exempting lands of the latter (and "rank-and-file Cossacks") from confiscation. In effect, it gave the peasants a free hand to take the landlords' lands.

The peasants responded, took the land, and thus were engaged in a parallel effort to end "feudalism" on the land, while the urban proletariat, under Bolshevik leadership, occupied itself in the cities with consolidating its own political power over the country.

The success of these tactics, and the strategy behind them, is described by William Henry Chamberlain :

In almost any other country a Government menaced by extremist revolutionaries could turn for support to the propertied peasant or farmer class. .. (Lenin) sensed the mood of the peasantry and the force and reality behind the agrarian revolution.

The mutiny of the army and the peasant upsurge, both of which had reached their high points in the autumn, paralyzed the Provisional Government. But neither of these movements would have overthrown it. The peasant in the village could not see beyond the nearest estate. The peasant in the trenches was more familiar with political slogans; but he, too, thought only of getting home to share in the spoils; he felt no impulse to march on Petrograd. For the decisive spearhead of their final thrust against the Kerensky regime the Bolsheviki relied neither on the soldiers nor on the peasants, but on the class of city workers on which from the beginning they had concentrated their propaganda."

The second, and thorny stage of the Bolshevik reforms-development of large-scale farms through collectivization-was left to a later day. Its coming, however, was foreshadowed by a "sleeper" within the Fundamental Land Law promulgated soon after the original 1917 Land Decree. Although "all the land of the republic was placed at the disposal of any and every person who is a working occupier and cultivates the soil by his own labour," at the same time "private ownership of the soil was formally abolished." 10

TACTICS

The Bolsheviks realized that while unity of the entire peasantry against the landlords had been crucial to the success of their revolution against the Provisional Government, the peasantry-or important sections of it-might yet turn against them. Should this occur it would impede the program for socialization of agriculture and could even challenge their own political power as well.

Facing these possibilities under conditions of "war communism" in 1919, Lenin made a decision, saying:

The party makes it its task to separate the middle peasantry from the Kulaks, to win it over to the side of the working class by attentive consideration for its needs, struggling against its backwardness by measures of ideological persuasion . . .1

11

At the same time Bolshevik intellectual leadership undertook careful analysis and classification of the peasantry, and expounded a program founded upon that classification.

The ABC of Communism explained in 1919:

Let us now consider how we hope to realize our program: to what strata of the population we look for support; by what methods we think we shall be able to win over the majority of the peasants to our side, or at least to ensure their neutrality.12

Chamberlain, op. cit., p. 258.

10 Bukharin, loc. cit.

11 Carr, op. cit. p. 163.

12 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 138.

The problem, however, was not as simple as identifying once and for all the role of each class within the peasantry. For the conditions in which classes might find themselves were subject to change, and their responses could vary with these changes. The ABC of Communism stated:

In the campaign against landlordism, the urban proletariat was supported by all the peasants, including the rich peasants . . . But the so-called socialization of the land, with its equal division of the cultivable areas, transferred the rich peasants into the counterrevolutionary camp. For the rich peasants lost part of the purchased land which they had owned before the revolution, and they lost the land which they had been able to farm because they had rented it from the poor peasants. They lost everything which they had secured when the estates of the great landlords had been plundered. Finally, it was made impossible for them to employ wage labour. The rich peasants constitute the class which would have become a landlord class if our revolution had never gone beyond the limits of a bourgeoisie democratic revolution. They constitute a class which is from its very nature mortally hostile to all attempts in the direction of the socialistic organization of agriculture. . . The rich peasant greeted the revolution inspired by the most rosy hopes and anticipations, but as a result of the revolution he found himself stripped of part of the land which he had owned before it occurred. As long as this class of rich peasants continues to exist, its members will inevitably prove to be irreconcilable enemies of the proletarian State and its agrarian policy. In its turn it can expect nothing from the Soviet Power but a pitiless struggle against its counter-revolutionary activities. The Soviet Power may eventually be compelled to undertake a deliberately planned expropriation of the rich peasants, mobilizing them for social work, and above all for the task of improving peasant land and the land of the soviet farms.13

The drive a decade later against the rich peasants-Kulaks—was forecast so early. Almost immediately the Bolsheviks' response to urgent need to increase agricultural production upset the direction of their own program for the peasantry. The very success of their temporary return to a market economy known as the New Economic Policy (NEP) raised a new problem within the peasantry itself. Of NEP's impact on agricultural classes, Carr has written:

For three years Soviet agrarian policy had had a consistently levelling effect : it had sought with some success both to level up and to level down. Its hostility to the kulak had been the counterpart of its desire to extend the holdings and improve the status of the poor peasant . . . The free play of the market was bound to increase the differentiation between the successful and well-to-do and the unsuccessful and poor, and to open the possibility for the former to exploit the latter. This was the price to be paid (for a quick increase in production) ...1⁄4

