S46 



Wheat Cultivation in Russia. [dec, 



serfs, 257,000,000 acres of land were allotted to 7,942,000 

 peasant families, giving an average of 32^ acres per family. 

 The bulk of this land was allotted not to individual families, but 

 to the commune, and is held in common ownership by the 

 villages. This land is redistributed at certain intervals between 

 the members of the community for individual cultivation. The 

 method of division naturally presents great difficulties, but as 

 the predominating system of agriculture in Russia is the three- 

 field system described below, the land in each commune is 

 divided into three parts, and each part is divided into parcels 

 according to the fertility ; these are then divided into rectangu- 

 lar strips theoretically of equal value. It will be seen that the 

 system is analogous to the open-field system of the English 

 manor, and it presents similar obstacles to agricultural pro- 

 gress. The possibility of redistribution tends to discourage 

 manuring and high cultivation, while the separation of the strips 

 makes their working laborious and difficult. There seems, how- 

 ever, to be a tendency to abandon the redivision of communal 

 .lands, and for the richer peasants to rent and cultivate the 

 allotments of their poorer brethren. 



Practically all the land which was not allotted to the peasants 

 was at the time of the emancipation the property of the State 

 and of the nobility, but much of this land has since been sold to 

 the peasants and to merchants and others of the commercial 

 class. 



Broadly, then, land in Russia may be said to be in communal 

 or in private ownership, and agriculture on the privately-owned 

 land is naturally of a more advanced character, and invariably 

 gives a higher yield. Commercial farming, especially farming 

 on a large scale, has made considerable progress, and wheat 

 culture on private lands has very rapidly increased. This fact 

 is of importance, because even a slight increase in the yield 

 would increase the production of wheat in Russia much more 

 than a further extension of area. The relative importance of 

 the two systems may be gathered from the fact that 17,627,000 

 acres of the wheat acreage is in private hands, and 26,126,000 

 acres in communal ownership. Taking the entire Russian 

 Empire, the excess of the spring-wheat yield on private lands 

 over that on the peasants' lands is more than i bushel per 



