enclosed holdings exempted from general intermixture of fields and
compulsory rotation of crops (such holdings were called “khootor’s vest
“otroob”s). In so far as the Bolshevist revolution raised its hand against
these progressive peasant farms and holdings, destroying them and scattering
to the winds their capital, it undermined the very bases of the agricultural
evolution of the country. For here the question was not of seizing and
partitioning land, nor even of seizing and partitioning agricultural capital,
but of changing both the legal foundations and the main technical con-
ditions of the agricultural production of the peasant mass itself.
We see, thus, that the immediate effect of the Bolshevist agrarian
revolution on the agriculture of Russia was twofold. On the one hand,
it simply meant a redistribution of land and a destruction of the agricultural
capital, on the other hand it involved regressive changes in the very structure
of agricultural production, putting, in the place of free and rounded land-
holdings, others, technically parcellated and dependent on the community.
But perhaps still more profound and pernicious than the immediate
and destructive effect of the Bolshevist revolution on the agriculture of
Russia, was its indirect effect through the medium of general economic
relations.
The agrarian revolution represented but one aspect of the Bolshevist
revolution; its other aspect was the socialisation or nationalisation of
industry. In any country industry and agriculture form a eystem of inter-
dependent markets: industry is a market for agriculture and vice versa.
This is the more true of Russia with her large territory and her economic
self-sufficiency. Even for the agriculture of Russia, not speaking of the
industry, outside markets always played a subsidiary role. '
The socialisation or nationalisation of industry in Russia has brought
about a curtailment of industrial production, making it more costly and
worse in quality*). Thereby it has curtailed the home market for agri-
cultural production, and since all production both for its economic pro-
sperity and for its technical development needs primarily a stable and
growing market, the socialisation (= nationalisation, or perhaps it would
be best to call it “etatisation”) of industry has dealt the most terrible blow
to Russian agriculture. To this was added, of course, the “etatisation” of
trade and the general attempt at a thorough regulation of the economic
life in its entirety.
*) Even the most biassed Bolshevist authors have to admit in their economic
surveys on the occasion of the roth anniversary of the October revolution that the
prices of industrial commodities constitute the weakest spot of the Soviet economics.
Whereas for the agricultural commodities the ratio of actual prices to the pre-war
standard is 160: 100, in the industry it is 250: 100.
g 7.