15 - The commune, socialisation, and the Stolypin reforms

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.