left pretty much to their own devices. The division of the land was carried out by the village committees. It was one of the roughest and most violent phases of the revolution. Many a noble landowner came to grief in the storm. The village committees had many difficulties to contend with, such as the opposition of the old-time owners, the greed of certain elements in their own ranks, the varying amounts and quality of the land to be divided, etc. But finally the job was done after a fashion, and a reasonably fair and equal distribution of the land arrived at.
As the situation now stands the peasants do not actually own the land: it all belongs to the State. Their rights are those of cultivators only. Periodically they re-divide the arable land among themselves, giving each family a share in accordance with the number of its members. The laws of inheritance are annulled, and land may not be handed down from father to son. Men and women alike have equal rights to the soil. In some districts and under certain circumstances, a few of the more crafty peasants succeed in evading these principles and setting up practical ownership of their land, but in the main the situation is as above described.
The Communists look upon the present agricultural arrangement as a temporary make-shift, having nothing in common with their ultimate goal. They are willing to concede that it is a vast improvement over the old system, by which a few parasites monopolized the land. But they also know that no civilization worth while could be constructed upon such a basis. Were the peasants to continue their present small-scale, individualistic, competitive methods of production they could not develop into anything better than a vast class of petty bourgeois afflicted with all the contemptible ignorance and short-sigtedness inseparable from this type. The Communists are well aware that only through a large-scale system of production can the workers, city and country, acquire, the breadth of vision and understanding that is absolutely necessary to real social progress. Hence, they propose to industrialize agriculture: to apply to it the same principles that they are now applying to the great national industries of transportation, mining, etc. They will abolish small-scale individualistic farming, and replace it by large-scale, co-operative agricultural production. This is a
65
