Thus the accomplishment of the Socialist programme in Russia led 
to the decay of both industry and agriculture, i. e. to an all-round economic 
regress. To the Socialist curtailment of industrial production, coupled 
with an increase of its cost, the agriculture or the villages replied by inten- 
sifying the natural economic character of its economic activities, and thus 
the social, economic and political revolution accomplished by the Bolshevics 
in Russia appears to us, in its economic aspect, as a regressive meta- 
morphosis of the entire national economy, in the direction of natural 
pconomy. 1 
A certain incongruence between the agricultural and the industrial side 
was always a characteristic feature of the Russian national economy. The 
agricultural development of Russia was, perhaps more clearly than anywhere 
and at any time, characterised by the growth of population in direct connect- 
jon with the growth of available food-area, and as that area for the greater 
part of the country, nearly throughout its history, had been susceptile 
of extensive and intensive increase, the growth of population went on 
continuously and was especially pronounced in the rural districts of the 
country. Thus was created the phenomenon which the present writer charac- 
terised as early as 1894 as natural-economic or pre-capitalistic rural over- 
population. The growth of population engaged in agriculture created a 
surplus of eaters who encumbered the agriculture and found no application 
in industry, which, in spite of its rapid development, was unable to keep 
pace with the growth of agricultural population. 
This pre-capitalistic overpopulation both in quantity and in quality, 
became particularly acute as a result of the Bolshevist revolution. It was 
more then natural in the conditions of a sharp discrepancy between the 
industry and the agriculture which characterises the economics of Soviet 
Russia. Such overpopulation as exists in present-day Socialist Russia was 
never known either in Tzarist Russia or in any other country where there 
had been a steady transformation of natural economy into money economy 
and on that ground a gradual development of industrial capitalism. 
What is the relation between the Bolshevist economic revolution which 
is, in fact, an economic reaction, and the doctrine of Marxism or so-called 
scientific Socialism? The writer of the present article had been in his 
past not only a Socialist and a Marxist, but one of the first to formulate, 
on the basis of the historico-sociological doctrine of Marx and of its 
evolutionary, or so-called Revisionist interpretation, the large conception 
of the economic development of Russia in the book, the orthodox Marxian 
reply to which was the first published work of Lenin. At that time the 
Marxians were conducting a struggle against the “Populists” (Narodniki) 
who believed that Russia could, by sticking to the village community, to 
the rural handicraft industry and to a system of State undertakings, avoid 
35