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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on dates and transliteration
- Map of regions and guberniyas of European Russia
- Introduction
- Part I From Populism to the SR party (1881–1901)
- Part II The campaign for the peasantry (1902–1904)
- Part III The revolution of 1905
- Part IV The aftermath of revolution (1906–1908)
- 12 The party approves its programme
- 13 Splits in the party
- 14 The SR agrarian programme in the first two Dumas
- 15 The commune, socialisation, and the Stolypin reforms
- 16 Party activity in the countryside
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - The commune, socialisation, and the Stolypin reforms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on dates and transliteration
- Map of regions and guberniyas of European Russia
- Introduction
- Part I From Populism to the SR party (1881–1901)
- Part II The campaign for the peasantry (1902–1904)
- Part III The revolution of 1905
- Part IV The aftermath of revolution (1906–1908)
- 12 The party approves its programme
- 13 Splits in the party
- 14 The SR agrarian programme in the first two Dumas
- 15 The commune, socialisation, and the Stolypin reforms
- 16 Party activity in the countryside
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Among the objects of SR attack in the Second Duma were the proposals for agrarian reform introduced by the Prime Minister, Stolypin, in his decree of 9 November 1906. The Stolypin reforms sought to encourage withdrawal from the commune by enabling peasants to claim title to their holdings and consolidate their strips into enclosed individual farms. As an attempt to destroy the communal solidarity of the peasantry, and to foster individualist proprietorial attitudes, these measures ran directly counter to the aims of SR agrarian policy. In order to assess the extent to which the Stolypin reforms threatened SR plans for the socialisation of the land, it is necessary to review the premises on which the party's hopes for socialisation were based, as well as the party's attitude towards the peasant commune.
According to Chernovian theory, SR hopes for the socialisation of the land derived not from the existence of the repartitional commune – this, as we shall see later, simply constituted a bonus – but from their view of the mass of small peasant producers as members not of the petty bourgeoisie but of the working class, and their consequent receptivity to socialist ideas. The peasants' desire for land was a progressive aspiration, with both an anti-feudal and anti-capitalist content, and it was the duty of a socialist party to ensure that any agrarian reform which transferred the land to the peasantry created class solidarity and cohesion and prevented the development of ‘property fanaticism’. For this reason, the SR minimum programme advocated the transfer of the land not to individual peasants as private property, but to democratic communal organisations for egalitarian utilisation.
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- Information
- The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary PartyFrom its Origins through the Revolution of 1905–1907, pp. 177 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977