The Debate on the Land Question¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter dissects the fierce intra-party struggle over the agrarian question at the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, an issue upon which the fate of the Russian Revolution hinged. Lenin broke decisively with the old programme of otrezki (cut-off lands) and advanced a radical demand for the confiscation of all landed estates by peasant committees, linked to the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of a democratic republic. This was the slogan of a “people’s revolution”—a thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic transformation led by the working class in alliance with the poor peasantry. The core argument is that the land question could be solved by revolutionary means or not at all.
Lenin’s key claim was that the nationalisation of the land—a bourgeois demand clearing away feudal rubbish for the free development of capitalism—was the only consistent revolutionary programme. He explicitly refuted Narodnik prejudices that this signified the overthrow of capitalism. The Mensheviks, by contrast, opposed peasant seizures and advocated municipalisation, a reformist scheme that presupposed the continued existence of the autocracy. Plekhanov’s polemic is quoted at length: he accused Lenin of Blanquism, of seeing nationalisation through the eyes of a Social Revolutionary, and of linking his agrarian draft to the “utopia of the seizure of power.” Plekhanov argued that restoration was inevitable after any revolutionary swing, citing France and Britain, and that the party must therefore adopt a programme that would cause the least harm in the event of counter-revolution. Lenin’s devastating reply is presented as the crux: the only full guarantee against restoration was a socialist revolution in the West. The Russian Revolution could achieve victory by its own efforts but could not consolidate it without international socialist revolution—a position that tied the fate of Russia indissolubly to the Western proletariat.
The chapter also notes significant opposition within the Bolshevik ranks. Stalin, along with Suvorov and Bazarov, opposed nationalisation in favour of dividing the land among the peasants, a demand Lenin recognised as reflecting petty-bourgeois tendencies. To defeat municipalisation, Lenin was forced to withdraw his own resolution and vote with the supporters of division, resulting in an unsatisfactory compromise. The polemic against the Mensheviks is relentless: their refusal to countenance workers’ seizure of power in a bourgeois revolution is exposed as a vulgarisation of Marxism, a fear of “provoking” counter-revolution that led them to cling to the liberals’ coat-tails. The chapter encapsulates two entirely different psychologies—revolutionary intransigence versus reformist timidity—and establishes that the agrarian debate was never merely about land, but about the very character and fate of the revolution itself.