia, 2.8 million peasant households had 23.0 million acres of allotment land in their households.

Unclaimed land. Rural communities, in addition to the land received by the endowment during the emancipation of the peasants, could buy land through ordinary private transactions. In relation to this land, they were full-fledged private collective owners, equal in rights with any other business partnerships, and were not subject to any class restrictions. This land could be sold or mortgaged by rural communities without the consent of the authorities. In the same way, the non-allotment land of the peasants and all sorts of cooperatives and partnerships was a complete personal property. The most popular form of peasant private landownership was the partnership, which consisted in the fact that the peasants bought the land together (large plots of land were cheaper), and then divided them in proportion to the money invested and each worked his part separately. In 1905, peasants personally owned 13.2 million acres of private land in European Russia, rural communities - 3.7 million, peasant associations - 7.7 million, which together accounted for 26% of all privately owned land. However, some of these persons, who formally belonged to the peasant class, in reality turned into large landowners - 1076 such "peasants" owned more than 1000 acres each, having a total of 2.3 million acres.

Peasant self-government and institutions for peasant affairs

This entire administrative system carried out very attentive and petty control over the fulfillment by rural communities and volosts of obligations to the state, the legitimacy of self-government decisions, improvement and law and order in rural areas, conflicts over land ownership; at the same time, institutions for peasant affairs did not interfere in the economic life of the peasants, including in the redistribution of land.

agrarian question

The "agrarian question" (the stable definition adopted at that time) consisted essentially of two independent problems:

From the problem of grinding peasant allotments, the dispossession of some of the peasants, the growing (according to contemporaries) poverty and the decline of the economy in the countryside; - from the traditional non-recognition by the peasant communities of the right of ownership of the landowners to the land.

The population of Russia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century grew at an extremely rapid pace (about 1.4% per year). The increase in the urban population was much slower than the growth of the population as a whole; between 1861 and 1913 the population of the Russian Empire increased 2.35 times.

Positive processes - the resettlement of peasants to Siberia on undeveloped lands, the purchase of landowner lands by peasants - were not so intense as to compensate for the rapid growth of the population. Provision of peasants with land gradually fell. The average size of allotment per male soul in European Russia decreased from 4.6 dessiatins in 1860 to 2.6 dessiatinas in 1900, while in Southern Russia the fall was even greater - from 2.9 to 1.7 dessiatins.

Not only did the size of the allotment per capita decrease, but also the size of the allotment per peasant household. In 1877, there were 8.5 million households in European Russia, and in 1905 - already 12.0 million. The state tried to fight family divisions by issuing a special law in 1893; however, all attempts to stop the division of families were unsuccessful. The grinding of peasant households posed a great economic threat - small economic units showed less efficiency than large ones.

At the same time, the uneven provision of peasants with land grew. Even at the time of the allocation of land to the peasants during the reforms of Alexander II, part of the peasants chose the minimum (in the amount of ¼ of the standard), but completely free allotment, which did not provide for the peasant family. In the future, inequality worsened: in the absence of affordable credit, landowners' lands were gradually bought up by more successful peasants who already had better allotments, while the less well-off peasants did not get the opportunity to buy additional land. The redistribution system (practiced by no means by all peasant communities) did not always fulfill equalizing functions - small and single-parent families, without adult male workers, were deprived of excess land during redistribution, which they could rent to fellow villagers and thereby support themselves.

The situation with an increase in the density of the rural population and a decrease in allotments was perceived by contemporaries mainly as a process of desolation of the village and the decline of the economy. Modern research, however, shows that, in general, agriculture in the second half of the 19th century saw not only an increase in yields, but also an increase in income per employee. However, this growth, which was not too fast, was completely hidden in the eyes of contemporaries by the widening gap between the living standards of the urban middle class and the way of life in the countryside. In an era when electric lighting, running water, central heating, telephone and automobile had already entered the life of the townspeople, the life and life of the village seemed infinitely backward. There was a stereotypical panic perception by the liberal intellectual of the peasant as a person who endures continuous need and misfortune, living in unbearable conditions. This perception determined the broad support of the liberal intelligentsia (including grassroots zemstvo employees) and all political parties from the Cadets and to the left of the ideas of endowing the peasants with nationalized landowners' land.

In general, the situation was much worse in the center of European Russia (there was a stable expression “impoverishment of the center”), while in the South of Russia, in the Western Territory and in the Kingdom of Poland, the economy, often with small plots, was much more efficient and sustainable; the peasants of the North and Siberia were on the whole well provided with land.

The state did not have a land fund to allocate land to all those in need. Actually, arable land at the disposal of the state was no more than 3.7 million acres (taking into account specific lands - the personal property of the imperial family - up to 6 million acres), while concentrated in several provinces, where the allotments of the peasants were already satisfactory. State lands were already rented by peasants by 85%, and the level of rent was below the market one.

Thus, no noticeable effect could be expected from the allocation of 10.5 million peasant farms with 6 million state acres. The process of resettlement of peasants to state-owned lands in Siberia, actively stimulated by the government, could not bring a quick effect - the economic development of virgin lands required considerable time and effort, resettlement absorbed no more than 10% of the increase in the rural population. The attention of supporters of endowing the peasants with additional land naturally turned to privately owned lands.

There were 38 million acres of privately owned lands (excluding lands already owned by peasants on the right of private ownership) suitable for field cultivation in European Russia. Taking into account all types of lands (landlords, appanages, monasteries, part of the city), 43-45 million acres could theoretically be transferred to the peasants. At the same time, in terms of the male soul, another 0.8 tithes (+30%) would be added to the cash 2.6 tithes. Such an increase, although noticeable in the peasant economy, could not solve the problems of the peasants and make them prosperous (in the understanding of the peasants, an increase in allotment by 5-7 acres per capita was considered fair). At the same time, under such a reform, all effective specialized landlord farms (livestock breeding, sugar beet farming, etc.) would perish.

The second part of the problem was the traditional rejection by the peasants (mostly former landlord peasants) of the entire legal structure of landed property. When the landlord peasants were liberated, part of the land they cultivated in serfdom for their own benefit remained with the landowners (the so-called "cuts"); the peasants stubbornly, for decades, remembered this land and considered it unjustly taken away. In addition, land management during the liberation of the peasants was often carried out without proper concern for the economic efficiency of the rural community. In many cases, rural communities did not have forests at all and were insufficiently provided with pastures and meadows (traditionally they were used collectively for the community), which gave the landowners the opportunity to lease these lands at frankly inflated prices. In addition, the distinction between landowners' and allotment lands was often inconvenient, and there were even overlapping possessions of landowners and peasants in the same field. All these unsatisfactorily resolved land relations served as sources of smoldering conflicts.

In general, the structure of agrarian property was not recognized by the peasants and was kept only by force; as soon as the peasants felt that this power was weakening, they were inclined to immediately move on to expropriation (which, ultimately, happened immediately after the February Revolution).

Peasant unrest

Peasant unrest, which had been going on constantly in some quantities, noticeably intensified in 1904. From the spring of 1905, the unrest intensified so much that what was happening was already assessed by all observers as a revolution; in June there were 346 incidents noted in the police records, the unrest covered about 20% of the counties. Unrest, reaching a peak in the middle of summer, decreased in autumn and almost ceased in winter. From the spring of 1906, the unrest resumed with even greater force, in June, at the peak of the riots, there were 527 incidents noted in the police records; about half of the counties were covered by unrest.

The unrest in its mildest form took the form of unauthorized logging in the landowner's forests. Peasants, who had almost no forests on communal lands, traditionally tended not to recognize any ownership of forests at all, and considered paying for the use of private forests to be robbery.

A more serious type of unrest was the unauthorized plowing of landlords' land. Since the harvest could only ripen after a certain time, the peasants turned to such actions only when they were sure of long-term impunity. In 1906, the peasants sowed the landlords' land in the belief that the Duma was about to make a decision on nationalization and the transfer of landowner lands to the peasants free of charge.

Even more disturbing was the so-called "dismantling" of estates. The peasants, gathering in crowds, broke open the locks and plundered the reserves of grain seeds, livestock and agricultural implements of the estate, after which, in some cases, they set fire to outbuildings. The peasants, as a rule, did not plunder the household property of the landowners and did not destroy the landowners' houses themselves, recognizing in this case the property of the landowners for everything that was not related to agriculture.

Violence and murders against the landowners and their representatives were quite rare, primarily because most of the landowners left the estates before the riots.

Finally, in the most extreme cases, it came to arson of estates and violence against the forces of police guards or troops who arrived at the place of unrest. The rules for the use of weapons in riots in force at that time allowed the troops to open fire before the start of any violence from the crowd, neither the police nor the troops possessed effective methods of dispersing the crowd without shooting to kill; the result was numerous incidents with wounded and dead.

A more peaceful, but also effective means of struggle were the strikes of peasants who rented the landlords' land, or, conversely, worked for hire on the landlords' land. The peasants, by agreement, refused to fulfill the agreements concluded with the landowner until their conditions were changed to more favorable ones.

Government activities between 1896 and 1906

Special meeting on the needs of the agricultural industry

On January 23, 1902, a Special Conference was formed on the needs of the agricultural industry, chaired by S. Yu. Witte. The meeting began its activities on a grand scale. The first stage was the collection of information from the localities, for which 531 local committees were organized. Zemstvo figures were widely involved in the work of the committees, in all cases chairmen and members of the provincial and district zemstvo administrations, and in some cases zemstvo vowels, took part in them. 6 representatives of zemstvo administrations were also invited to participate in the Meeting itself. The meeting had a complex administrative structure, divided into commissions and subcommittees. Simultaneously with the Conference at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an Editorial Commission was organized to revise the legislation on peasants.

The conference, which included many members and was organized in a complex way, was drowned in a gigantic amount of proposals and information coming from the field or put forward by its participants. The activities of the Meeting proceeded slowly, for more than two years of its work no final recommendations were developed. In general, the Meeting paid more attention to the organization of local government, legal proceedings and the legal status of peasants than to property relations and ensuring the optimal organization of agriculture, although S. Yu. Witte personally considered communal land ownership to be the main obstacle to the development of agriculture. However, the positive result of the Meeting was the very receipt by the highest bureaucratic institutions of a large amount of information, opinions and proposals from local governments.

During the work of the meeting, S. Yu. Witte experienced a serious career crisis associated with a drop in the emperor's confidence in him. In August 1903, Witte lost the significant post of Minister of Finance, his political weight decreased. As a result of various kinds of government intrigues, on March 30, 1905, the Witte Meeting was closed, and on the same day a Special Meeting was formed on measures to strengthen peasant land ownership, chaired by the former Minister of the Interior I. L. Goremykin.

Goremykin's special meeting operated until August 30, 1906, and was also dissolved until he developed any final recommendations. In April 1906, at the opening of the First Duma, the irrelevance of the meeting as a mechanism for mutual coordination of interests became obvious - the positions of the majority of the Duma, including deputies from the peasants, radically differed from the entire range of views considered by the Meeting.

The activities of the meetings turned out to be useful only in terms of collecting primary materials, while the very idea of ​​resolving a complex issue through the activities of a multilateral commission and coordinating departmental positions and interests (but not the interests of the peasants themselves, whose opinion was not directly requested by anyone) turned out to be unviable. Carrying out agrarian reforms was possible only with the appearance of a prime minister with his own firm convictions and strong political will. In general, the activities of the Conferences provided no more than abundant auxiliary material for the subsequent agrarian reform.

In addition to the activities of the Meetings, the development of bills on the peasant issue was carried out by the Zemsky department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This activity began during the ministry of V.K. The developments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs largely prevented Stolypin's policy, although the accentuation of ideas at that moment was different - before Stolypin's ministry appeared, officials attached more importance to civil law aspects (civil equality of peasants, the division of rural society into an all-class local community and a peasant economic partnership, property rights), and less - to land management measures.

In general, at this stage, the government showed extreme indecision and slowness in trying to resolve the agrarian issue. According to V.I. Gurko, “... in general, in this matter, not only the bureaucracy, but also the public showed some kind of strange timidity. The number of people who were aware of and, most importantly, recognized all the negative aspects of communal land tenure was more than significant, but the number who decided to speak out in favor of energetic measures aimed at destroying the community was completely insignificant ... The land community seemed to be some kind of fetish, and, moreover, a form of land use so characteristic of the Russian folk spirit that one can hardly even dream of its abolition. .

Debt Forgiveness on Food Capital Loans

On April 5, 1905 (under the chairman of the Committee of Ministers S. Yu. Witte, Minister of Agriculture and State Property A. S. Yermolov), a decree was issued on the forgiveness of arrears and debts of peasants on loans from food capital and on the seeding of fields issued during the crop failure of 1891-92. The system for supplying grain to peasants during crop failures was a combination of food capital and natural grain reserves, separate for each rural society. Peasants were required to pay an annual contribution in kind or in cash until the amount of grain and money reached the amount established by law. In case of crop failure, the peasants could spend these resources free of charge, and the state immediately replenished the reserves, but the peasants had to repay the debt. It was these debts, repaid by the peasants with great reluctance, that were (not for the first time) forgiven.

Cancellation of redemption payments

On November 3, 1905 (under the chairman of the Council of Ministers S.Yu. Witte N.N. Kutler), the Supreme Manifesto and the decree accompanying it were issued, according to which the redemption payments of the former landlord peasants were reduced by half from January 1, 1906, and completely canceled from January 1, 1907. This decision was extremely important for both the government and the peasants. The state refused large budget revenues, moreover, at a time when the budget had a significant deficit covered by foreign loans. Peasants received a tax break that applied to peasants but not to other landowners; after that, the taxation of all lands no longer depended on the class to which their owners belonged. Although the peasants no longer paid redemption payments, the landlords, who retained the state's redemption obligations (by that time they had the form of 4% rent), continued to receive them.

The cancellation of redemption payments turned the entire buyout operation from profitable for the budget into unprofitable (the total loss on the buyout operation amounted to 386 million rubles). 1,674,000 thousand rubles of debt were accumulated, payable in installments under various conditions (payments on some debts were to continue until 1955), while the current lost budget revenues amounted to about 96 million rubles. per year (5.5% of the budget revenues). In general, the abolition of redemption payments was the largest financial sacrifice of the state, aimed at solving the agrarian problem. All further government activities were no longer so costly.

