The Economics of the Russian Village. Isaac A. Hourwich
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Isaac A. Hourwich
The Economics of the Russian Village
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066137601
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION. THE RISE OF “PEASANTISM.”
CHAPTER I. GENERAL SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANDHOLDING IN RUSSIA.
CHAPTER II. COMMUNITY OF LAND.
CHAPTER III. THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF THE PEASANTRY.
CHAPTER IV. TAXATION OF THE PEASANT.
CHAPTER V. COMMUNAL TENURE AND SMALL HOLDINGS.
CHAPTER VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THE FARMER INTO THE AGRICULTURAL LABORER.
CHAPTER VII. THE WAGES IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS.
CHAPTER VIII. THE RURAL SURPLUS POPULATION.
CHAPTER IX. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY.
CHAPTER X. THE MODERN AGRICULTURAL CLASSES.
CHAPTER XI. INDIVIDUAL OWNERSHIP AND AGRARIAN COMMUNISM.
CHAPTER XII. THE REDIVISION OF THE COMMUNAL LAND.
NOTE TO CHAPTER XII., THE “INALIENABILITY” SCHEME.
CHAPTER XIII. AGRICULTURE ON A LARGE SCALE.
CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FAMINE.
APPENDICES. STATISTICAL TABLES.
TABLE I.— Distribution of Land Among the Several Sections of the Peasant Population.
TABLE II.— Taxation of the Peasantry.
TABLE IV.— Distribution of Rented Land.
TABLE V. BUDGETS OF TYPICAL PEASANT HOUSEHOLDS.
TABLE VI.— Wages of the Peasant in Industrial Employment.
TABLE VII.— Average Yields of Wheat (District of Voronezh) .
AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION.
Systematic Political Science BY THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE.
INTRODUCTION.
THE RISE OF “PEASANTISM.”
The awful famine which has lately been raging over an area as large as the territory of the Dreibund, and inhabited by a population as numerous as that of the “allied Republic,” has called the attention of the whole civilized world to the condition of the starving Russian peasant. A movement has been set on foot in this country to relieve the hard need of the sufferers. This has induced me to think that it would perhaps not be without some interest for the American student of economics to cast a glance at the rural conditions which have finally resulted in that tremendous calamity. I felt bound to improve the opportunity of having been educated in Russia, by introducing the American reader to some one portion of the vast Russian economic literature which, because of the language, remains as yet completely unknown to the scientific world at large.
Russians by education, though not by ethnical descent, who, in spite of having identified themselves with the cause of the Russian people, are now denied the honorable title of “Russian,” may find consolation in the fact that the first investigator of Russian history (Schlözer), the first grammarian who scientifically elaborated the laws of Russian grammar, our Brown (Vostokoff = von Osteneck), the best, if not the first Russian lexicographer, our Webster (Dahl), and finally the man who, it may be said, discovered for the Russian public the Russian village community, the mir (Freiherr August von Haxthausen), were all of foreign birth.
The last named discovery was destined to play a prominent part in the subsequent political history of Russia. Agrarian communism, spread throughout a vast country during an age of extreme economic individualism, when the last traces of such a form of possession were deeply buried in the past of European nations, gave rise for years to an erroneous theory both in Russia and in Western Europe, viz: that this was a specifically Russian or Slavic institution. In Russia it contributed greatly towards drawing the line between the two parties of the Russian educated class in “the epoch of the forties,”