1901. The peasants, of course, tried a variety of ways to alleviate their desperate plight, from periodic employment in the cities to migration, but with limited success at best. They worked as hard as they could, exhausting themselves and the land, and competing for every bit of it. In this marginal economy droughts became disasters, and the famine of 1891 was a shattering catastrophe. But even without outright famine peasants died rapidly. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the annual death rate for European Russia, with the countryside leading the cities, stood at 31.2 per thousand, compared to 19.6 in France and 16 in England. Naturally, conditions differed in the enormous Russian Empire, with Siberian peasants, for example, reasonably prosperous. On the other hand, perhaps the worst situation prevailed in the thickly populated provinces of central European Russia - caused by the so-called 'pauperization of the center.' How the peasants themselves felt about their lot became abundantly clear in the massive agrarian disturbances culminating in 1905.
To appreciate the burden that the Russian peasant had to carry, we should take further note of the fiscal system of the empire. Thus, an official inquiry indicated that after the emancipation the peasants paid annually
to the state in taxes, counting redemption payments, ten times as much per desiatina of land as did members of the gentry. And even after the head tax was abolished in 1886 and the redemption payments were finally canceled in 1905, the impoverished masses continued to support the state by means of indirect taxes. These taxes, perennially the main source of imperial revenue, were levied on domestic and imported items of everyday consumption such as vodka, sugar, tea, tobacco, cotton, and iron. The tax on alcohol, which Witte made a state monopoly in 1894, proved especially lucrative. While relentless financial pressure forced the peasants to sell all they could, the government, particularly Witte, promoted the export of foodstuffs, notably grain, to obtain a favorable balance of trade and finance the industrialization of Russia. Foodstuffs constituted almost two-thirds in value of all Russian exports in the first years of the twentieth century compared to some two-fifths at the time of the emancipation.
However, the last years of imperial Russia, the period from the Revolution of 1905 to the outbreak of the First World War, brought some hope and improvement - many authorities claim much hope and great improvement - into the lives of the Russian peasants, that is, the bulk of the Russian people. The upswing resulted from a number of factors. As already indicated, the industrialization of Russia no longer demanded or obtained the extreme sacrifices characteristic of the 1890's, and the new Russian industry had more to offer to the consumer. The national income in fifty provinces of European Russia rose, according to Prokopovich's calculation, from 6,579.6 million rubles in 1900 to 11,805.5 million in 1913. In 1913 the per capita income for the whole Russian Empire amounted to 102.2 rubles, a considerable increase even if highly inadequate compared to the figures of 292 rubles for Germany, 355 for France, 463 for England, or 695 for the United States. Luckily, the years preceding the First World War witnessed a series of bountiful harvests. Russian peasants profited, in addition, from a remarkable growth of the co-operative movement, and from government sponsorship of migration to new lands. Co-operatives multiplied from some 2,000 in 1901 and 4,500 in 1905 to 33,000 at the outbreak of the First World War, when their membership extended to 12 million people. Credit and consumers' co-operatives led the way, although some producers' co-operatives, such as Siberian creamery co-operatives, also proved highly successful. As to migration, the government finally began to support it after the Revolution of 1905 by providing the necessary guiding agencies and also by small subsidies to the migrants, suspension of certain taxes for them, and the like. In 1907 over half a million people moved to new lands and in 1908 the annual number of migrants rose to about three-quarters of a million. After that, however, it declined to the immediate pre-war average of about 300,000 a year. Land under cultivation increased from 88.3 million desiatin in 1901-5 to 97.6 million in 1911-13.
Also as mentioned earlier, the Peasant Land Bank became much more active, helping peasants to purchase over 4.3 million desiatin of land in the decade from 1906 to 1915, compared to 0.96 million in the preceding ten years. State and imperial family lands amounting to about a million and a quarter desiatin were offered for sale to the peasants.
Stolypin's land reform could well be considered the most important factor of all in the changing rural situation, because it tried to transform the Russian countryside. Stolypin's legislation of 1906, 1910, and 1911 - outlined in the preceding chapter - aimed at breaking up the peasant commune and at creating a strong class of peasant proprietors. These peasant proprietors were to have their land in consolidated lots, not in strips. To summarize the results of the reform in the words of a hostile critic, Lia-shchenko:
By January 1, 1916, requests for acquisition of land in personal ownership were submitted by 2,755,000 householders in European Russia. Among these, some 2,008,000 householders with a total acreage of 14,123,000
Oganovsky, Robinson, Florinsky, Karpovich and others have arrived at roughly the same figure of about 24 per cent of formerly communal households completing their legal withdrawal from the commune. In contrast to Liashchenko, however, some specialists emphasize a greater spread and potentiality of the reform. Notably they stress the fact that, although only 470,000 households in nonrepartitional communes had time to receive legal confirmation of their new independent status, the law of 1910 made in effect all householders in such communes individual proprietors. Two million would thus be a more realistic figure than 470,000. If we make this adjustment and if we add to the newly established independent households the three million or more hereditary tenure households in areas where communal ownership had never developed, we obtain for European Russia at the beginning of 1916 over seven million individual proprietary households out of the total of thirteen or fourteen million. In other words, peasant households operating within the framework of the peasant commune had declined to somewhat less than half of all peasant households in Russia. Consolidation of strips, a crucial aspect of the reform, proceeded much more slowly than separation from the commune, but it too made some progress. One important set of figures indicates that of the almost two
and a half million households that had left communes somewhat more than half had been provided with consolidated farms by 1916.
Still, these impressive statistics do not necessarily indicate the ultimate wisdom and success of Stolypin's reform. True, Stolypin has received much praise from many specialists, including post-Soviet Russian historians and such American scholars as Treadgold, who believe that the determined prime minister was in fact saving the empire and that, given time, his agrarian reform would have achieved its major objective of transforming and stabilizing the countryside. But critics have also been numerous and by no means limited to populists or other defenders of the commune as such. They have pointed, for example, to the limited scope of Stolypin's reform, which represented, in a sense, one more effort to save gentry land by making the peasants redivide what they already possessed, and to the element of compulsion in the carrying out of the reform. They argued that the reform had largely spent itself without curing the basic ills of rural Russia. Moreover, it added new problems to the old ones, in particular by helping to stratify the peasant mass and by creating hostility between the stronger and richer peasants whom the government helped to withdraw from the commune on advantageous terms and their poorer and more egalitarian brethren left behind.
To conclude, various evaluations have been given of the development of Russian industry in the last years of the empire, of the development of Russian agriculture, and indeed of the entire economy of the country. Whereas Gerschenkron, Karpovich, Pavlovsky, and other scholars have emphasized progress and grounds for optimism, Soviet authorities, as well as such Western specialists as Von Laue, concluded that in spite of all efforts - perhaps the maximum efforts possible under the old regime - Russia was not solving its problems either in terms of its own requirements or by comparison with other countries. Most close students of the period have come out with the feeling - so pronounced in Robinson's valuable work on rural Russia - that, whether the conditions of life in Russia improved or declined on the eve of the First World War, they remained desperately hard for the bulk of the population.
It has been said that revolutions occur not when the people are utterly destitute, oppressed beyond all
