Every one who has kept informed concerning Russian revolutionary
movements during the past twenty or twenty-five years knows that during all
that time one of the principal subjects of controversy among Socialists was
the land question and the proper method of solving it. The "Narodniki," or
peasant Socialists, later organized into the Socialist-Revolutionary party,
wanted distribution of the land belonging to the big estates among the
peasant communes, to be co-operatively owned and managed. They did not want
land nationalization, which was the program of the Marxists--the Social
Democrats. This latter program meant that, instead of the land being
divided among the peasants' communal organizations, it should be owned,
used, and managed by the state, the principles of large-scale production
and wage labor being applied to agriculture in the same manner as to
industry.
The attitude of the Social Democratic party toward the peasant Socialists
and their program was characterized by that same certainty that small
agricultural holdings were to pass away, and by the same contemptuous
attitude toward the peasant life and peasant aspirations that we find in
the writings of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, and many other Marxists.
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