But the first assertion to the effect that Russian peasants had originally 
been personal or collective owners of the land they cultivated, does not, 
generally speaking, correspond to the historical reality. 
With certain exceptions of local and limited meaning Russian free 
peasants did not own the land they cultivated, but only tenanted it. They 
were helpless and shorn of capital, and became lease-holders not because 
they could find no land — there were more than enough free lands — 
but because they had neither food, nor seeds, nor working cattle, and also 
because they were in need of being guarded by strong men, in order to 
secure their persons and property. 
The fact that the Russian peasants began, so to speak, the course of 
historical agrarian development, not as owners, but as leaseholders, after- 
wards turned into serfs, whose legal status was very near to slavery, that 
fact was of greatest consequence for the whole historical development of 
Russia. 
In Russia, serfdom and the agrarian regime based upon it became more 
deeply rooted than in any other country. On the other hand, personal 
freedom of the peasants who were not bound to privileged private landowners 
and remained dependent on the State, was not accompanied by personal 
ownership of land. These lands inhabited by free peasants were owned by 
the State, and the latter regarded the holdings distributed by it among the 
peasants and cultivated by them, as a material basis underlying the duties 
of the peasants towards the State, as an allotment (nadyel). This latter 
institution represents consequently not primary individual, personal and 
private peasant-ownership of land, but a collective public right (of larger 
or smaller groups of “souls”) to the land. It derives from, and is subjected 
bo certain obligations towards the State and constitutes a right to nourish- 
ment, given by the State. 
Thus, no peasant ownership of land was created under the regime of 
serfdom in Russia, either as regards the enslaved private peasants, or the 
free State peasants. 
Such is the cardinal fact of Russian development, and it was the main 
factor of the subsequent agrarian revolution. 
It would seem that the emancipation of peasants in 1861 ought to have 
laid the foundation of the peasant ownership of land. Huge areas of land 
were transferred from the possession of the former serf-owners to the 
peasants’ control; the same happened, somewhat later, to the State lands 
lenanted by free State peasants. 
But the emancipation of peasants from the power ol landlords and 
from the control of the State did not imply either the emancipation of the 
peasant-ownership from the fetters of the serfdom regime — for, I repeat, 
such ownership had not been previously formed under that regime — or 
J