- Project Runeberg -  Problems confronting Russia and affecting Russo-British political and economic intercourse /
15

(1918) [MARC] Author: Alfons Heyking - Tema: Russia
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE STATE ii

The common ownership of the land involved a constant
new partition of it, and made it impossible to improve the
methods of cultivation.

The abolition of serfdom achieved only personal freedom ;
it did not at all provide for economic prosperity and progress.
The great economic advantages and moral value of personal
ownership of the land had been totally left out of account
by the reforms of 1861. The reformers did not wish to
depart from the old principle that the ownership of land
was assured to each individual through its common
ownership by the village as a whole. But the constant increase
of the population was necessarily followed by a
corresponding decrease of the area which could be allotted to each
person. In many parts of the country these allotments
became too small to maintain a family. The happy (or
rather unhappy) possessors of such allotments had therefore
to look out for a living in the towns, in industrial works,
and so forth, and derived no real benefit from the
theoretically glorious fact that he was a member of the mir and, as
such, a landowner.

On the other hand, the primitive methods of agricultural
cultivation diminished increasingly the productivity of the
soil. The average production of com on one acre of peasant
land in Russia in the years 1899-1906 did not exceed 670
kilogrammes, while in Western Europe such a piece of land
would yield three times this amount. Lack of rational
cultivation of the land also produced harvest failures, which
repeated themselves with increasing frequency, for instance,
in the years 1891, 1897, 1898, 1901, 1906, 1907, and 1908.
But more than any other consideration, the agrarian
upheavals which followed the disasters of the Japanese War
made it apparent to Russian statesmen that fundamental
agricultural reforms were badly needed.

It was the Prime Minister Stolypin who had the courage
to break with the old methods of the mir, advising the
Tsar to promulgate an Imperial Order on March 17, 1906,
by which every village community received the right to
decide by a majority of two-thirds whether they wanted

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