With the landlord class eliminated in the first stage of the 1917 revolution, and the rich peasant having served dependably but now undependable, the Bolsheviks turned their attention upon the middle peasants, seeking to make them their next main reliance. The ABC of Communism explained:

The middle peasants form the great majority of the Russian peasants. These middle peasants secured their share of the landlord's estates with the aid of the urban proletariat, and only with its aid can they retain their grip upon this land in face of the counter-revolutionary movement on the part of the capitalists and the great landlords. . . The system of petty agriculture is in any case doomed. It must inevitably be replaced by a more advantageous and more productive system, by the system of large-scale cooperative agriculture. Only through an alliance between the socialist proletariat and the middle peasants can this transformation be achieved without poverty, ruin, and incredible torment for the latter."5

13 Ibid., pp. 316-317.

14 Carr, op. cit., p. 291.

15 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 317.

Winning over the middle peasants thus became crucial to the Bolsheviks, both politically and for the achievement of their ultimate agricultural program.

The ABC of Communism elaborated:

The petty-proprietor mentality of the middle peasants . . inclines them to form an alliance with the rich peasants. An additional impulsion . . . arises because the middle peasants are compelled to divide their superfluous grain with the town workers . . . without any prospect of receiving in return the prod

ucts of urban industry. It is therefore essential that the Communist Party should endeavor to detach the middle peasants from the rich peasants; for the latter are in reality the agents of international capitalism, and are endeavoring to lead the peasantry as a whole into courses which will involve the loss of all that has been gained by the revolution.

Without losing sight of ultimate objectives, the Bolsheviks were sensitive to the need for flexibility in tactics and for care in timing the moves toward the objectives. The ABC of Communism continued:

Furthermore, our party must make it perfectly clear to the middle peasants that only consideration for transient and temporary interests can induce them to make common cause with the rich peasants and with the bourgeoisie; we must show them that their real, permanent and far-reaching interests, as genuine workers, dictate an alliance with the urban proletariat. Finally, while striving to effect the socialist transformation of agriculture, we must be careful to avoid alienating the middle peasants by ill-considered and premature measures, and must make no attempt to coerce them into forming communes and cartels. At the present juncture the principal task of communism in Russia is to bring it to pass that the workers upon their own initiative, and the peasants upon their own initiative, shall destroy the counter-revolution. When that has been achieved, there will no longer remain any insuperable obstacles in the way of the socialization of agriculture.'

16

The ABC of Communism then described the political role of the poor peasants:

As regards the poor peasants, the proletarian and semi-proletarian strata of these have to a considerable extent, thanks to the revolution, been raised into the stratum of the middle peasants; nevertheless the stratum of the poor peasants still constitutes a main prop of the proletarian dictatorship. It was owing to the alliance with the poor peasants that the Soviet Power was enabled to deal some sturdy blows against the rich peasants and to detach the middle peasants from the rich peasants. The communist mentality of the poor peasants rendered it possible to create instruments of the Soviet Power in the rural regions, thereby bringing about the first important and decisive military mobilization of the peasantry.

The ABC of Communism made it plain that the motivation of the poor peasants was "not that we are fighting for socialism," but that it was "advantageous to themselves. . . to make it impossible for the imperialists to put the peasants' neck again under the yoke of landlord or merchant." 17

The advance toward socialized agriculture has proceeded irregularly, and short of its announced goal to rid even the "poor peasants" of their "futile hopes that they will continue vigorous, independent, individual farming." 18 The 1961 congress of the Communist party "reaffirmed the desire to blend the collective farm into the state farm, when it declared in the new party program that 'Life itself has been bringing public and cooperative forms of ownership closer together and will ultimately lead to the establishment of a single, communist

18 Ibid., pp. 317-318.

17 Ibid., pp. 318-319. 18 Ibid., p. 320.

principle of distribution.'" 19 Yet the blending of public and private ownerships is slow, and a private sector of small but productive "peasants' plots" survives in vigor, testifying to deepseated private incentive and sustained peasant resistance to program.

IV. China

STRATEGY

The strategy adopted to win power through revolution in the China of the thirties and forties differed from that adopted in Russia in 1917. Communist leaders in both nations recognized the importance of the peasantry and its discontents, but for reasons relevant to conditions of the times in each country they cast the peasants early in opposite roles. In Russia they chose the urban proletariat as the "revolutionary force," for reasons given above. In China they chose the peasants for this revolutionary role. Leadership was proletariat-oriented, but the peasants became the "force." In China, peasant areas rather than the cities furnished the haven and operations base of the Red armies, from which Communist control spread finally in 1949 over the entire mainland.

