Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/101

 Without necessarily breaking up at once the Councils of Peasants, the proletarian party must show the necessity of organizing special Councils of Farm Laborers' Delegates and other Councils composed of delegates of the pauperized peasants (agrarian proletariat), or, at least, of standing committees, of delegates from these various classes, sitting as separate factions or parties within the Councils of Peasants' Delegates. Otherwise all the sonorous phraseology of the "friends of the people" on the subject of the peasants will be put to good use by the well-to-do farmers in fooling the destitute agrarian masses; for these farmers, after all, are simply another variety of capitalists.

To offset the influence of the liberal, bourgeois, or purely bureaucratic sermons delivered by many Social-Revolutionists in the Councils of Workers and Peasants, which preach that the peasants must not seize the large estates or begin any land reform until the Constituent Assembly meets, the proletarian party must urge the peasants to bring about at once an agrarian revolution and to confiscate at once the large estates upon the authority of the local Council of Peasants' Delegates. In this connection, we must insist on the necessity of increasing the production of food-stuffs, and absolutely forbid the destruction or wastage of cattle, tools, machinery, buildings, etc.

In No. 88 of the Isvestya of the All-Russian Council of Peasants' Delegates there are printed a number of proposed laws, which are of interest in connection with the agrarian problem in Russia. The first division of these laws deals with the general political premises, the requirements of political democracy, while the second division is concerned with the land question.

The land demands of the peasantry in these proposed laws consist, first of all, in an abolition of all private ownership of land down to the peasant holdings, without compensation; in handing over to the state or the communes all parcels of land which are under intensive cultivation; in similarly confiscating all live stock and immovables (excluding those of peasants with small holdings), and handing them over to the state or the communes; in the prohibition of hired labor; in equalizing the distribution of land among the toilers, with periodic redistributions, etc. Among the measures proposed for the transition period before the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the peasants demanded the immedi-