IbO RUSSIA - MISCELLANEOUS 



in Europe is very limited and confined to s^Decial localities, for the peasants 

 clearly can only round off their holdings with land adjacent to them and 

 it is just in the regions where the need for increasing the holdings is 

 greatest that land is least available ; finally, the available land is in part 

 situated where its utilisation for agriculture is impossible on account of the 

 climate or the nature of the soil. 



These considerations would lose nothing of their value, even were the 

 proposals of the socialist deputies of the first Duma followed, and the large 

 estates expropriated purely and simply. Even such a radical measure would 

 scarcely succeed in improving, however Uttle, the situation of the small farm- 

 er of South West and lyittle Russia, for it is just in those parts of the Empire, 

 where the peasants most feel the insufficiency of their lots, that the large 

 estates have only a comparatively small area. However it be, the large estates 

 aU considered, including the nobles' estates (in 1910 about 50,000,000 

 deciatines), would hardly suffice, in view of the rapid increase of the popula- 

 tion to meet the need of land by the peasants, for the next fifty years. 



Independently of the improvement of the method of farming, the peas- 

 ants' land by means of intensive cultivation, there is only one means of meeting 

 the difficulty: colonisation, on a large scale, of the vast waste regions of 

 the Empire, especially in Central Asia and Siberia. The Russian Government 

 has long understood this ; and to crown its great work of farm readjustment, 

 dating from 1906, it has organized the free immigration of peasants to Siberia, 

 instituting a " Special Board " at St. Petersburg; at the end of the nineteenth 

 century, this movement of immigration into Siberia had assumed consid- 

 erable dimensions, owing to the distress of the small farmers in certain 

 parts of European Russia. 



Tliis movement of the population, which is not only immediately con- 

 nected with the Russian Land Reform of 1861, but must be, as far as can be 

 foreseen, the final solution of the whole movement of the peasants and the 

 question of peasant farms, deserves to be studied separately and with 

 greater attention. Such a stud^^ however, would exceed the limits of this 

 section and we are obhged to refer our readers, for the details of chief im- 

 portance to the well known Memoir e of Mil. Stolypine and Krivoscheine, 

 of which a German edition has recently appeared (i). 



(i) " Die Kolonisation Siberiens " (Colonisation of Siberia), Berlin, 1912. Pauw. 



ALFREDO RUGGERI, gerente responsabile. 



