The present catastrophe was consequently by no means unexpected, and there has been no lack of alarming symptoms within the past ten years. In 1883, 1884 and 1885 famine stalked alternately through western Siberia, through the northeast, and through certain of the central provinces of European Russia (Vyatka, Kazañ, Kursk, etc.). Famine was again reported in 1889.[185] To such an extent was the peasantry already exhausted that even the extraordinarily good harvest of 1890[186] was unable to prevent a subsequent failure of crops from resulting in a famine.
It is only in the area affected that the present failure is distinguished from its precursors.[187] The cause of the various famines is at bottom always essentially the same, viz: the backwardness of Russian agriculture. The surface of the soil has become finally exhausted and the wooden plough of the Russian peasant is unable to reach down to the deeper layers where the soil is yet virgin. Deep ploughing is impossible with only one horse, and that horse fed on straw. It is further not only the peasant land, but also the major part of the landlord’s fields, that is cultivated with the peasant’s stock and implements. Thus the crisis of peasant agriculture is at the same time the crisis of Russian landlord farming.[188] The famine has brought about at one single stroke the dissolution which had been slowly going on in the village since 1861.
The Russian papers have published a multitude of letters from their correspondents telling of the loss of some 50% of the horses owned by the peasants. This means the complete ruin of the weak groups of the village, and the further concentration of the communal land into the hands of the strong, who alone survived as the farming class.[189] The class of small farmers in Russia is evolving into a peasant bourgeoisie similar to the French peasantry after the great Revolution, or to the American small employing farmers. The transitional groups of half farmers, half laborers, by whom the major part of the landlords’ estates were formerly cultivated, have sunk through the famine into the proletarian class. The laborer having become a proletarian, it is by proletarian labor that the estates must be tilled, and agriculture upon a large scale becomes a regular capitalistic pursuit.[190] The nobility with its estates under mortgage can not possibly afford the capital needed.[191]
The land is destined to be divided between the large capitalist and the small farmer—the homo novus of the village.[192]
Thus the present famine must be considered as a genuine turning-point in the economic history of Russia.
Family co-operation, village community, nobility, and natural economy—such was the economic constitution of Russia in the past.
The Russia of the days to come will have for its basis a peasant bourgeoisie, a rural proletariat, and capitalistic agriculture.[193]