The abolition of redemption payments themselves was a more constructive measure than the previously repeated cancellation of penalties for late payments (which was a direct incentive for payment delays). However, this event also put the communities that paid the redemption payments with delays and delays in a more advantageous position than the communities that completed the redemption ahead of schedule. As a result, this measure was perceived by the peasants more as a retreat of the government in the face of the onslaught of agrarian unrest in the summer of 1905 than as a useful subsidy. Failure to comply with legal obligations received some reward, and this was one of the reasons that this measure (the most expensive of all those taken) did not achieve its main goal - agrarian unrest resumed with even greater force by the summer of 1906 (see below).

The principal consequence of the abolition of redemption payments was the potential for further reform of land tenure. Rural communities, as collective owners of land and owners of household plots, could previously dispose of their land quite freely, but only on the condition that its redemption was completed (or it was bought in the course of private transactions after the allotment), otherwise any land transactions required the consent of the state as a creditor. With the abolition of redemption payments, rural communities and owners of household plots have improved the quality of their property rights.

Establishment of land management commissions

On March 4, 1906 (under the chairman of the Council of Ministers S.Yu. Witte, the chief administrator of land management and agriculture A.P. Nikolsky), the Highest Decree established a committee on land management under the main department of land management and agriculture, provincial and district land management commissions. The committee and commissions, which brought together officials from various departments, representatives of zemstvos and representatives from the peasants, had the main goal of assisting the peasants in buying land through the Peasant Land Bank. As advisory bodies, the commissions did not work for long, and already in 1906 their tasks and powers were significantly expanded (see below).

Agrarian bills in the First and Second Dumas

When discussing the land bill in the III Duma, P. A. Stolypin explained the main ideas of the reform as follows:
“In those areas of Russia where the personality of the peasant has already received a certain development, where the community, as a forced union, puts up an obstacle to his independent activity, there it is necessary to give him the freedom to apply his labor to the land, there it is necessary to give him the freedom to work, grow rich, dispose of his property; it is necessary to give him power over the earth, it is necessary to save him from the bondage of the obsolete communal system ...
Is it really forgotten ... that the colossal experience of guardianship over a huge part of our population has already suffered a huge setback? ...
... So much is needed for the reorganization of our kingdom, its reorganization on strong monarchical foundations, a strong personal owner, so much he is an obstacle to the development of the revolutionary movement ... "
“... it would be reckless to think that such results were achieved at the insistence of government officials. Government officials have worked hard on the matter of land management, and I guarantee that their work will not weaken. But I have too much respect for the people's mind to admit that the Russian peasantry is reorganizing its land life by order, and not by inner conviction. .
“...According to our concepts, it is not the land that should own a person, but a person should own the land. Until labor of the highest quality is applied to the land, labor is free and not forced, our land will not be able to withstand competition with the land of our neighbors ... "

From the cited quotations, one can clearly see the predominance of strategic and macroeconomic considerations in Stolypin's ideas, the emphasis on the problem of the quality of property rights and economic freedoms, which was quite unusual for a government official of that time and therefore did not arouse the understanding of contemporaries.

The idea was repeatedly expressed that Stolypin did not come up with the idea of ​​agrarian reform so much as, with the participation of his closest assistants (primarily S. E. Kryzhanovsky, the author of the text of the most important bills and speeches of Stolypin, and V. I. Gurko) put them together from previously made proposals. This is partly true (any ideas can be found in the huge number of proposals submitted during the work of the Meetings), but the fact that the reform was actually carried out with huge political resistance shows Stolypin's invaluable personal participation and expression of his energy and will.

Strengthening the ownership of allotment lands by peasants

Decree of November 9, 1906 - the fundamental act of agrarian reform

On November 9, 1906, the main legislative act of agrarian reform is issued (according to Article 87 of the Basic Laws) - a decree "On the addition of some resolutions of the current law concerning peasant land ownership and land use". The decree proclaimed a wide range of measures to destroy the collective land ownership of rural society and create a class of peasants - full owners of the land.

The decree declared that “every householder who owns land on a communal basis may at any time demand that a part of the land due to him be secured for his personal property”. Ownership of former allotment lands remained, however, bound by certain restrictions: land could only be sold to peasants, their societies or partnerships; only the Peasant Land Bank had the right to accept the former allotment land as a pledge. The important point was that the fortified land became the personal property of the peasant householder, and not the collective property of the peasant family.

In those societies where there had been no redistribution of communal land for more than 24 years, each householder could free of charge secure the ownership of the piece of land that he used on a permanent basis. In those societies where there were redistributions, such a plot was subject to gratuitous fixation in ownership, which at the moment followed the principles by which the last redistribution was carried out by this household (for example, by the number of workers in the family); additional land was already subject to redemption from the rural society.

When plots were consolidated into ownership, the new owners retained their former right to use undivided communal lands (meadows, pastures, forests, inconvenient lands, driveways).

Households wishing to secure the land as property had to declare this to the rural society. The rural society was obliged to convene a village meeting within a month and make the necessary decision, which required 2/3 of the votes. If such a decision was not made, the applicant could apply to the zemstvo district chief, who then made a decision to strengthen his power. Complaints against resolutions of rural assemblies and decisions of zemstvo chiefs were filed with county congresses.

Particular attention was paid to those peasants who wished to receive their plots allocated to one place, instead of several lanes in different fields (these plots were called "cuts", and if the owner's house also stood on the site - "farms"). If the peasant wished to stand out "for the cut", rural society in the vast majority of cases could not technically fulfill this by partially redrawing the existing strips; required a complete redistribution of land. The law allowed the rural society in this case to abandon the complete redistribution and give those who wished to stand out the choice of owning the striped land that he already used, or leaving the community without land with adequate monetary compensation. But if the community decided to make a redistribution, it had to cut off plots to one place for all householders who asked for it.

The law stimulated access to cuts by granting owners of cuts plots better property rights. The owners of striped plots were equalized in rights with the old household owners. They could not fence and dig in their strips and had to let the cattle of fellow villagers into them (in those periods when this field was not sown); thus, they had to synchronize their agricultural cycle with the entire community. At the same time, the owners of cut-off plots could fence off their plots and use them at their discretion. The owners of striped plots could inherit the land, but could not sell it without the consent of the community; owners of cut-off plots could make any transactions with them.

The selection of cuts (opening) was technically and organizationally more difficult than traditional redistribution in striped land tenure. It was necessary to determine what would be divided and what would remain in secular use, to find principles for compensating for the different values ​​of land in different places due to the size of the plots, to locate new driveways and runs for livestock, to provide sites with access to water, to deal with ravines and wetlands. With all this, it was necessary to carry out extensive and expensive geodetic work on the ground and the office processing of their results. As it turned out, the rural communities themselves were not able to cope with this task, including on the condition that they hire professional surveyors (there were very few surveyors in the provinces, and they were not familiar with the deployment). Therefore, in this part, agrarian reform stalled until the government provided local land management commissions with the necessary staff of instructors and land surveyors and began to provide land management services free of charge (see below).

Law June 14, 1910

On June 14, 1910, a law was passed "On amendments and additions to certain resolutions on peasant land ownership", which was a law of 1906, again, after countless multi-stage discussions, introduced by the government to the Third Duma in January 1908. The law, in addition to the provisions of the law of 1906 described above, also contained important innovations; it was the next step in the destruction of the traditional rural community.

All communities in which there were no general redistributions from the moment they were given land were recognized as communities with household land ownership. All owners of plots in communities with household land tenure (including those communities in which household land tenure was practiced earlier, and those communities that were classified as such by this law) received the rights of private owners, even if they did not express such a desire. In order to legally secure the right of ownership, the peasant had to receive a confirmation verdict from the village meeting, which the meeting had to decide without fail within a month, by a simple majority of votes. If the gathering refused to issue a verdict, the necessary documents were issued by the zemstvo chief.

The law proclaimed private ownership of a very significant part of the allotment land. In the provinces of European Russia, allotments have not been made since the moment of allotment of land in 58% of communities and villages, which amounted to 3.716 thousand households with an area of ​​33.7 million acres.

In those communities that made redistributions, each household retained the right to demand the consolidation of land into private ownership on conditions close to the 1906 law. The rules for peasants who want to get a cut-off plot have not undergone significant changes either.

The law was a slight deviation from the previous course of allocation of plots to one place, due to the fact that land management commissions could not cope with the flow of applications for land management work - in 1910, about 450 thousand applications for land management were filed, of which only about 260 thousand were implemented. The government was forced to prefer the consolidation of ownership of striped land (as requiring a smaller amount of land management and organizational work) to delays in the execution of applications for full development.

The question of whether the property should be personal or family property caused a great deal of discussion. Stolypin firmly adhered to the position that the land should be in the personal property of the peasant-household owner, the absence of the need for family consensus in the disposal of land facilitated, in his opinion, the economic turnover.

Land Survey Act 1911

On May 29, 1911, a law was passed "About land management". The law significantly detailed the provisions of the previously issued laws of 1906 and 1910, replacing the departmental instructions that were in effect de facto. The law was submitted to the First Duma in 1906, but its adoption was extremely delayed.

The features of the law were the following provisions:

Possibility of forced deployment not only of communal allotment lands, but also of private lands interspersed with them; - a clear list of those lands that cannot be allocated without the consent of the owners (land under development, under vineyards, etc. valuable plantations, under various commercial facilities); - the right of any village to demand the allotment of land (if the rural community consists of several villages); - an individual householder may demand the allotment of land to one place only before the decision of the community on the redistribution, and if this is possible without special difficulties; one-fifth of the householders may claim allotment of plots to one place at any time and in any case; - a complete redistribution of all communal lands with their allocation to one place is carried out at the request of half of the householders (with household ownership) or two-thirds of the householders (with communal ownership); - the ability to carry out land management without waiting for the end of various litigations related to this land.

The law, on the whole, emphasized the course towards the allocation of farms and cuts and the full development of rural communities. The high level of detail in the law helped to reduce the number of misunderstandings and complaints during land management.

The activities of land management commissions

The system of land management institutions was three-level and subordinated to the Main Department of Agriculture and Land Management (GUZiZ).

The bottom link of the system was county land management commissions, consisting, under the chairmanship of the county marshal of the nobility, of the chairman of the county zemstvo council, an indispensable member - an official of the GUZiZ, a county member of the district court, a member from the specific department (where there were specific lands), a zemstvo chief and a tax inspector (when considering issues within their plots), three members from the county zemstvo assembly, three members from peasants (chosen by lot from among the candidates elected by volost gatherings ). Since 1911, electives from volosts elected three members of the commission at a special meeting, and when considering each one in each separate volost, the commission included a temporary member chosen by the peasants of this volost.

In 1906, 186 county commissions were opened, in 1907 - another 190 commissions, by 1912 the commissions operated in 463 counties of 47 provinces of European Russia, there were no commissions in the three Baltic provinces, but the work was carried out by seconded officials.

The next link was provincial land management commissions, chaired by the provincial marshal of the nobility, consisted of the chairman of the provincial zemstvo council, an indispensable member - an official of the GUZiZ, the manager of the Treasury Chamber, managers of the local branches of the Peasant Land and Noble Banks, one of the members of the District Court, one of the indispensable members of the Provincial Presence, six members elected by the provincial zemstvo assembly, of which three were to be peasants.

Led the system Land Management Committee, a division of the GUZiZ, chaired by the chief manager of the GUZiZ, with the participation of comrades in chief of the State, Noble Land and Peasant Land Banks, and representatives of the ministries of the court, internal affairs, finance, justice and State control.

At the GUZiZ, an instructor (then renamed into a revision) part was also organized, headed by the popular ideologist of farm land management A. A. Kofod.

The commissions were headed by the chief executives of the GUZiZ: from the foundation of A.P. Nikolsky, in April-July 1905 - A.S. Stishinsky, from July 1906 to May 1908 - B.A. Vasilchikov, from May 1908 to October 1915 - A.V. Krivoshein.

It immediately became obvious that the result of the work of the commissions depends not so much on the number of officials involved, but on the number of land surveyors and land surveyors. The available staff of the survey departments of the provincial governments was insufficient (in the end, it was decided to use these departments only for office data processing), and the GUZiZ decided that the county commissions should independently hire the necessary personnel. The necessary specialists were not available in the labor market, and GUZiZ began to develop special educational institutions. 5 existing land surveying schools were strengthened and 9 new ones were established; At the same time, temporary courses for land surveying assistants were opened, graduating by 1910 1,500 people a year.

In 1905, the commissions had only 200 land surveyors, in 1907 - 650, in 1908 - 1300. By 1914, the commissions already had 7,000 surveyors. After the outbreak of the First World War, a large number of topographers were drafted into the army, which immediately slowed down land management work.

The progress of the reform all the time critically depended on the land surveying personnel, from the very beginning of work and until the February Revolution there was no moment when there would not be a queue of unfulfilled applications for land management. In general, those wishing to secure land for ownership waited for their turn for an average of a year, after which the plots were allocated to the peasants in kind, but they had to wait another two years on average to receive a certificate of ownership. At the beginning of 1916, there were applications from 2.34 million households for which work had not even begun. The maximum volume of land management work was achieved in 1913 and amounted to 4.3 million acres per year (3.6% of the 119 million acres of allotment land).

