152 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE LAND QUESTION 153 political parties that constitute the present political strength of the Russian Revolution. The demands of their agrarian programs, in part or in whole, are contained in the decisions of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Delegates, the Soviets of Peasants Delegates, in the agrarian policy of the Provisional Government up to the Bolshevik coup état in November (very fragmentary and undecided, however. and furthermore, in the decisions of the Bolshevik Government and of the prorogued Constituent Assembly.
It follows that the agrarian programs of the other Russian parties have no great practical importance in the solution of the agrarian question in Russia. The agrarian demands of the other Socialist groups were all more or less similar to those of the program of the Social Revolutionaries; this is particularly true of the laborite group and the Populist Socialists, which are now losing their significance. The more influential Liberal Party, the Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets, whose political influence had gone down enormously, demanded in their program the seizure of cabinet, appanage, church, monastery, and noble estates the latter by purchase, however for the purpose of enlarging the parcels of the peasants. What this purchase would have amounted to, the Cadets themselves pointed out. According to the estimate made by them in the First National Duma, 70 per cent. of the immense purchase money, or 2, 900, 000, 000 rubles (about 1, 450, 000, 000) would go to reimburse 9573 nobles. The Russian Revolution has as yet taken no steps to destroy in this way the exhausted finances of the people for the benefit of the nobles, and is not likely to take them.
Let me now turn to the agrarian program of the SocialRevolutionaries and the Social Democracy.
The fundamental demands of the agrarian program of the Social Revolutionaries, already declared in 1908 and repeated in 1917, are these. The socialization of all privately owned lands, that is, the taking of them out of the private ownership of persons into the public ownership and their management by democratically organized leagues of communities, with the purpose of an equitable utilization.
In this program nothing is said of the method of taking away the privately owned land and its turning over into public management: is it purchase or confiscation In practice, the SocialRevolutionaries, in their decisions in 1917, have set themselves down as in favor of seizure without compensation. The AllRussian Soviet of Peasants Deputies, which was under the ideological guidance of the Social Revolutionaries, in their famous declaration of May 25, 1917, on the agrarian question, came out for a passing of the land into public ownership by the people, without any payment.
We must point out a tendency among the Social Revolutionaries to socialize even the peasant lands, and a desire to do away with all wage labor in the country, in the hopes of thus eliminating the class struggle among the peasantry.
The agrarian program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, approved in 1906, contains the following demands: The abolishing of all class restrictions as to the persons and the property of the peasants. The abolishing of all imposts and services connected with the class restrictions of the peasants, and the cessation of all obligations or debts having the character of mortgages. Confiscation of church, monastery, appanage, cabinet, and private estate lands, except small holdings, and turning them over, together with the state lands, to the great organs of local administration, which have been democratically elected. Land, however, which is necessary as a basis for future colonization, together with the forests and bodies of water, which are of national importance, are to pass into the control of the democratic state. Wherever conditions are unfavorable for this transformation, the party declares itself in favor of a division among the peasants of such of the private estates as already have the petty farming conditions, or which may be necessary to round out a reasonable holding.