in the Roubtzov district, 48.2 per cent.; in Novosibirsk district, 31.9; 
in the Province of Altai, 45.9 per cent. (1925). 
Alongside with* this widely spread form of letting land on lease 
accompanied by hiring oneself as a labourer, there exists also a simple lease. 
It is characteristic of the Soviet conditions that, as a general rule, it is 
the poor who let the land to the well-to-do, and not vice versa. Various 
observers have recorded for various districts of Russia the fact that the 
highest percentage of farms letting their land on lease is to be come across 
in uncultivated or lower cultivating groups, and also the fact of a gradual 
increase of the number of poor peasants letting their land on lease. To 
what extent this is directly due to the equalising distribution of land, we 
can gather from a general remark made by Azizian, one of the Soviet 
specialists who studied the question of leasehold. Emphasising the fact 
that the poor peasants for the most part let their land on lease, he makes 
an exception for “non-organised” districts where there had been since the 
October coup d’Etfat no redistribution of land and where the poor peasants 
as often as not have no land; and he adds that “when the land-organisation 
will have taken place the poor peasant who had obtained land will let on 
lease a portion of his allotment, instead of leasing it as he does now” 
Economic Review, September 1927). 
The Soviet economist does not even consider the possibility of the poor 
peasant himself cultivating his land: he will get his plot only in order to 
let it to a “kulak”. 
It is difficult to say with certainty what is the numerical extent of 
such simple lease of land, for no statistics can cover these carefully 
concealed facts. If by socalled “budget descriptions” we can establish the 
approximate percentage of farm renting land [this percentage according to 
the data supplied by A. Gaister (“On the Agrarian Front’, No. 6, 1926) 
was in 1925: in the province of Smolensk, 35 per cent., in the province of 
Yaroslav, 35.7, in the province of Kaluga, 50, in the province of Moscow. 
22.2, in the province of Tambov, 40.7, in the province of Kursk, 34.5, 
in the Northern Caucasus, 24.8, in the steppe regions of the Ukraine, 36.4, 
in the wood-steppe regions of the Ukraine, 20.4, in the province of 
Novosibirsk, 19.4], for the farms that let their land on lease we can obtain 
no figures corresponding to the reality. Gaister asserts that the farms that 
rent land are, by the head of cattle and the number and value of agri- 
cultural implements; superior to those that rent no land, and that the lease 
is a means of “rectification’’ of the land “equalisations’”’. The budget data, 
as Gaister says, bear out only one thing, namely that the farms that lease 
their land are small farms. And this entitles him to make the following 
general statement: “The great majority of the tiniest farms resort to 
7