Land management activities consisted of the following types of work (the first three types are personal land management, the rest are collective):

• Distribution to farms and cuts of communal lands(meaning the full expansion of communal land). This form of land management, as the most conducive to the rise of the economy, the government provided special protection. In 1907-1915, applications were submitted from 44.5 thousand villages, consisting of 1.809 thousand households (13% of the total number of households).
• Allocation to one place of plots from communal lands(a situation where some peasants want to own a compact plot individually, while others want to keep the communal land). This type of work naturally generated the greatest number of conflicts (and attracted the attention of critics of the reform). In 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from villages consisting of 865 thousand households (6.5% of the total number of households). In April 1915, against the background of conscripting 40% of the staff of land management commissions into the army, the allocation of plots to one place in the absence of the consent of the rural society was temporarily suspended.
• Distribution to one place of lands of different ownership. These works were carried out when the peasants who stood out from the community already had not only allotment, but also their own lands, which should have been combined into one plot. During the years 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from villages consisting of 286 thousand households (2% of the total number of households).
• Division of land between villages and parts of villages. The need for these works was due to the fact that many rural communities consisted of several villages and considered themselves too large for optimal communal management. During the years 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from the villages, which consisted of 1.790 thousand households (13% of the total number of households).
• Allocation of land for settlements. In the course of this operation, the interleaved possession was preserved, but the land in the most remote fields, which were inconvenient for all peasants to reach, was transferred to the use of a small group. In 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from villages consisting of 220 thousand households (1.6% of the total number of households).
• Expansion of the patchwork of allotment lands with adjacent properties. The presence in the peasant fields of strips of owners who did not belong to the community created great organizational problems - with striped land use, all owners had to agree on a single crop rotation; These works were aimed at eliminating these difficulties. During the years 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from the villages, which consisted of 633 thousand households (4.7% of the total number of households).
• Expanding the common use of peasants with private owners. These works were aimed at eliminating another painful problem: when buying land, the peasants and landowners were left with various mutual rights of travel, cattle driving, use of forests, water bodies, etc., which served as sources of continuous conflicts. During the years 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from the villages, which consisted of 131 thousand households (1% of the total number of households).
• Delimitation of allotment lands. These works were aimed at creating simple, compact boundaries of rural communities with adjacent lands. During the years 1907-1915, petitions were submitted from the villages, which consisted of 437 thousand households (3.2% of the total number of households).

General results. By the beginning of 1916, out of 119 million acres of allotment land in 47 provinces of European Russia, 25.2 million (21.2%) were demarcated (and transferred to the ownership of peasants, partnerships and rural societies), for another 9.1 million acres (7.6%) the paperwork was not completed; apparently, by the time of the February Revolution, land management work had actually been carried out on 37-38 million acres (about 31% of allotment land). 6.174 thousand households (45.7% of the total) decided to take advantage of the land management proposed by the state, and only 2.360 thousand households completed the paperwork (the rest were either awaiting the start of work or were already managing the converted land, waiting to receive documents). 1.436 thousand households appeared in the country in sole proprietorship.

The opportunities provided by the reform aroused the greatest interest among two groups of peasants: owners of wealthy, stable farms and peasants who were about to leave the farm (the latter were attracted by the previously absent opportunity to sell the plot). Within 2-3 years after being secured in ownership, about 20% of the new owners sold their land plots (which accounted for about 10% of the area assigned to ownership). This fact was repeatedly presented as evidence of the failure of the reform, however, from the point of view of the government, the decrease in the rural population was a natural and beneficial process, and the proceeds from the sold land supported the peasants when they moved to the cities.

A feature of the work carried out was that land management and the allocation of land to individual ownership was voluntary. Although in some cases, if the desire of one or more peasants to stand out could not get the approval of the village assembly, the decision on land management was made by the power of the zemstvo chief, the general policy of the GOOZiZ was aimed at obtaining the support and approval of the peasants. Brochures by A. A. Kofod were published and distributed in millions of copies, popularly explaining the merits of the farm economy; at the expense of the GUZiZ, excursions to the already developed villages were organized for representatives of rural communities. Despite this, the support of the peasants was not universal: in 1914, two thirds of the strengthening sentences were issued by the authorities of the zemstvo chief, contrary to the opinion of the gatherings. Characteristically, despite the general patronage of individual ownership, the government provided for many types of land management work that helps to optimize the economy for those rural communities that decided to maintain communal ownership of land.

When allocated to farms, interest-free loans were allocated for the transfer of buildings and land reclamation; the standard loan amount was 150 rubles, the increased one (requiring special permission) - 500 rubles. By the end of 1914, loans were provided to a total of 299 thousand households. On average, the loan covered 44% of the peasants' expenses for moving the farm to the farm.

State spending on land management (land management was free for the peasants) amounted to 2.3 million rubles in 1906, after which it continuously increased until the start of the war, and in 1914 amounted to 14.1 million rubles.

Sale of state and specific lands to peasants

One of the first measures of the government under the leadership of Stolypin was the transfer of state, specific and cabinet lands to the ownership of the peasants.

August 27, 1906 issued a decree "On the purpose of state lands for sale to expand peasant land ownership". All state-owned agricultural land (and in some cases, forest land) was subject, as the existing lease agreements were terminated, to be sold to peasants through the Peasants' Bank. The issue of assessing the land to be sold and the organization of land management work were entrusted to local land management commissions.

The sale of state lands to peasants did not cause a boom in demand, since in those areas where these lands were available, land hunger was not felt strongly. Sales peaked in 1909, when 55,000 acres were sold, and in the years 1907-1914, 232,000 acres were sold, that is, a negligible amount. The peasants found the lease of state lands more profitable than the redemption. In 1913, 3,188,000 acres were leased out (of which 945,000 dess. to companies, 1,165,000 dess. to individual householders, and 1,115,000 dess. to partnerships), the average rental rates ranged from 184 kopecks. per tithe in 1907 to 284 kopecks. for a tithe in 1914.

On September 19, 1906, the cabinet lands of the Altai District were given to the needs of the migrant peasants.

One household could be sold land not exceeding the norm, separately established for each locality (as a rule, about 3 acres per worker).

Operations of the Peasant Land Bank

On November 15, 1906, a decree was issued, repealing the law on December 14, 1893, and allowing peasants and rural communities in general to receive loans from the Peasants' Bank against the security of allotment lands. Loans could be spent on redeeming allotments from resettling members of societies, to compensate for the missing part of the cost of land purchased from the bank (a loan for purchased land was issued at 90% of its value), to compensate for various expenses during land development. The loan amount ranged from 40 to 90% of the value of the collateral.

These measures made it possible to somewhat intensify the activities of the Peasants' Bank, which noticeably stopped in 1905-1906 (the peasants believed in the coming nationalization and free distribution of landowners' land and did not want to buy it). After the decree of 1906, during the period 1906-1916, through lending transactions by the bank, the peasants acquired 5.822 thousand acres, and directly from the bank (also with loans) the peasants acquired 2.825 thousand acres in the same period. The bank always had an unsold land fund, which peaked (4.478 thousand acres) in 1908, and in 1917 amounted to 2.759 thousand acres. In 1911, a record-breaking year in terms of sales, the peasants purchased 1,397 thousand acres from a bank or through bank lending.

The total volume of all types of transactions with the participation of the bank for 1906-1916 amounted to 9.648 thousand acres of land, for which the bank issued loans for 1.042 billion rubles.

The land was acquired by individual peasants (17%), rural societies (18%) and partnerships (65%) (partnerships were associations of peasants only for the purpose of buying land, which was further processed individually).

The bank's policy was designed primarily to support strong and sustainable peasant farms. 70% of the buyers of land were peasant farms that owned more than 9 acres of land (that is, above average security). The peasants turned out to be fairly reliable borrowers, and by 1913 the accumulated arrears amounted to only 18 million rubles. In the period 1909-13, the bank foreclosed on 20-35 thousand acres of land per year, that is, no more than 2% of annual sales.

In terms of lending to peasants on the security of their land, the inertia of thinking in government circles turned out to be very strong. The protection of peasant lands from seizure for debts seemed to be one of the foundations of the agrarian system (although it completely contradicted the principles of the ongoing agrarian reform); the strong resistance of the Ministry of Finance led to the fact that in reality lending secured by allotment land did not work. During 1906-1916, the bank issued only 43 million rubles. mortgage loans secured by 560 thousand acres of land. The paradox of the situation was that a peasant who had nothing could be credited against the security of land. A peasant who had already bought land with his own money (that is, a obviously more reliable borrower) could not obtain a loan for the development of the economy on the security of this land.

Agronomic assistance

Beginning in 1906, agronomic assistance to the peasants in all its forms was sharply intensified. The initiator of the process was GUZiZ, which carried out part of the activities on its own, part - by subsidizing the activities of zemstvos. Zemstvos, with the promise of more and more subsidies by the state, actively joined in the development of agronomic assistance. In 1905, state spending on agronomic assistance amounted to 3.7 million rubles, from 1908 a rapid increase in appropriations began, and in 1913 agronomic assistance cost the treasury already 16.2 million rubles.

The effectiveness of agronomic assistance was due primarily to the fact that the peasant economy lagged far behind advanced agricultural technologies, which gave it a huge reserve for development. The main growth opportunities consisted in the use of developed crop rotations instead of the outdated three-field system (then science offered crop rotations from simple 4-field to 11-field ones, potatoes, seeded grasses, flax, sugar beets were added to cereals), the use of efficient agricultural machines (primarily steel plows and row seeders), the introduction of grass sowing, an increase in the number of operations for cultivating the land, sorting seeds, and using artificial fertilizers (more in a small amount), establishing an optimal balance between arable, meadow and pasture lands and increasing the role of livestock in farms. The situation was normal when the harvest on the experimental fields turned out to be 50-90% higher than that of the peasants.

One of the main factors making real assistance to the peasants possible was the presence of agronomic personnel close to the peasants. Therefore, the main emphasis was placed on increasing the number of district agronomists (that is, serving a group of villages smaller than the county) agronomists. In particular, in 34 so-called. 401 agronomists worked in the “Old Zemstvo” provinces in 1904, and already 3716 in 1913, of which only 287 were employed at the level of provinces and counties, and all the rest at the level of plots.

The activities of zemstvos, state and zemstvo agronomists were very diverse. Zemstvos maintained experimental fields (for this they rented peasant plots, processing was carried out under the guidance of agronomists), which turned out to be the most effective means of persuading the peasants, who trusted more personal experience than lectures and books. For example, in the developed Kherson province in 1913 there were 1491 experimental fields, that is, advanced agronomic experience could reach almost every village. To promote new agricultural machines, which the peasants did not dare to buy, rolling stations were set up, and for the trade in agricultural machinery, fertilizers and seeds - zemstvo warehouses. In 1912, agronomic readings were held at 11,000 locations, attended by more than 1 million listeners.

The result was the rapid introduction of modern agronomic technologies into the peasant economy and the mechanization of the economy. The total cost of agricultural implements in the country increased from 27 million rubles. in 1900 to 111 million rubles in 1913. Yield statistics for individual years are not reliable (due to large yield fluctuations between good and lean years), but the total grain harvest in European Russia in 1913 turned out to be a record - 4.26 billion poods, while the average harvest for the period 1901-1905 was 3.2 billion poods.

cooperative movement

At the beginning of the twentieth century. began to rapidly increase the role of those born in the 1860s. institutions of consumer and credit cooperation (the so-called "small credit": credit partnerships, savings and loan partnerships, zemstvo small loan offices). On June 7, 1904, the “Regulations on Small Credit” were adopted, which. reflected a shift in the government's focus on "strong" masters. P.A. Stolypin, while still the governor of Saratov, paid great attention to the cooperative movement.

The growth of cooperation was facilitated by the beginning of the Stolypin agrarian reform, which eliminated a number of property and legal restrictions on peasants, as well as the government through the State. The Duma (in 1907-1912) of a number of laws: “Regulations on city and public banks”, the establishment of the “Central Bank of Mutual Credit Societies” and others, some of which were initiated “from below” (III Congress of Representatives of Mutual Credit Societies, 1907) and supported by the government of P.A. Stolypin (p. 216-219, 225). Working capital of class-public institutions for the decade 1904-1914. increased from 52 million to 115.4 million rubles, deposits - from 22.3 million to 70.3 million rubles, the amount of loans issued - from 46.7 million to 103.5 million rubles. Credit cooperatives grew at a faster pace, their number increased from 1.2 thousand to 14.4 thousand, the number of members - from 447.1 thousand to 9.5 million people. Balance funds, which in 1904 amounted to 49.7 million rubles, increased to 708.8 million rubles, loans and deposits - from 31 million to 468.3 million rubles. Over 90% of credit partnerships started their activities with the help of loans from the State Bank. The Moscow People's Bank (1912) then became the coordinating center of the system of credit cooperation.

The number of cooperatives in Russia by 1914 in total amounted to 32,975: 13,839 of them were credit cooperatives, followed by 10,000 consumer cooperatives, 8,576 agricultural cooperatives, 500 repair cooperatives, and 60 others. In terms of the total number of cooperative organizations, Russia was second only to Germany. In 1916 the number of cooperatives has already reached 47 thousand, in 1918. 50-53 thousand. Consumer societies among them accounted for more than 50%, credit cooperatives about 30%. S. Maslov believes that on January 1, 1917. there were at least 10.5 million members of credit cooperatives in the country, and about 3 million members of consumer cooperatives.

Administrative reform of the rural community

On October 5, 1906, a decree was issued "On the abolition of certain restrictions on the rights of rural inhabitants and persons of other former taxable states". The decree provided for a wide range of measures that weakened the power of rural society over its members:

For admission to study and to a spiritual rank, permission (a dismissal sentence) from the rural society was no longer required; - it was allowed to enter the civil service, complete the course of educational institutions, while continuing to remain a member of rural society; - it was allowed to simultaneously be a member of several rural societies; - it was allowed to leave rural communities without asking for their consent (on condition that they refuse to use secular land).

A number of provisions of the decree were aimed at expanding the legal capacity of the peasants in order to equalize their rights with other estates:

Peasants, like all other persons of the former taxable estates, were allowed to enter the civil service (previously, peasants were required to have an educational qualification in the amount of the program of a 4-class county school); - the poll tax and mutual guarantee were completely abolished in those few areas where they still existed; - the punishment of peasants by zemstvo chiefs and volost courts for minor offenses not listed in the law was canceled; - peasants were allowed to be bound by bills; - those peasants who had the necessary qualified property were allowed to participate in elections to the State Duma for the corresponding qualified curiae; - Peasants independently elected vowels to zemstvo assemblies (earlier, peasants elected several candidates, vowels were chosen from among them by the governor); - county congresses could cancel the sentences of rural societies only because of their illegality (previously it was allowed to do this under the pretext of inexpediency of decisions, that is, arbitrarily).