The Chinese Communist strategy has been described succinctly in 1953 by Chao Kuo-Chun:

The vital role of the peasants and the agrarian issue in China is no discovery of the Chinese Communists. But they are the only group in recent decades that has fully realized the tremendous potentialities of the peasantry in the struggle for political power. They have tackled agrarian problems at the grass roots.

Mao Tse-Tung, leader of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the Peiping regime, summarized the situation as early as 1936:

90

"Whoever solves the land question will win the peasants." . . . it is little exaggeration to say that land policy constitutes the greatest single factor responsible for the Chinese Communist Party's phenomenal rise to power .. Land reform is . . . employed as a political weapon to attain and retain power and as a social tool to transform the traditional Chinese villages into the Marxist pattern of rural society and community life-a highly organized rural community with the peasants engaging in cooperative and then collective farming. If use of the peasantry was vital to achievement of revolutionary ends, land reform was vital to creation of a willingness among the peasantry to play the role of the "revolutionary force." On the eve of the revolution's success Dr. Chen Han-seng estimated that in rural China 3 percent of the families (landlords) owned 26 percent of total acreage, 7 percent (rich peasants) owned 27 percent, 22 percent (middle peasants) owned 25 percent, and 68 percent (poor peasants) owned 22 percent." As Jack Gray has observed:

There is no need to labour the point that in China as a whole social conditions in the village presented a potentially revolutionary situation, and that the most important single political issue involved was land tenure."2

19 Hazard, John N. The Soviet System of Government, Chicago, 1964, p. 135.

20 Chao Kuo-Chun. "Chinese Land Policies." Current History, June 1953: 339-40.

21 Cited in B. N. Ganguli, Land Reform in New China, New Delhi, 1953.

23 Gray, Jack. "Political Aspects of the Land Reform Campaigns in China, 1947-1952." Soviet Studies v. 16, no. 2, p. 212.

Wolf Ladejinsky has written in similar vein :

The Chinese Communists recognized in the rural situation, and particularly in the inequalities of land ownership, the most dramatic and politically exploitable issue. They monopolized the slogan of "land to the landless," and in the minds of the peasantry they succeeded in identifying themselves as the authentic "agrarian reformers."

Spencer and Katkoff have summarized:

Unlike Lenin, Mao changed the stress from the urban proletariat to the peasantry. The Chinese revolution was based upon a tightly organized Party directing a mass peasant revolt against landlords and other potentates of the countryside Mao probably did not entertain these rural ideas much before the break with Chiang Kai-shek in 1927. The agrarian ideas were not so much theoretical notions as a strategic course of action dictated by the circumstances which wiped out the urban communist movement in China and left Mao's rural bases the only effective channel of communism."

TACTICS

Prior to their accession to full power on the mainland in 1949, Chinese Communists carried out land reforms in areas under their control. Peasants were classified, and

A great deal of actual land reform was carried out through the Peasants' Association (which excluded former landlords and the rich peasants) and mass meetings of the villagers. One of the characteristics of the land policy of the Soviet period was the preferential treatment given to farm labourers and poor peasants.

Another important feature of this period was the holding of meetings to define the class status of the village adults. This is an all-important step, as the fate of the villagers is determined by their class status. The amount of land and equipment allotted to each poor peasant or farm labourer depends on the quantity available in that area for redistribution . . .3

Shortly upon accession to power, on August 4, 1950, the Government Administration Council of the Central People's Government adopted "Decisions concerning the differentiation of class status in the countryside." 26 These decisions gave explicit guidance for interpreting the agrarian reform law. Under the title "How to analyse class status in the countryside" they provided these definitions:

1. Landlord. A person shall be classified as a landlord who owns land, but does not engage in labour or only engages in supplementary labour, and who depends on exploitation for his means of livelihood. Exploitation by the landlords is chiefly in the form of land rent, plus money lending, hiring of labour, or the simultaneous carrying on of industrial or commercial enterprises . . . Any person who collects rent and manages the landed property for landlords and depends on the exploitation of peasants by the landlords as his main means of livelihood and whose living conditions are better than those of an ordinary middle peasant shall be treated in the same manner as a landlord. .

2. Rich peasant. A rich peasant generally owns land. But there are also rich peasants who own only part of the land they cultivate and rent the rest from others. There are others who own no land but rent all their land from others.

p. 92.

Ladejinsky, Wolf. "Carrot and Stick in Rural China," Foreign Affairs, September 1966, 24 Spencer, D. L. and V. Katkoff. "China's Land Transformation and the USSR Model,' Land Economics, 1957. pp. 33, 245. Chao Kuo-chun. Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921-1959. New Delhi, 1960. p. 122.

20 Agrarian Reform Law of the People's Republic of China and Other Relevant Documents. Peking, 1953. pp. 18-58.