than I or my students, I say to them: "Imagine Stolypin's agrarian reform stretching over whole centuries, so to speak, split up into a great number of separate local measures and carried to a large extent by the initiative and in the interests of the landlord in each particular case." And in the same way, ladies and gentlemen, I would say to you: that which in England in the form of enclosures came about in the course of several centuries, and which expressed itself in elemental economic processes, at times of a cataclysmic character, happened in Russia—or rather is being evolved—as an integral reform or revolution systematically carried through from above.
This revolution, moreover, was effected within the peasantry without any participation of the landlord, and altogether without any bearing on his interests. By this process the land of the Russian peasants comes into agricultural use under full individual control.
The sentence I have just spoken, is, with the exception of the words "Russian peasants," taken nearly literally from the preface to Professor Gonner's well-known book on enclosures in England. You understand that this process, although in certain cases it may be painful, is of enormous positive importance to the whole economic and social development of Russia[1]. Russia is becoming more and more a country of peasants, that is, a country of small land tenure, which is growing invincibly at the cost of big estates. And this
- ↑ The well-known political aims, conservative or even reactionary, of Stolypin's agrarian reforms matter little in comparison with their significance for the economic and social development of Russia.