The provisions of this decree were considered by the government as temporary and transitional until the implementation of a much broader conceived reform of local government. However, the decree itself was stuck in the III and IV Dumas forever. The legislators of the two institutions - the Duma and the State Council - were unable to find a compromise, and preferred endless delays in the adoption of bills to any constructive solution. Accordingly, there was no need to even think about legislative approval and any subsequent, more radical measures. As a result, the temporary government measures of 1907 continued to operate until 1917 without change.

Agrarian unrest in 1907-1914

At the beginning of the agrarian reform, agrarian unrest, which reached its peak in 1905-1906, began to decline. In the summer of 1907, the unrest was still very significant (although less than in 1906), but from the autumn of 1907 the riots began to decline, and then their intensity decreased year after year, until they completely disappeared by 1913.

The reasons for the cessation of agrarian unrest can be considered:

Intensive punitive measures; - a general cessation of revolutionary unrest and stabilization of the situation throughout the country; - the beginning of real measures to strengthen land ownership and land development (land management work on the ground is carried out between the harvest of the autumn harvest and preparation for planting winter crops, that is, in the middle of autumn; the first land management according to the decrees of 1906 was carried out in the autumn of 1907).

A sign of the gradual calming of the situation is the amount of land offered by private owners to the Peasants' Bank. In 1907, the proposal was of a rush nature, 7.665 thousand acres of land were offered for sale, of which the bank bought only 1.519 thousand acres. Another 1.8 million acres were bought by the peasants from the nobles directly with the assistance of the bank. But in the following year, 1908, out of the unpurchased 4.3 million acres, only 2.9 million were offered for sale. Thus, the landlords believed that agrarian unrest would not resume in full, and stopped panicking attempts to sell the land. Further, the volume of land sold by the landowners decreased year after year.

The second evidence is the maintenance of relatively stable land prices even at the time of its widest offer for sale in 1907. Although the landowners offered land for sale, the existing estates continued to bring them income, and therefore the price of land could not fall below the marginal price corresponding to the current profitability of the landowner's economy (according to the business customs of that time, the cost of estates was calculated on the basis of 6% yield). Land prices divided into two periods - before the unrest and after (until the middle of 1906, transactions were practically not made, since buyers considered the upcoming nationalization of the land to be a done deal). However, with the opening of the Third Duma, it became clear that there would be no nationalization, and transactions resumed at the previous prices (although in some areas the price of land fell by 10-20%, the average price did not change).

The nature of the agrarian unrest has also changed - if earlier they were a violation of the property rights of the landowners, now they have turned into protests against land management on conditions that seemed unfair to the peasants (the law required the consolidation of land for any willing peasant, even if the rural society refused to pass the necessary sentence). Another point of protest was the so-called "delimitation" of communal and landowner lands during land management work (landlords and communal lands often had a complex border, up to striping, which land surveyors tried to simplify when the communal land was developed), which stirred up old claims against landlords. Providing peasants with real freedom of economic activity, a sudden transition from the traditional model of existence to a way of life with many possible behaviors - to stay in the community, go to the farm, take a loan and buy land, sell the existing allotment - led to the creation of a conflict situation in the village and many personal tragedies.

The fate of Stolypin's reforms after 1911

Stolypin's reforms, contrary to popular belief, began to bear their main fruits just after 1911 - thanks to the legislative acts of 1911 (see the section "Land Management Law of 1911"), the reform takes on a second wind during the Stolypin agrarian reform. Statistical analysis" .

The volume of land management work to allocate land, the amount of land assigned to the property of peasants, the amount of land sold to peasants through the Peasants' Bank, the volume of loans to peasants grew steadily until the start of the First World War (and did not stop even during WWI):

Literally for all stages of land management, the average indicators for 1912-1913. surpass - and very significantly - similar indicators of 1907-1911. So, in 1907-1911. on average, 658 thousand petitions were filed annually to change the conditions of land use, and in 1912-1913. - 1166 thousand, completed in 1907-1911. cases 328, thousand households on an area of ​​3061 million acres, in 1912-1913. - 774 thousand households on an area of ​​6740 million acres, approved land management projects in 1907-1911. for 214 thousand households on an area of ​​1953 million acres, in 1912-1913. - 317,000 households on an area of ​​2,554 million acres. This applies to both group and individual land management, including individual allotments from the community. For 1907-1911 on average, 76,798 householders a year in Russia wanted to stand out, and in 1912-1913 - 160,952, i.e. 2.9 times more. Even higher is the growth in the number of finally approved and accepted by the population land management projects of individual allotments - their number increased from 55,933 to 111,865, respectively, i.e. 2.4 times more in 1912-13 than in 1907-1911. .

The laws adopted in 1907-1912 ensured the rapid growth, for example, of the cooperative movement, even during WWI: from 1914. by January 1, 1917, the total number of cooperatives increased from 32,975 to almost 50,000 by 1917, i.e., more than 1.5 times. By 1917, they consisted of 13.5-14 million people. Together with family members, it turns out that up to 70-75 million citizens of Russia (about 40% of the population) were related to cooperation.

Results of the reform

The results of the reform in numerical terms were as follows:

Reform assessments

The reform, which affected the most important social and democratic interests, gave rise to an extensive literature in the pre-revolutionary period. The assessment of the reform by contemporaries could not be impartial. Reviews of the reform directly depended on political positions. Considering the great weight of government critics in the public and scientific life of that time, we can assume that a negative attitude prevailed over a positive one. The Narodnik, and later Socialist-Revolutionary and Cadet, point of view on the agrarian question implied an accentuation of the suffering and exploitation of the peasantry, ideas about the positive role of communal landownership and a general anti-capitalist trend, hopes for a positive effect of the alienation of landlord lands, mandatory criticism of any undertakings of the government. The rightists, who emphasized the positive role of landownership of the nobility, were irritated by the policy of encouraging the purchase of landowners' lands. The Octobrists and nationalists who supported the government in the Duma tried to increase their own importance by delaying the consideration of all bills by introducing numerous small, insignificant changes to them. During the life of Stolypin, the struggle of political ambitions prevented many from giving a positive assessment of his activities; opinions about Stolypin noticeably softened after his tragic death.

The attitude of Soviet historical science to the Stolypin reforms turned out to be completely dependent on the harsh assessments given to Stolypin by Lenin in the midst of the political struggle, and Lenin's conclusions that the reform had completely failed. Soviet historians, who had done a great deal of work, had no opportunity to express their disagreement with Lenin's assessments, and were forced to adjust their conclusions to a previously known template, even if this contradicted the facts contained in their works. Paradoxically, both communal land ownership and reforms that destroyed the community should be criticized. The opinion was also expressed that although there was a positive trend in the development of agriculture, this was simply a continuation of the processes that took place before the start of the reforms, that is, the reforms simply did not produce a significant effect. Among the literature of the Soviet period, the bright books of A. Ya. Avrekh stand out, approaching the pamphlet genre in their actively expressed disgust for Stolypin and general emotionality. Of particular note are the works created in the 1920s by a group of economists, whose career in Soviet Russia soon ended in emigration or repression - A.V. Chayanov, B.D. Brutskus, L.N. Litoshenko. This group of scientists was extremely positive about Stolypin's reforms, which to a large extent determined their fate.

Modern Russian historians, with a wide range of opinions, generally tend to be positive about Stolypin's reforms, and in particular, agrarian reform. Two extensive special studies on this topic - V.G. Tyukavkina and M.A. Davydov - published in the 2000s, unconditionally consider the reform useful and successful.

The assessment of Stolypin's reforms is complicated by the fact that the reforms were never fully implemented. Stolypin himself assumed that all the reforms he conceived would be implemented comprehensively (and not only in terms of agrarian reform) and would give the maximum effect in the long term (according to Stolypin, it was required "twenty years of inner and outer peace"). The nature of the changes initiated by the reform, both institutional (improving the quality of property rights) and production (transition to 7-9 year crop rotations), was gradual, long-term and did not give grounds to expect a significant effect over 6-7 years of the active progress of the reform (considering the real deployment of the reform in 1908 and the suspension of its progress with the outbreak of war in 1914). Many observers of 1913-1914 believed that the country had finally come to the beginning of rapid agrarian growth; however, this phenomenon was noticeable not in the main indicators of agricultural statistics, but in indirect manifestations (rapid development of grass-roots agricultural education, an equally rapid increase in demand for modern agricultural equipment and specialized literature, etc.).

With the pace of land management work achieved in 1913 (4.3 million acres per year), land management activities would have been completed by 1930-32, and given the increase in speed, perhaps by the mid-1920s. War and revolution prevented these broad plans from being realized.

, No. 25853. : State. type., 1912. - 708 p. ISBN 5-88451-103-5. - . - : Type. V.F. Kirshbaum, 1905. - 421 p. . - / (1906 reissue). - M .: Ed. YurInfo-Press, 2008. - 622 p. , p. 601.

Data on tax collection for 1900 are given as the last quiet year before the start of agrarian unrest,

The main provisions of the agrarian reform Goals 1. Destruction of the peasant community 2. Creation of farms and cuts 3. Resettlement policy 4. Development of peasant productive cooperation 5. Provision of state assistance to peasant farms 6. Ensuring the legal equality of the peasantry 1. Removing social tension in the countryside 2. Forming a wide layer of small owners to ensure political stability 3. Distracting peasants from the idea of ​​forcible alienation of landed estates 4. Preservation all forms of private property (including landowners) Directions

Manifesto November 3, 1905 “On improving the welfare and easing the situation of the peasant population” Decree to the Governing Senate on supplementing certain provisions of the current law concerning peasant land ownership and land use (November 9, 1906) Law on amending and supplementing certain resolutions on peasant land ownership (June 14, 1910) Decree on land management commissions (May 29, 1911) The main bills regulating the implementation of agrarian reform:

The destruction of the community began agrarian reform. The government allowed free exit from the community. Allotments assigned to the peasant became his property, reduced to a single plot. A peasant could go to a cut (staying to live in a village), or to a farm. Stolypin sought to create a stratum of petty bourgeois proprietors as the backbone of the autocracy. P.A. Stolypin inspects farm gardens near Moscow in April 1910

But the main task of the reform was the desire to divert the peasants from the struggle to seize the landlords' lands. But the exit suddenly went in a different direction. 60% of the peasants who left the community sold their allotments. By 1915, the number of farmers was 10%. The rest of the peasants treated them with undisguised hostility. Stolypin inspects the farm.

The most important direction of the reform was the resettlement policy. Fighting overpopulation in the center of the country, Stolypin began to distribute land in Siberia in the Far East and Central Asia, providing immigrants with benefits (exemption for 5 years from taxes and military service). But the local authorities were hostile to this. Almost 20% of the displaced persons returned back. True, the population of the eastern regions has increased markedly. Russian settlers in the Samarkand province of the Turkestan Governor General.

Relationship between the reform of local government and the agrarian reform The electoral system was lowered to the level of volosts and villages, with the grassroots self-government bodies being given a semi-official character. “First of all, it is necessary to create a citizen, a peasant-owner, a small landowner and ... - citizenship itself will reign in Rus'. Citizen first, citizenship second. Giving the peasant-owner civil rights. The lower cell of the zemstvo representation is the county zemstvo

The first results of the reforms. Stolypin did not expect quick results. Once he said: "Give the state 20 years of peace ... and you will not recognize today's Russia." During the years of reform, the area under crops increased by 10%, Russia began to export 25% of the world trade in bread, the widespread use of mineral fertilizers began, the peasants began to purchase and use agricultural machinery.

This again led to the beginning of an industrial boom (9% per year). The peasantry went its own way, unlike the Americans, it began to unite in cooperatives that actively worked both in the domestic and foreign markets. In 1912 the Moscow People's Bank was created, lending to peasants for the purchase of equipment, seeds, fertilizers, etc. P Stolypin visiting the kulak.

Reasons for the failure of P.A. Stolypin ExternalInternal Death of Stolypin P.A. Russo-Japanese War (gg.) The rise of the labor movement in the years. Opposition of the peasantry Lack of allocated funds for land management and resettlement Poor organization of land management work

Conclusions: The beginning of the 20th century was a time of political instability for Russia. A series of riots, war, revolution affected the entire social structure of Russian society. In such difficult conditions, Russia needed both political and economic reforms that could strengthen and improve the economy. It would be most expedient to start with agrarian reforms, because even at the beginning of the 20th century Russia remained an agrarian country with a majority of the rural population. The agrarian reform was the impetus for the development of a series of projects to address a number of issues: labor, cultural and educational, financial and local government. All these issues were closely related to the new changes that were introduced as a result of the agrarian reforms. The beginning of these transformations in Russia was laid by the agrarian reform led by P.A. Stolypin, whose main goal was to create a wealthy peasantry, imbued with the idea of ​​property and therefore not in need of a revolution, acting as a support for the government.

INTRODUCTION

The paper discusses the reasons for the implementation, the main stages, the results of the Stolypin agrarian reform, which was carried out by the tsarist government in the period from 1906 to 1914. Consideration of the problem is carried out against the background of the political and economic situation that has developed in Russia, on the eve of the ongoing reforms.

The beginning of the 20th century was a time of fundamental transformations in politics and economics. A crisis situation was brewing in the country, revolutionary uprisings rose, the revolution of 1905-1907 took place. Russia needed to get “on its feet” in order to continue to develop as a strong state in order to gain influence and respect among highly developed countries such as England, France, which at that time were capitalist powers, with a well-functioning administrative apparatus, with a stable economy, with good rates of development of industry, production and economy.

Russia had two ways of development: revolutionary and peaceful, i.e. through political and economic reforms. In agriculture, there were no development trends, and it was agriculture that was considered as a source of capital accumulation for the development of industry. After the abolition of serfdom, the peasants did not improve their position, life status. The landowners' mayhem continued. A crisis was brewing. More and more peasant uprisings arose. To prevent unrest, the government had to immediately take measures to settle the peasant masses, to organize production, and to restore agriculture. A reform was needed that could settle all the grievances, a person was needed who would take responsibility for carrying out such a reform. They became Prime Minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. He offered his way out of the situation. His reform was approved and accepted by the government.

The main stages and ways of carrying out the Stolypin agrarian reform are considered in detail and set out in this work. With the help of the available material, we are convinced that this reform was the most acceptable way out of the current situation, gave time to think about the further ways of Russia's development.

