Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/189

Rh government and the tsars, despite the best will in the world, could do little to help the nobles.

Little, too, could be done to help the peasant, whose land hunger remains intense, and whose land is no less gravely burdened with debt than that of the great landowners.

The size of the peasant farm has been reduced through increase in population. The mean landholding per head of the male peasant population was in 1860, 4·8 desjatinas; in 1880, 3.5 desjatinas; and in 1900, 2·6 desjatinas.

Whilst land hunger has thus continually increased, since the liberation the price of land has more than doubled. The average price per desjatina of land was:

It is by no means easy to appraise the actual position of the peasantry in respect of landownership in various regions to-day. But if we remember that on the average a peasant family requires 12·24 desjatinas for a satisfactory livelihood, it is evident that about three-fourths of the peasant families have insufficient land.

The land hunger of the Russian peasantry gives rise to a need for food which is chronic, with acute exacerbations. This is illustrated by the following data: 70·7 per cent of the peasants secure less from the land than would suffice for a decent existence; 20·4 per cent can feed themselves but cannot feed their stock; only 8·9 per cent can buy anything more that the bare necessaries of daily consumption. According to trustworthy reports, in the south, upon the fruitful black earth, after all taxes have been paid by a Russian family consisting of ﬁve persons, no more than eighty-two roubles remain for the entire year's subsistence.

The agrarian committee appointed by Witte in 1903 reported as follows: "When the harvest is normal, the amount of nutriment obtainable by the peasant is, on the average, 30 per cent below the minimum physiologically requisite to maintain the strength of an adult worker on the land."