amounts to 3,600,000, only 1,000,000 are employed by sovkhoses, by village 
communities, by forestries, by cooperative societies, and by craft industries; 
the remaining 24 millions of labourers were employed in 1926 on in- 
dividual peasant farms. As regards the disguised hiring of piece-work 
labourers, according to Larin’s calculations about 20 per cent. of households 
are subjected to such “capitalistic exploitation”. This accounts for the fact 
that 5/6 of the households possessing no working cattle — which constitute 
30 per cent. of the total number of households in R.S.F.S.R. — are 
recorded as tilling their land. “And for this purpose — says Larin — exists 
the “hire of piece-work labourers”, or to be simpler, the cultivation by 
the superior group with the aid of its cattle of the lands of horseless 
paupers who sometimes have even to perform labourers’ duties”). 
The percentage of actually landless households indicated by Larin seems 
enormous. Yet it is rather underestimated, than exaggerated. At least the 
monographic data concerning separate regions are still more terrifying. 
Thus a certain Bricks in his research about West-Siberian villages (On the 
Agrarian Front, 1927, No. 6) gives the following data about “fictitious 
farms” in Kamenetzky district. 
In 1920 there were altogether 10.4 per cent. of uncultivated farms, 
in 1924 their number diminished by 10 times falling to 1.1 per cent. But 
parallel with this the number of farms without stock increased from 17 to 
27.8 per cent. Thus over 1/4 of all the farms are “fictitious farms”. 
“The peasants of the lower cultivating groups are farmers (owners) only 
in the legal, but not in the economic sense of the word. They own their 
labour, or hands, and not means of production; in other words they are 
practically the labourers of the well-to-do peasantry”, quotes Bricks on 
this occasion from Kritzman. It is significant that the process of prole- 
tarisation of the peasantry in the later years after 1924, instead of slackening, 
has been going on at an accelerated pace. In 1924 the number of farms 
without stock was 27.8 per cent.; in 1925, 29.1 per cent.; in 1926 39.9 per 
cent.; “in 1926 fo per cent. of farms in the black soil producing region 
of Kamensk had no ploughs”, concludes Bricks, and he gives an information 
of the Siberian Statistical Department from which it follows that the same 
state of things is characteristic of the whole of Western Siberia. It appears 
that in the Barnaoul region there are 42.2 per cent. of stockless farms, 
*) G. Larin. Private Capital in U.S. S.R. P. III: Private Capital in Agriculture 
1927. 
According to information supplied also by Larin, the number of households that 
are annually liquidated and abandoned amounts to 2.4 per cent. of the total number 
in the consuming regions, about 3.2 per cent. in the producing regions, and about 
2.8 per cent. in the Ukraine! 
EE —