1. PETER ARKADIEVICH STOLYPIN ON REFORM

“We are called to free the people from begging, from ignorance, from lack of rights,” said Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. He saw the way to these goals primarily in the strengthening of statehood.

Land reform became the core of his policy, his life's work.

This reform was supposed to create in Russia a class of small proprietors - a new "strong pillar of order", a pillar of the state. Then Russia would be "not afraid of all revolutions." On May 10, 1907, Stolypin concluded his speech on land reform with the famous words: “They (opponents of statehood) need great upheavals, we need Great Russia!”

"Nature has invested in man some innate instincts ... and one of the strongest feelings of this order is a sense of ownership." - Pyotr Arkadyevich wrote in a letter to L.N. Tolstoy in 1907. “You can’t love someone else’s on a par with your own, and you can’t court, improve land that is in temporary use, on a par with your own land. The artificial castration of our peasant in this respect, the destruction of his innate sense of property, leads to much evil and, most importantly, to poverty. And poverty, for me, is the worst of slavery ... "

P.A. Stolypin stressed that he sees no point in "driving the more developed element of the landowners off the land." On the contrary, the peasants must be turned into real owners.

What kind of social system would emerge in Russia after this reform?

Supporters of Stolypin both then and later imagined him differently. Nationalist Vasily Shulgin, for example, believed that he would be close to the Italian fascist system. The Octobrists thought it would be more of a Western liberal society. Pyotr Arkadyevich himself said in 1909 in an interview: "Give the state 20 years of inner and outer peace, and you will not recognize today's Russia."

Internal peace implied the suppression of the revolution, external - the absence of wars. “While I am in power,” said Stolypin, “I will do everything in human power to prevent Russia from going to war. We cannot measure ourselves against an external enemy until the worst internal enemies of Russia's greatness, the social revolutionaries, have been destroyed. Stolypin prevented war after Hungary captured Bosnia in 1908. Having convinced the tsar not to mobilize, he noted with satisfaction: "Today I managed to save Russia from destruction."

But Stolypin failed to complete the planned reform.

The Black Hundreds and influential court circles were extremely hostile to him. They believed that he was destroying the traditional way of life in Russia. After the suppression of the revolution, Stolypin began to lose the support of the king

2. BACKGROUND TO AGRARIAN REFORM

Before the revolution of 1905-1907, two different forms of land ownership coexisted in the Russian countryside: on the one hand, the private property of the landowners, on the other, the communal property of the peasants. At the same time, the nobility and peasants developed two opposite views on the land, two stable worldviews.

The landlords believed that the land - the same property as any other. They saw no sin in buying and selling it.

The peasants thought otherwise. They firmly believed that the land was "no one's", God's, and only labor gives the right to use it. The rural community responded to this age-old idea. All the land in it was divided between families "according to the number of eaters." If the size of the family was reduced, its land allotment also decreased.

Until 1905, the state supported the community. It was much easier to collect various duties from it than from many individual peasant farms. S. Witte remarked on this occasion: "It is easier to graze the herd than each member of the herd separately." The community was considered the most reliable support of autocracy in the countryside, one of the "pillars" on which the state system rested.

But the tension between the community and private property gradually increased, the population increased, the plots of the peasants became smaller and smaller. This burning lack of land was called land scarcity. Involuntarily, the views of the peasants turned to the noble estates, where there was a lot of land. In addition, the peasants considered this property initially unfair, illegal. “It is necessary to take away the landowner’s land and attach it to the communal one!” they repeated with conviction.

In 1905, these contradictions resulted in a real "war for the land."

The peasants "with the whole world", that is, the whole community, went to smash the noble estates. The authorities suppressed the unrest by sending military expeditions to the places of unrest, carrying out mass floggings and arrests. From the "original foundation of autocracy" the community suddenly turned into a "hotbed of rebellion." The former peaceful neighborhood of the community and the landowners came to an end.

3. STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM. HER MAIN IDEA

During the peasant unrest of 1905, it became clear that it was impossible to maintain the former situation in the countryside. Communal and private ownership of land could no longer coexist side by side.

At the end of 1905, the authorities seriously considered the possibility of meeting the peasant demands. General Dmitry Trepav said then: "I myself am a landowner and I will be very glad to give away half of my land for nothing, being convinced that only under this condition will I keep the other half for myself." But at the beginning of 1906 there was a turning point in the mood. After recovering from the shock, the government chose the opposite path.

The idea arose: what if not to yield to the community, but on the contrary, to declare a merciless war on it. The idea was that private property should go over to a decisive offensive against communal property. Especially quickly, in a few months, this idea won the support of the nobility. Many landowners, who had previously been ardent supporters of the community, now turned out to be its irreconcilable opponents. “The community is a beast, this beast must be fought,” the well-known nobleman, monarchist N. Markov, categorically stated. Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, became the main spokesman for the sentiments directed against the community. He urged "to give the peasant the freedom to work, to grow rich, to save him from the bondage of the obsolete communal system." This was the main idea of ​​the land reform, which was called Stolypin.

It was assumed that wealthy peasants would turn from community members into "little landowners." Thus, the community will be blown up from within, destroyed. The struggle between the community and private property will end in victory for the latter. A new layer of strong owners is emerging in the country - a "strong support of order."

Stolypin's concept offered a way for the development of a mixed, multi-structural economy, where state forms of economy were to compete with collective and private ones. The constituent elements of his programs are the transition to farms, the use of cooperation, the development of land reclamation, the introduction of a three-stage agricultural education, the organization of cheap credit for peasants, the formation of an agricultural party that really represented the interests of small land ownership.

Stolypin puts forward the liberal doctrine of managing the rural community, eliminating striping, developing private property in the countryside and achieving economic growth on this basis. As the market-oriented peasant economy of the farm type progresses, in the course of the development of land purchase and sale relations, a natural reduction in the landowner's land fund should occur. The future agrarian system of Russia was presented to the prime minister in the form of a system of small and medium-sized farms, united by local self-governing and not numerous noble estates. On this basis, the integration of two cultures - noble and peasant - was to take place.

Stolypin relies on "strong and strong" peasants. However, it does not require universal uniformity, unification of forms of land tenure and land use. Where, due to local conditions, the community is economically viable, "it is necessary for the peasant himself to choose the method of using the land that suits him best."

The beginning of the land reform was announced by a government decree of November 9, 1906, adopted on an emergency basis, bypassing the State Duma. According to this decree, the peasants received the right to leave the community with their land. They might as well sell it.

P.A. Stolypin believed that this measure would soon destroy the community. He said that the decree "laid the foundation of a new peasant system."

In February 1907, the II State Duma was convened. In it, as in the First Duma, the land question remained in the center of attention. The difference was that now the "noble side" was not only defending, but also advancing.

The majority of deputies in the Second Duma, even more firmly than in the First Duma, advocated the transfer of part of the noble lands to the peasants. P.A. Stolypin resolutely rejected such projects. Of course, the Second Duma showed no desire to approve the Stolypin decree of 9 November. In connection with this, persistent rumors circulated among the peasants that it was impossible to leave the community - those who left would not get the landlord's land.

The creation of the June 3rd system, which was personified by the Third State Duma, along with the agrarian reform, was the second step in turning Russia into a bourgeois monarchy (the first step was the reform of 1861).

The socio-political meaning boils down to the fact that Caesarism was finally crossed out: the "peasant" Duma turned into the "lord's" Duma. On November 16, 1907, two weeks after the work of the Third Duma began, Stolypin addressed it with a government declaration. The first and main task of the government is not reform, but the struggle against the revolution.

The second central task of the government, Stolypin announced the implementation of the agrarian law on November 9, 1906, which is "the fundamental idea of ​​the present government ...".

Of the reforms, reforms of local self-government, education, workers' insurance, etc. were promised.

In the Third State Duma, convened in 1907 under a new electoral law (limiting the representation of the poor), completely different moods prevailed than in the first two. This Duma was called Stolypinskaya . She not only approved the decree of November 9, but went even further than P.A. Stolypin. (For example, in order to hasten the destruction of the community, the Duma declared dissolved all the communities where land redistribution had not taken place for more than 24 years).

The discussion of the decree on November 9, 1906 began in the Duma on October 23, 1908, i.e. two years after he entered life. In total, the discussion went on for more than six months.

After the adoption of the decree on November 9 by the Duma, as amended, it was submitted for discussion by the State Council and was also adopted, after which, according to the date of its approval by the tsar, it became known as the law on June 14, 1910. In its content, it was, of course, a liberal bourgeois law that promoted the development of capitalism in the countryside and, therefore, progressive.

The decree introduced extremely important changes in the landownership of the peasants. All peasants received the right to leave the community, which in this case allocated land to the escaping in their own possession. At the same time, the decree provided for privileges for wealthy peasants in order to encourage them to leave the community. In particular, those who left the community received "in the ownership of individual householders" all the lands "consisting in his permanent use." This meant that people from the community also received surpluses in excess of the per capita norm. Moreover, if redistribution has not been made in a given community over the past 24 years, then the householder received the surplus free of charge, but if there were redistributions, then he paid the community for the surplus at the redemption prices of 1861. Since prices have increased several times over 40 years, this was also beneficial for wealthy people.

Communities in which there had been no redistribution from the moment the peasants switched to redemption were recognized as mechanically transferred to the private property of individual householders. For the legal registration of the right of ownership to their plot, it was enough for the peasants of such communities to submit an application to the land management commission, which drew up documents for the plot actually in their possession in the ownership of the householder. In addition to this provision, the law differed from the decree by some simplification of the procedure for leaving the community.

In 1906, the “Provisional Rules” on the land management of peasants were also adopted, which became law after the approval of the Duma on May 29, 1911. The land management commissions created on the basis of this law were given the right, in the course of the general land management of the communities, to allocate individual householders without the consent of the gathering, at their own discretion, if the commission considered that such allocation did not affect the interests of the community. The commissions also had the final say in determining land disputes. Such a right opened the way to the arbitrariness of the commissions.

4. MAIN DIRECTIONS OF THE STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM

Stolypin, being a landowner, leader of the provincial nobility, knew and understood the interests of the landowners; as governor during the revolution, he saw peasants in revolt, so for him the agrarian question was not an abstract concept.

The essence of the reforms: laying a solid foundation for the autocracy and advancing along the path of industrial, and consequently, capitalist development.

The core of the reforms is agrarian policy.

The agrarian reform was the main and favorite brainchild of Stolypin.

The goals of the reform were several: socio-political - to create in the countryside a strong support for the autocracy from strong owners, splitting them off from the bulk of the peasantry and opposing them to it; strong farms were to become an obstacle to the growth of the revolution in the countryside; socio-economic - to destroy the community, plant private farms in the form of cuts and farms, and send the excess labor force to the city, where it will be absorbed by growing industry; economic - to ensure the rise of agriculture and the further industrialization of the country in order to eliminate the lag behind the advanced powers.

The first step in this direction was taken in 1861. Then the agrarian question was solved at the expense of the peasants, who paid the landlords both for land and for freedom. Agrarian legislation 1906-1910 was the second step, while the government, in order to strengthen its power and the power of the landowners, again tried to solve the agrarian question at the expense of the peasantry.

The new agrarian policy was carried out on the basis of the decree of November 9, 1906. This decree was the main business of Stolypin's life. It was a creed, a great and last hope, an obsession, his present and future - great if the reform succeeded; catastrophic if it fails. And Stolypin was aware of this.

In general, a series of laws 1906-1912. was bourgeois.

Medieval allotment land tenure of peasants was abolished, exit from the community, sale of land, free resettlement to cities and outskirts were allowed, redemption payments, corporal punishment, and some legal restrictions were abolished.

The agrarian reform consisted of a complex of successively carried out and interconnected measures.

From the end of 1906, the state began a powerful attack on the community. For the transition to new economic relations, a whole system of economic and legal measures to regulate the agrarian economy was developed. The Decree of November 9, 1906 proclaimed the predominance of the fact of sole ownership of land over the legal right to use it. Peasants could now leave it and receive land in full ownership. They could now separate what was in actual use from the community, regardless of its will. The land allotment became the property not of the family, but of the individual householder.

The peasants were cut off from the communal land plots - cuts. Wealthy peasants transferred their estates to the same plots - this was called farms. The authorities considered hamlets to be the ideal form of land ownership. On the part of the farmers, who lived apart from each other, it was possible not to be afraid of riots and unrest.

Measures were taken to ensure the strength and stability of working peasant farms. So, in order to avoid land speculation and concentration of property, the maximum size of individual land ownership was limited by law, and the sale of land to non-peasants was allowed.

After the beginning of the reform, many poor people rushed from the community, who immediately sold their land and went to the cities. Wealthy peasants were in no hurry to get out. What was the explanation for this? First of all, leaving the community broke the usual way of life and the whole outlook of the peasant. The peasant resisted the transition to farms and cuts, not because of his darkness and ignorance, as the authorities believed, but on the basis of sound worldly considerations. The community protected him from complete ruin and many other vicissitudes of fate. Peasant farming was very dependent on the vagaries of the weather. Having several scattered strips of land in different parts of the public allotment: one in a lowland, another on a hill, etc. (this order was called striped), the peasant provided himself with an annual average harvest: in a dry year, strips in the lowlands helped out, in a rainy year - on the hills. Having received an allotment in one cut, the peasant found himself at the mercy of the elements. He went bankrupt in the very first dry year, if her cut was in a high place. The next year was rainy, and it was the neighbor's turn to go bankrupt who found himself in a lowland. Only a large cut, located in different reliefs, could guarantee an average annual yield.

After the peasants went out to cuts or farms, the former "insurance" against crop failure disappeared. Now just one dry or too rainy year could bring poverty and famine. So that such fears among the peasants disappeared, the best lands began to be cut into those leaving the community. Naturally, this aroused the indignation of the rest of the community. Hostility quickly grew between the two. The number of those who left the community began to gradually decrease.

The formation of farms and cuts was even somewhat slowed down for the sake of another goal - the strengthening of allotment land into personal property. Each member of the community could declare his withdrawal from it and secure for himself his striped allotment, which the community could no longer reduce or move.

But the owner could sell his fortified allotment even to a person outside the community. From an agrotechnical point of view, such an innovation could not bring much benefit (the allotment, as it was striped, remained), but it was capable of greatly disrupting the unity of the peasant world, causing a split in the community. It was assumed that every householder who had lost several souls in his family and fearfully awaited the next redistribution would certainly seize the opportunity to leave his entire allotment intact.

In 1907 - 1915. 25% of households announced their separation from the community, while 20% - 2008.4 thousand households actually separated. New forms of land tenure became widespread: farms and cuts. As of January 1, 1916, there were already 1221.5 thousand of them. In addition, the law of June 14, 1910 considered it unnecessary for many peasants to leave the community, who were only formally considered community members. The number of such households amounted to about one third of all communal households.

Despite all the efforts of the government, the farmsteads took root well only in the northwestern provinces, including partly Pskov and Smolensk. Even before the beginning of the Stolypin reform, the peasants of the Kovno province began to settle in farms. The same phenomenon was observed in the Pskov province. In these parts, the influence of Prussia and the Baltic states affected. The local landscape, changeable, cut by rivers and streams, also contributed to the creation of farms.

In the southern and southeastern provinces, the main obstacle to widespread farming was the difficulty with water. But here (in the Northern Black Sea region, in the North Caucasus and in the steppe Trans-Volga region) the planting of cuts went quite successfully. The absence of strong communal traditions in these places was combined with a high level of development of agrarian capitalism, exceptional soil fertility, its uniformity over very large areas, and a low level of agriculture. The peasant, having spent almost no money on improving his strips of labor and means, left them without regret and switched to cuts.

In the Central Non-Chernozem region, the peasant, on the contrary, had to invest a lot of effort into cultivating his allotment. Without care, the local land will not give birth to anything. Fertilization of the soil here began from time immemorial. And since the end of the nineteenth century. cases of collective transitions of entire villages to multi-field crop rotations with sowing of fodder grasses became more frequent. Received development and transition to "wide bands" (instead of narrow, confusing).

The activities of the government would be much more useful if in the Central Black Earth provinces, instead of planting farms and cuts, it would help to intensify peasant agriculture within the community. At first, especially under Prince B.A. Vasilchikov, the head of land management and agriculture, such assistance was partly provided. But with the advent of A.V. Krivoshein, who in 1908 took the post of chief administrator of land management and agriculture and became the closest associate of Stolypin, the land management department led a sharply anti-communal policy. As a result, the scythe hit rock bottom: the peasants resisted the planting of farms and cuts, and the government almost openly prevented the introduction of advanced farming systems on communal lands. The only thing in which the land surveyors and local peasants found common interest was the division of joint land ownership of several villages. In Moscow and some other provinces, this type of land management was so developed that it began to relegate work on the allocation of farms and cuts to the background.

In the Central Black Earth provinces, the main obstacle to the formation of farms and cuts on communal lands was the lack of peasant land. For example, in the Kursk province, local peasants "wanted the landowner's land immediately and for free." From this it followed that before planting farms and cuts, in these provinces it was necessary to solve the problem of peasant land shortages - including at the expense of swollen landlord latifundia.

The June 3 coup d'état radically changed the situation in the country. The peasants had to give up their dreams of a quick "cutting". The pace of implementation of the decree of November 9, 1906 increased dramatically. In 1908, compared with 1907, the number of established householders increased 10 times and exceeded half a million. In 1909, a record figure was reached - 579.4 thousand strengthened. But since 1910, the pace of strengthening began to decline. The artificial measures put into law on June 14, 1910, did not straighten the curve. The number of peasants who stood out from the community stabilized only after the release of the law on May 29, 1911 “On land management”. However, to approach the highest indicators of 1908-1909 again. did not succeed.

During these years, in some southern provinces, for example, in Bessarabian and Poltava, communal land ownership was almost completely eliminated. In other provinces, for example in Kursk, it has lost its leading position. (In these provinces, even before there were many communities with household land ownership).

But in the provinces of the northern, northeastern, southeastern, and partly in the central industrial reform only slightly affected the thickness of the communal peasantry.

The interspersed fortified personal peasant landed property very remotely resembled the classical Roman "sacred and inviolable private property." And the point is not only in the legal restrictions imposed on fortified allotments (prohibition to sell to non-peasant class persons, to mortgage in private banks). The peasants themselves, leaving the community, attached paramount importance to securing for themselves not specific bands, but their total area. Therefore, it happened that they were not averse to taking part in the general redistribution, if this did not reduce the area of ​​\u200b\u200btheir allotment (for example, when switching to "wide stripes"). So that the authorities would not interfere and upset the case, such redistributions were sometimes carried out secretly. It happened that the same view of the fortified land was adopted by the local authorities. The ministerial revision of 1911 found numerous cases of shared fortification in the Oryol province.

This means that it was not certain bands that were strengthened, but the share of this or that householder in worldly land ownership. And the government itself, in the end, took the same point of view, arrogating to itself, by law on May 29, 1911, the right to move the fortified belts when allocating farms or cuts.

Therefore, the mass strengthening of striped lands actually led only to the formation of unlimited communities. By the beginning of the Stolypin reform, about a third of the communities in European Russia did not redistribute the land. Sometimes two communities coexisted side by side - the re-divided and the undivided. Nobody noticed a big difference in the level of their agriculture. Only in the besperedelnaya the rich were richer, and the poor were poorer.

In reality, the government, of course, did not want the concentration of land in the hands of a few world-eaters and the ruin of the mass of farmers. Having no means of subsistence in the countryside, the landless poor had to pour into the city. Industry, depressed until 1910, would not have been able to cope with an influx of labor on such a scale. Masses of homeless and unemployed people threatened new social upheavals. Therefore, the government hastened to make an addition to its decree, forbidding within one county to concentrate in one hand more than six higher shower allotments, determined by the reform of 1861. In different provinces, this ranged from 12 to 18 dessiatins. The ceiling set for "strong owners" was very low. The corresponding norm was included in the law on June 14, 1910.

In real life, it was mostly the poor who left the community, as well as city dwellers, who remembered that they had an allotment in a long-abandoned village that could now be sold. The land was also sold by the settlers who left for Siberia. A huge amount of lands of interstrip fortification went on sale. In 1914, for example, 60% of the area fortified in that year was sold. The buyer of the land sometimes turned out to be a peasant society, and then it returned to the mundane cauldron. More often, wealthy peasants bought the land, who, by the way, were not always in a hurry to leave the community. Other communal peasants also bought. Fortified and public lands were in the hands of the same owner. Without leaving the community, at the same time he also had fortified areas. A witness and participant in all this upheaval could still remember where and what stripes she had. But already in the second generation such a confusion was to begin, in which no court would have been able to sort it out. Something similar, however, has already taken place once. Prematurely redeemed allotments (according to the reform of 1861) at one time severely violated the uniformity of land use in the community. But then they began to gradually trim. Since the Stolypin reform did not resolve the agrarian issue and land oppression continued to grow, a new wave of redistribution was inevitable, which was to sweep away a lot of Stolypin's legacy. Indeed, the land redistribution, which had almost stalled at the height of the reform, began again in 1912 on an upward trend.

Stolypin, apparently, himself understood that the cross-strip fortification would not create a "strong owner." It was not for nothing that he urged the local authorities "to be imbued with the conviction that the strengthening of the plots is only half the battle, even only the beginning of the work, and that the law of November 9 was not created to strengthen the strips." On October 15, 1908, by agreement of the ministers of internal affairs, justice and the chief administrator of land management and agriculture, "Temporary rules on the allocation of allotment land to some places" were issued. “The most perfect type of land arrangement is a farm,” the rules said, “and if it is impossible to form one, a cut that is continuous for all field lands, set aside especially from the indigenous estate.”

In March 1909, the Committee for Land Management Affairs approved the "Provisional Rules for the Land Management of Entire Rural Societies." Since that time, local land management bodies have been increasingly focused on the development of allotments of entire villages. The new instruction, issued in 1910, specifically emphasized: “The ultimate goal of land management is the development of the entire allotment; therefore, when performing work on sections, one should strive to ensure that these works cover the largest possible area of ​​​​the allotment being arranged ... ”When assigning work to the queue, the first thing to do was to expand the entire allotment, then - on group sections and only after them - on single ones. In practice, with a shortage of land surveyors, this meant the cessation of single allotments. Indeed, a strong owner could wait a long time until all the poor were driven out to cut off in the neighboring village.

In May 1911, the law "On land management" was issued. It included the main provisions of the instructions of 1909-1910. the new law established that in order to switch to a cut-off and farm economy, it was no longer necessary to first consolidate allotment lands into personal property. Since that time, the cross-strip fortification has lost its former meaning.

Of the total number of farms and cuts created during the reform, 64.3% arose as a result of the expansion of entire villages. It was more convenient for the land surveyors to work this way, the effectiveness of their work increased, the high authorities received round figures for juggling, but at the same time the number of small farmers and cut-off farmers who could not be called "strong masters" increased. Many farms were not viable. In the Poltava province, for example, with the full expansion of villages, on average, there were 4.1 dess. The peasants said that on other farms "there is nowhere to drive the chicken."

Only about 30% of farms and cuts on communal lands were formed by separating individual owners. But these, as a rule, were strong hosts. In the same Poltava province, the average size of a single division was 10 dess. But most of these allotments were made in the first years of the reform. Then the matter practically vanished.

Stolypin had mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, he understood that only the dissection of the allotment into cuts would isolate the peasant farms from each other, only the complete settlement on the farms would finally liquidate the community. It will be difficult for the peasants dispersed over the farms to raise revolts.

On the other hand, Stolypin could not but see that instead of strong, stable farms, the land management department was fabricating a mass of small and obviously weak ones - those who could in no way stabilize the situation in the countryside and become the backbone of the regime. However, he was not able to deploy the bulky machine of the land management department in such a way that it would not act as it was convenient for it, but as necessary for the good of the cause.

Simultaneously with the issuance of new agrarian laws, the government is taking measures to forcibly destroy the community, not fully relying on the action of economic factors. Immediately after November 9, 1906, the entire state apparatus is set in motion by issuing the most categorical circulars and orders, as well as by repressive measures against those who do not carry them out with too much energy.

The practice of the reform showed that the mass of the peasantry was opposed to separation from the community - at least in most areas. A survey of the sentiments of the peasants by the Free Economic Society showed that in the central provinces the peasants had a negative attitude towards separation from the community (89 negative indicators in the questionnaires against 7 positive ones). Many peasant correspondents wrote that the decree of November 9 was aimed at ruining a mass of peasants so that a few would profit from it.

In the current situation, the only way for the government to carry out reform was the way of violence against the main peasant mass. The specific methods of violence were very diverse - from intimidation of rural gatherings to drawing up fictitious sentences, from the cancellation of decisions of the gatherings by the zemstvo chief to the issuance of decisions by the county land management commissions on the allocation of householders, from the use of police force to obtain the "consent" of the gatherings to the expulsion of opponents of the division.

In order to get the peasants to agree to the breakdown of the entire allotment, officials from the land management bodies happened to resort to the most unceremonious measures of pressure. One characteristic case is described in the memoirs of the zemstvo chief V. Polivanov. The author served in the Gryazovets district of the Vologda province. Once, early in the morning, at a bad time, an indispensable member of the land management commission came to one of the villages. A meeting was convened, and an indispensable member explained to the "peasants" that they needed to go to the farms: the community was small, there was enough land and water from three sides. “As soon as I looked at the plan, I say to my clerk: it’s necessary to transfer Lopatikha to the farm.” After conferring among themselves, the scouts refused. Neither promises to provide a loan, nor threats to arrest the "rebels" and to bring soldiers to billet had no effect. The peasants kept repeating: "As the old people lived, so we will live, but we do not agree to the farm." Then the indispensable member went to drink tea, and the peasants were forbidden to disperse and sit on the ground. After drinking tea, the indispensable was drawn to sleep. He went out to the peasants waiting under the windows late in the evening. "Well, do you agree?" - “Everyone agrees!” The assembly answered in unison. “To the farms, so to the farms, to the aspen, so to the aspen, only so that everyone, then, together.” V. Polivanov claimed that he managed to reach the governor and restore justice.

However, there is evidence that sometimes the resistance of the peasants to too much pressure from officials led to bloody clashes.

4.1 ACTIVITIES OF THE PEASANT BANK

In 1906-1907. By decrees of the tsar, some part of the state and specific lands was transferred to the Peasants' Bank for sale to the peasants in order to ease the land tightness.

Opponents of the Stolypin land reform said that it was carried out according to the principle: "The rich will increase, the poor will be taken away." According to the plan of the supporters of the reform, the peasant proprietors had to increase their allotments not only at the expense of the rural poor. In this they were assisted by the Peasant Land Bank, which bought land from the landowners and sold them to the peasants in small plots. The law of June 5, 1912 allowed the issuance of a loan secured by any allotment land acquired by the peasants.

The development of various forms of credit - mortgage, reclamation, agricultural, land management - contributed to the intensification of market relations in the countryside. But in fact, this land was bought mainly by the kulaks, who thus received additional opportunities for expanding the economy, since only wealthy peasants could afford to buy land even through a bank, with payment in installments.

Many nobles, impoverished or troubled by peasant unrest, willingly sold their lands. The inspirer of the reform P.A. Stolypin, to set an example, sold one of his estates himself. Thus, the bank acted as an intermediary between the sellers of land - the nobles and its buyers - the peasants.

On a grand scale, the Bank carried out the purchase of land with their subsequent resale to peasants on preferential terms, intermediary operations to increase peasant land use. He increased credit to the peasants and significantly reduced its cost, and the Bank paid more interest on its obligations than the peasants paid it. The difference in payment was covered by subsidies from the budget, amounting for the period from 1906 to 1917. 1457.5 billion rubles.

The bank actively influenced the forms of land ownership: for peasants who acquired land as sole property, payments were reduced. As a result, if before 1906 the bulk of the buyers of land were peasant collectives, then by 1913 79.7% of the buyers were individual peasants.

The scale of operations of the Peasant Land Bank in 1905-1907. for the purchase of land has almost tripled. Many landlords were in a hurry to part with their estates. In 1905-1907. the bank bought over 2.7 million dess. earth. State and specific lands were transferred to his disposal. Meanwhile, the peasants, counting on the liquidation of landownership in the near future, were not very willing to make purchases. From November 1905 to the beginning of May 1907, the bank sold only about 170,000 dessiatins. In his hands turned out to be a lot of land, for the economic management of which he was not adapted, and little money. To support his government even used the savings of pension funds.

The activities of the Peasants' Bank caused growing irritation among the landlords. This was manifested in sharp attacks against him at the III Congress of authorized noble societies in March-April 1907. The delegates were unhappy that the bank was selling land only to peasants (some landowners were not averse to using its services as buyers). They were also worried that the bank had not yet completely given up selling land to rural communities (although it tried to sell land mainly to individual peasants in whole plots). The general mood of the noble deputies was expressed by A.D. Kashkarov: "I believe that the Peasants' Bank should not deal with the so-called agrarian issue ... the agrarian issue should be stopped by the power of the authorities."

At the same time, the peasants were very reluctant to leave the community and strengthen their allotments. There was a rumor that those who left the community would not get land cuts from the landowners.

Only after the end of the revolution did the agrarian reform go faster. First of all, the government took vigorous action to liquidate the land reserves of the Peasants' Bank. On June 13, 1907, this issue was considered in the Council of Ministers, it was decided to form temporary branches of the Council of the Bank on the ground, transferring a number of important powers to them.

Partly as a result of the measures taken, and also as a result of a change in the general situation in the country, things went better for the Peasants' Bank. In total for 1907-1915. 3,909,000 dess. were sold from the bank's fund, divided into about 280,000 farm and cut-off plots. Until 1911, sales increased annually, and then began to decline.

This was explained, firstly, by the fact that during the implementation of the decree of November 9, 1906, a large amount of cheap allotment “peasant” land was thrown onto the market, and secondly, by the fact that with the end of the revolution, the landlords sharply reduced the sale of their lands. It turned out that the suppression of the revolution in the end did not benefit the creation of farms and cuts on banking lands.

The question of how the purchases of bank farms and cuts were distributed among the various strata of the peasantry has not been adequately investigated. According to some estimates, the rich top among the buyers was only 5-6%. The rest belonged to the middle peasantry and the poor. Her attempts to gain a foothold on the lands of the bank were explained quite simply. Many landowners' lands, leased from year to year to the same societies, became, as it were, part of their allotment. Selling them to the Peasants' Bank hit first of all the small landowners. Meanwhile, the bank gave a loan in the amount of up to 90-95% of the cost of the site. The sale of a fortified allotment usually made it possible to pay a down payment. Some zemstvos provided assistance in furnishing farms. All this pushed the poor to the banking lands, and the bank, having losses from the maintenance of the purchased lands on its balance sheet, was not picky in the choice of clients.

Having set foot on banking land, the peasant, as it were, restored for himself those exhausting and endless redemption payments that, under the pressure of the revolution, the government canceled on January 1, 1907. Arrears soon appeared on bank payments. As before, the authorities were forced to resort to installments and rescheduling. But something appeared that the peasant did not know before: the sale of the entire farm by auction. From 1908 to 1914 11.4 thousand plots were sold in this way. This, apparently, was primarily a measure of intimidation. And the bulk of the poor, one must think, remained on their farms and cuts. For her, however, the same life continued ("to get by", "to hold out", "to hold out"), which she led in the community.

However, this does not exclude the possibility that fairly strong farms have appeared on banking lands. From this point of view, land management on bank lands was more promising than on allotment lands.

4.2 COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

Loans from the peasant bank could not fully satisfy the demand of the peasant for money goods. Therefore, credit cooperation, which has gone through two stages in its movement, has received significant distribution. At the first stage, administrative forms of regulation of small credit relations prevailed. By creating a qualified cadre of small credit inspectors and allocating substantial loans through state banks for initial loans to credit partnerships and for subsequent loans, the government stimulated the cooperative movement. At the second stage, rural credit associations, accumulating their own capital, developed independently. As a result, a wide network of institutions of small peasant credit, loan and savings banks and credit associations was created that served the money circulation of peasant farms. By January 1, 1914, the number of such institutions exceeded 13,000.

Credit relations gave a strong impetus to the development of production, consumer and marketing cooperatives. The peasants, on a cooperative basis, created dairy and butter artels, agricultural societies, consumer shops, and even peasant artel dairy factories.

4.3 RESETTLEMENT OF PEASANTS TO SIBERIA

The Stolypin government also passed a series of new laws on the resettlement of peasants to the outskirts. The possibilities for a wide development of resettlement were already laid down in the law of June 6, 1904. This law introduced freedom of resettlement without benefits, and the government was given the right to decide on the opening of free preferential resettlement from certain areas of the empire, "the eviction from which was recognized as particularly desirable."

For the first time, the law on preferential resettlement was applied in 1905: the government "opened" resettlement from the Poltava and Kharkov provinces, where the peasant movement was especially wide.

The mass resettlement of peasants to the eastern outskirts of the country was one of the most important areas of reform. Thus, the "land pressure" in the European part of Russia was reduced, "steam" of discontent was released.

By decree of March 10, 1906, the right to resettle peasants was granted to everyone without restrictions. The government allocated considerable funds for the costs of settling settlers in new places, for their medical care and public needs, and for laying roads. In 1906-1913. 2792.8 thousand people moved beyond the Urals.

During the 11 years of the reform, more than 3 million people moved to the free lands of Siberia and Central Asia. In 1908, the number of immigrants was the largest in all the years of the reform and amounted to 665 thousand people.

However, the scale of this event also led to difficulties in its implementation. The wave of migrants rapidly subsided. Not everyone was able to develop new lands. Back, to European Russia, the reverse flow of immigrants moved. Completely devastated poor people returned, unable to settle down in a new place. The number of peasants who failed to adapt to new conditions and were forced to return was 12% of the total number of migrants. In total, about 550 thousand people returned in this way.

The results of the resettlement campaign were as follows. First, during this period, a huge leap was made in the economic and social development of Siberia. Also, the population of this region increased by 153% during the years of colonization. If before the resettlement to Siberia there was a reduction in sown areas, then in 1906-1913. they were expanded by 80%, while in the European part of Russia by 6.2%. In terms of the rate of development of animal husbandry, Siberia also overtook the European part of Russia.

4.4 AGRO-CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

One of the main obstacles to the economic progress of the countryside was the low culture of agriculture and the illiteracy of the vast majority of producers who were accustomed to working according to the general custom. During the years of the reform, large-scale agro-economic assistance was provided to the peasants. Agro-industrial services were specially created for the peasants, who organized training courses on cattle breeding and dairy production, democratization and the introduction of progressive forms of agricultural production. Much attention was paid to the progress of the system of out-of-school agricultural education. If in 1905 the number of students in agricultural courses was 2 thousand people, then in 1912 - 58 thousand, and in agricultural readings - 31.6 thousand and 1046 thousand people, respectively.

At present, there is an opinion that Stolypin's agrarian reforms led to the concentration of the land fund in the hands of a small rich stratum as a result of the landlessness of the bulk of the peasants. Reality shows the opposite - an increase in the proportion of "middle strata" in peasant land use. This is clearly seen from the data in the table. During the reform period, peasants actively bought land and increased their land fund annually by 2 million acres. Also, peasant land use increased significantly due to the lease of landlord and state lands.

Distribution of the land fund between groups of peasant buyers

Having us a male soulPeriodLandlessUnder three tithesMore than three tithes1885-190310,961,527,61906-191216,368,413,3

5. RESULTS OF THE STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM

agrarian reform landownership stolypin

The results of the reform are characterized by a rapid growth in agricultural production, an increase in the capacity of the domestic market, an increase in the export of agricultural products, and the trade balance of Russia has become more and more active. As a result, it was possible not only to bring agriculture out of the crisis, but also to turn it into the dominant feature of Russia's economic development. The gross income of all agriculture in 1913 amounted to 52.6% of the total gross income. The income of the entire national economy, due to the increase in the value created in agriculture, increased in comparable prices from 1900 to 1913 by 33.8%.

The differentiation of types of agricultural production by regions has led to an increase in the marketability of agriculture. Three-quarters of all raw materials processed by industry came from agriculture. The turnover of agricultural products increased by 46% during the reform period.

Even more, by 61% compared with 1901-1905, the export of agricultural products increased in the prewar years. Russia was the largest producer and exporter of bread and flax, a number of livestock products. So, in 1910, the export of Russian wheat amounted to 36.4% of the total world export.

The foregoing does not mean at all that pre-war Russia should be presented as a "peasant's paradise." The problems of hunger and agrarian overpopulation were not solved. The country still suffered from technical, economic and cultural backwardness. According to I.D. Kondratiev in the USA, on average, a farm accounted for a fixed capital of 3,900 rubles, while in European Russia the fixed capital of an average peasant farm barely reached 900 rubles. The national income per capita of the agricultural population in Russia was about 52 rubles per year, and in the United States - 262 rubles.

The growth rate of labor productivity in agriculture was relatively slow. While in Russia in 1913 they received 55 poods of bread from one tithe, in the USA they received 68, in France - 89, and in Belgium - 168 poods. Economic growth took place not on the basis of the intensification of production, but by increasing the intensity of manual peasant labor. But during the period under review, socio-economic conditions were created for the transition to a new stage of agrarian transformation - to the transformation of agriculture into a capital-intensive technologically progressive sector of the economy.

5.1 RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM

The community withstood the confrontation with private land ownership, and after the February Revolution of 1917 went on a decisive offensive. Now the struggle for land again found a way out in the burning of estates and the murders of landowners, which took place with even greater bitterness than in 1905. “Then they didn’t finish the job, stopped halfway? the peasants argued. “Well, now let’s not stop and exterminate all the landowners to the root.”

The results of the Stolypin agrarian reform are expressed in the following figures. By January 1, 1916, 2 million householders left the community for the interstriped fortification. They owned 14.1 million dess. earth. 469,000 householders who lived in unrestricted communities received certificates worth 2.8 million dess. 1.3 million households moved to farm and cut ownership (12.7 million dess.). In addition, 280,000 farms and cut-off farms were formed on banking lands - this is a special account. But the other figures cited above cannot be added up mechanically, since some householders, having strengthened their allotments, then went out to farms and cuts, while others went to them immediately, without inter-strip reinforcement. According to rough estimates, about 3 million householders left the community, which is somewhat less than a third of their total number in those provinces where the reform was carried out. However, as noted, some of the evacuees had in fact abandoned agriculture long ago. 22% of the land was withdrawn from communal circulation. About half of them went on sale. Some part returned to the communal cauldron.

During the 11 years of the Stolypin land reform, 26% of the peasants left the community. 85% of the peasant lands remained with the community. Ultimately, the authorities failed to either destroy the community or create a stable and sufficiently massive layer of peasant proprietors. So what can be done about the general failure of the Stolypin agrarian reform.

At the same time, it is known that after the end of the revolution and before the outbreak of the First World War, the situation in the Russian countryside improved markedly. Of course, there were other factors at work besides the reform. First, as was already the case, since 1907 redemption payments were abolished, which the peasants had been paying for more than 40 years. Secondly, the global agricultural crisis ended and grain prices began to rise. From this, presumably, something fell to ordinary peasants. Thirdly, during the years of the revolution, landownership was reduced, and in connection with this, enslaving forms of exploitation also decreased. Finally, fourthly, for the entire period there was only one lean year (1911), but on the other hand, two years in a row (1912-1913) were excellent harvests. As for the agrarian reform, such a large-scale undertaking, which required such a significant reshaping of the land, could not have a positive effect in the very first years of its implementation. Nevertheless, the activities that accompanied her were a good, useful thing.

This concerns the provision of greater personal freedom to the peasants, the arrangement of farms and cuts on bank lands, resettlement to Siberia, and certain types of land management.

5.2 POSITIVE OUTCOMES OF AGRARIAN REFORM

The positive results of the agrarian reform include:

up to a quarter of farms separated from the community, the stratification of the village increased, the rural elite gave up to half of the market bread,

3 million households moved from European Russia,

4 million acres of communal lands were involved in the market turnover,

the cost of agricultural implements increased from 59 to 83 rubles. for one yard

consumption of superphosphate fertilizers increased from 8 to 20 million poods,

for 1890-1913 income per capita of the rural population increased from 22 to 33 rubles. in year,

5.3 NEGATIVE OUTCOMES OF AGRARIAN REFORM

The negative results of agrarian reform include:

from 70% to 90% of the peasants who left the community somehow retained ties with the community, the bulk of the peasants were the labor farms of the community members,

0.5 million migrants returned to Central Russia,

the peasant household accounted for 2-4 acres, at a rate of 7-8 acres,

the main agricultural tool is a plow (8 million pieces), 58% of farms did not have plows,

mineral fertilizers were applied on 2% of sown areas,

in 1911-1912 the country was struck by a famine that engulfed 30 million people.

6. REASONS FOR THE FAILURE OF THE STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM

In the course of the revolution and the civil war, communal landownership won a decisive victory. However, a decade later, at the end of the 1920s, a sharp struggle broke out again between the peasant community and the state. The result of this struggle was the destruction of the community.

But a number of external circumstances (the death of Stolypin, the beginning of the war) interrupted the Stolypin reform. If we look at all those reforms that were conceived by Stolypin and announced in the declaration, we will see that most of them failed to come true, and some were just started, but the death of their creator did not allow them to be completed, because many of the introductions rested on the enthusiasm of Stolypin, who tried to somehow improve the political or economic structure of Russia.

Stolypin himself believed that it would take 15-20 years for the success of his undertakings. But also for the period 1906-1913. a lot has been done.

The revolution showed a huge socio-economic and political gap between the people and the authorities. The country needed radical reforms, which were not followed. It can be said that during the period of the Stolypin reforms, the country experienced not a constitutional crisis, but a revolutionary one. Standing still or semi-reforms could not solve the situation, but only on the contrary expanded the springboard for the struggle for cardinal changes. Only the destruction of the tsarist regime and landlordism could change the course of events, the measures that Stolypin took during his reforms were half-hearted. The main failure of Stolypin's reforms lies in the fact that he wanted to carry out the reorganization in a non-democratic way and, contrary to him, Struve wrote: “It is his agrarian policy that is in glaring contradiction with his other policies. It changes the economic foundation of the country, while all other politics tends to keep the political "superstructure" as intact as possible and only slightly decorates its facade. Of course, Stolypin was an outstanding figure and politician, but with the existence of such a system that was in Russia, all his projects "split" about a lack of understanding or an unwillingness to understand the full importance of his undertakings. I must say that without those human qualities, such as: courage, determination, assertiveness, political flair, cunning - Stolypin hardly managed to make any contribution to the development of the country.

What are the reasons for her defeat?

First, Stolypin began his reforms with a great delay (not in 1861, but only in 1906).

Secondly, the transition from a natural type of economy to a market economy under the conditions of an administrative-command system is possible, first of all, on the basis of the vigorous activity of the state. In this case, the financial and credit activities of the state should play a special role. An example of this is the government, which managed with amazing speed and scope to reorient the powerful bureaucratic apparatus of the empire to energetic work. At the same time, "local economic and economic profitability was deliberately sacrificed for the sake of the future social effect from the creation and development of new economic forms." The Ministry of Finance, the Peasants' Bank, the Ministry of Agriculture, and other state institutions acted in this way.

Third, where administrative principles of economic management and egalitarian modes of distribution have dominated, there will always be strong opposition to change.

Fourthly, the reason for the defeat is the mass revolutionary struggle, which swept the tsarist monarchy from the historical arena along with its agrarian reform.

Therefore, it is necessary to have a social support in the person of the initiative and qualified sections of the population.

The collapse of the Stolypin reform did not mean that it had no serious significance. It was a major step along the capitalist path, and contributed to a certain extent to an increase in the use of machinery, fertilizers, and an increase in the marketability of agriculture.

CONCLUSION

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin was a talented politician, he conceived several reforms that could make the Russian Empire an advanced state in all respects. One of these ideas was Stolypin's agrarian reform.

The essence of Stolypin's agrarian reform was the desire to create a layer of prosperous peasantry in the countryside. Pyotr Arkadyevich believed that by creating such a layer, one could forget about the revolutionary plague for a long time. The prosperous peasantry was to become a reliable support of the Russian state and its power. Stolypin believed that in no case should the needs of the peasantry be met at the expense of the landlords. Stolypin saw the implementation of his idea in the destruction of the peasant community. The peasant community was a structure that had both pluses and minuses. Often the community fed and saved the peasants in lean years. People who were in the community were supposed to provide each other with some help. On the other hand, lazy people and alcoholics lived at the expense of the community, with whom, according to the rules of the community, they had to share the harvest and other products of labor. Destroying the community, Stolypin wanted to make every peasant, first of all, an owner, responsible only for himself and his family. In this situation, everyone would strive to work more, thereby providing themselves with everything necessary.

The Stolypin Agrarian Reform began its life in 1906. That year, a decree was adopted that made it easier for all peasants to leave the community. Leaving the peasant community, a former member of it could demand from it that a piece of land assigned to him be secured in personal ownership. Moreover, this land was given to the peasant not according to the principle of "strips", as before, but was tied to one place. By 1916, 2.5 million peasants left the community.

During the agrarian reform of Stolypin, the activities of the Peasants' Bank, established in 1882, intensified. The bank served as an intermediary between landlords who wanted to sell their land and peasants who wanted to buy it.

The second direction of the Stolypin agrarian reform was the policy of resettlement of peasants. Due to the resettlement, Peter Arkadievich hoped to reduce the land hunger in the central provinces, and to populate the deserted lands of Siberia. To some extent, this policy paid off. Settlers were provided with large plots of land and many benefits, but the process itself was poorly debugged. It is worth noting that the first settlers gave a significant increase in the wheat harvest in Russia.

Stolypin's agrarian reform was a great project, the completion of which was prevented by the death of its author.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE

1. Munchaev Sh.M. "History of Russia" Moscow, 2000.

Orlov A.S., Georgiev V.A. "History from ancient times to the present day" Moscow, 2001.

Kuleshov S.V. "History of the Fatherland" Moscow, 1991.

Tyukavkina V.G. "History of the USSR" Moscow, 1989.

Shatsillo K.F. "We need a great Russia" Moscow, 1991.

Avrekh A.Ya. “P.A. Stolypin and the fate of reforms in Russia, Moscow, 1991.

Kozarezov V.V. "About Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin" Moscow, 1991.

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a set of interrelated measures for the restructuring of all components of the economic mechanism - organization, management, economic relations, forms of ownership and management, land relations, etc. The first document providing for comprehensive measures to build a market economy was the Program for the transition of the agro-industrial complex of the Byelorussian SSR to a regulated market economy (1990). It was developed by a team of scientists from the Belarusian Research Institute of Economic Problems of the Agro-Industrial Complex, specialists from the State Committee for Agriculture and Food with the participation of employees of the State Plan and the Research Economic Institute of the State Planning Commission. It outlines the issues of the formation of a new agrarian policy in relation to the transition period and market economy. Contains sections: “Principles of the reform of relations in the agro-industrial complex. Political preconditions and their probable consequences”, “Property. Land ownership and reform. Denationalization and privatization”, “Creation and development of farm-type peasant farms”, “Formation of the food fund”, “Price mechanism. Price Parity ”,“ Financial-credit relations and tax policy ”,“ Improving investment policy ”,“ Strengthening motivation and stimulation of labor ”,“ Development of social infrastructure ”,“ Preparation of personnel ”,“ Management of management ”,“ Fertility ”,“ grain ”,“ potatoes ”,“ potatoes ”,“ vegetables ”,“ fruits and berries ”,“ sugar ”,“ food ”,“ food ”,“ fodder ”,“ food ”,“ food ”,“ feed ”,“ food ”,“ food ”,“ feed ”,“ feed ”,“ food ”,“ food ”,“ food ”,“ feed ”,“ feed ” "," Milk "," Foreign Economic Relations ". The program gives a description of the pre-market state of the republic's agricultural economy. In 1991, the State Program for the Revival of the Belarusian Village was developed and approved by the Council of Collective Farms. It defines the priority areas for capital investments in the non-production sector, the volume of construction and commissioning of healthcare and education facilities, trade and life, and preschool institutions. The expediency of construction of well-maintained estate-type housing with autonomous engineering arrangement in rural areas, the use of electricity and gas for domestic purposes is argued. The task was set to transfer the communal economy to self-sufficiency, to bring the on-farm road network and streets into proper order. In 1994, scientists of the Belarusian Research Institute of Economic Problems of the Agro-Industrial Complex developed and approved at a joint meeting of the Board of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Presidium of the Academy of Agrarian Sciences of the Republic of Belarus, the Concept of Agrarian Reform in the Republic of Belarus (Decree of April 25, 1994 No. No. 14/20). The concept contains the main provisions for improving the organizational and economic mechanism for the functioning of the agro-industrial complex in the context of its transition to a market economy system. It proposes a system of views on the following issues: denationalization and privatization, transformation of forms of management, establishment of farming, development of land relations, formation of a system of financing and pricing, taxation and lending to enterprises, activation of their investment, restructuring of the existing system of logistics and agro-service, employment regulation, formation of a food fund, development of cooperation and integration, non-productive sphere of the village. A guideline was taken for self-sufficiency of the republic with food, agricultural raw materials, taking into account the economic feasibility of their production, which contributes to ensuring national food security. The scientific and practical basis for reforming the agrarian sector in the republic was the State Program for Reforming the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Republic of Belarus, approved by the Board of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus on August 6, 1996. The main goal: a gradual transition in the field of agro-industrial production from a command-administrative to a market economic system, which implies the free functioning of economic entities within the legal corridor with state regulation of certain aspects of activity (see State Program for Reforming the Agro-Industrial Complex). Over the past period, the main stages of agrarian reform can be distinguished: 1991-1992. - awareness of the sovereignty of Belarus, orientation of the mentality of the population and rural producers to the development of market methods, emphasis on the formation of alternative forms of management. 1992-1995 - a sharp reduction in state subsidies to agriculture, the state's departure from the problems of the agrarian economy, the accelerated destruction of the production potential of large agricultural enterprises, the beginning of a wide transformation of collective farms and state farms into market-type forms on a share and share basis, creating conditions for the development of farms. 1995-1998 - recognition of the diversity and diversity of agriculture, alignment of state policy in relation to various forms of management, rehabilitation of the role and importance of large-scale production, gradual restoration of the system of direct centralized management of the economy (with a sharp shortage of material and technical resources and financial resources), an increase in the debt of enterprises on loans and loans and the aggravation of insolvency problems. 1999-2000 - strengthening state centralized financial support for agriculture, an attempt to stabilize production, creating a mechanism for the country's food security and using elements of intervention regulation of the agro-industrial complex, adopting a development program and forecast, priority to efficient production. In 2000, the Republican Program for Improving the Efficiency of the Agro-Industrial Complex for 2000-2005 was developed and approved by the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus. Includes the main directions of development: 1. Economy and organization of the agro-industrial complex (food security - a strategy for the development of the agro-industrial complex; improvement of the economic mechanism; reformation of agricultural enterprises). 2. Placement and zonal specialization. 3. Agriculture and plant growing (structure of sown areas; selection and seed production, grain, oilseeds, sugar beets, potatoes, flax, fodder; development of fruit growing, vegetable growing; melioration and use of reclaimed lands, etc.). 4. Development of animal husbandry (intensification of milk production, development of breeding and herd reproduction, development of poultry farming, etc.). 5. Mechanization and energy of agriculture. 6. Processing and food industry. 7. Development of the bakery industry. 8. Priority directions of investment. 9. Foreign economic activity. 10. Scientific support. 11. Information system of the agro-industrial complex. 12. Agricultural education and staffing. 13. Current and Required Legislation. The program did not become the main guideline for the development of the agro-industrial complex, was not reflected in legislative acts and decisions of local government and economic management bodies. In 2001, the Program for Improving the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Republic of Belarus for 2001-2005 was developed and approved by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus. The main goal: to form a micro- and macroeconomic management system that ensures sustainable development and a consistent increase in the efficiency of agro-industrial production, guaranteeing the food security of the state by increasing the volume of agricultural production to a level that ensures a minimum level of food security. In 2005, by Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus (dated September 14, 2003 No. 37), the State Program for the Revival and Development of the Village for 2005-2010 was approved. (see the State Program for the Revival and Development of the Village for 2005-2010). During the years of agrarian reforms, contradictory processes took place, but positive, qualitatively new phenomena were able to manifest themselves, in particular: conditions were created for multistructural structure and diverse forms of management were formed; legal guarantees have been created for the equal development of two forms of ownership - state and private (the absolute majority at present are agricultural enterprises of non-state ownership; about 17% of land is privately owned); formed the basis for the gradual formation of a new mentality of the population and producers on the laws and principles of a market economy; economic relations have been revived, providing for the earning of funds, self-employment, self-regulation and self-management; methods of economic activity are involved that cause resource saving and cost savings, rational use of resources and optimization of the return on investment; efforts have been made to restructure production for market consumer demand and sales; measures were taken to master the basics of agribusiness, entrepreneurship and foreign economic activity, commercial calculation and competition; mastered the methods of direct contractual economic relations between business partners and market counterparties, etc.

agrarian reform

agrarian reform

Agrarian reform - measures taken by the state in order to redistribute land ownership in favor of direct producers, increase their interest in the results of labor, increase production.

Finam Financial Dictionary.

See what "Agrarian Reform" is in other dictionaries:

Agrarian reform transformation of the system of land tenure and land use. Peasant reform of 1861 Stolypin agrarian reform Agrarian reform in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ... Wikipedia

agrarian reform- State measures to transform the system of land tenure and land use. Syn.: land reform... Geography Dictionary

AGRARIAN REFORM P- AGRARIAN REFORM P.A. STOLYPIN reform of peasant allotment land tenure in Russia. Named after its initiator P.A. Stolypin. Measures such as the permission to leave the peasant community for farms and cuts (law of November 9, 1906), ... ... Legal Encyclopedia

Reform of peasant allotment land tenure in Russia. Named after its initiator P. A. Stolypin. Measures such as allowing the exit from the peasant community to farms and cuts (law of November 9, 1906), strengthening the Peasants' Bank, ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of Economics and Law

Agrarian reform of 1864 in the Kingdom of Poland- The tsarist government sought to prevent the mass transition of the Polish peasantry to the insurgent camp, or at least neutralize it. To this end, on February 19, 1864, a royal decree was issued on the reform in Poland. All… …

Agrarian reform of 1864 in Moldavia and Wallachia- In the united Romania, the struggle on the most important issues of domestic policy immediately intensified. Large landowners, landowners and part of the bourgeoisie, headed by Bratianu, closely associated with them, resolutely opposed the implementation of any reforms, ... ... The World History. Encyclopedia

This term has other meanings, see Agrarian reform. P. A. Stolypin. Portrait of the work of I. Repin (1910) Stolypin agrarian ... Wikipedia

Bourgeois reform of peasant allotment landownership (See Allotment landownership) in Russia. It began by decree on November 9, 1906, and was terminated by a decree of the Provisional Government on June 28 (July 11), 1917. Named after the chairman ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Stolypin agrarian reform- agrarian polit. the course of autocracy aimed at transforming the cross. allotment landownership. Naib. active period of reform implementation 1906-1911, when the government was headed by P.A. Stolypin. The reforms included: cross resettlement policy.… … Ural Historical Encyclopedia

STOLYPIN AGRARIAN REFORM- AGRARIAN REFORM P.A. STOLYPIN ... Legal Encyclopedia

Books

• Agrarian reform in post-Soviet Russia. Mechanisms and results, V. Ya. Uzun, N. I. Shagaida. The book systematizes the prerequisites for agrarian reform in Russia in the post-Soviet period, summarizes the theory and practice of its implementation, formulates the lessons of the reform and challenges that…
• The state of the agricultural classes in France on the eve of the revolution and the agrarian reform of 1789-1793. , I. V. Luchitsky. Readers are offered a book by the outstanding Russian historian I. V. Luchitsky, dedicated to the study of the agrarian history of the station at the end of the 18th century. The two main issues being discussed...