Tuesday 30 November 2021

The Handicraft Census In Perm - Article I, Section I - Part 1 of 6

The Handicraft Census In Perm

In this work, written when Lenin was in exile in Siberia, during 1898, he, again, provides an analysis of the latest economic data, and examines the conclusions drawn from it by the Narodniks. Many of the economic trends highlighted by the data have already been illustrated in previous works, and also comprise part of the more comprehensive analysis in Lenin's later work, The Development of Capitalism In Russia. I will avoid replication of tables unless required for clarity, because the original tables are available in the work online, or in print in Lenin's Collected Works, Volume 2, from which the page references again are taken.

Article One  


As part of the 1896 Exhibition in Nizhni-Novgorod, the Perm Gubernia Zemstvo provided funds for a scientific survey of the state of handicraft industry in the region. The result was to be a handbook of eight volumes, amounting to over 3,000 pages, in total. In fact, only one volume was published in time, A Survey of Perm Territory. A Sketch of the State of Handicraft Industry in Perm Gubernia. It is this data that Lenin analyses, along with other data. He notes,

“For the novelty, wealth and fullness of the material on which it is based, the Sketch is a work of outstanding interest. The material was obtained through a special handicraft census financed by the Zemstvo and taken in 1894-95. This was a house-to-house census, each householder being questioned individually.” (p 357)

The questions asked were also wide-ranging, covering not only the activities of the master craftsmen, but also their family members, and wage labourers. It covered things like agricultural activity, as well as details on raw material purchases, production techniques, seasonal work patterns, sale of products, debts, and the time businesses had existed.

“As far as we are aware, this is perhaps the first time such abundant information has been published in our literature. But to whom much is given, much is required. The very wealth of the material entitles us to demand its thorough analysis by the investigators, but the Sketch is a long way from meeting this demand. Both in the tabulated data and in the method of grouping and analysing them there are many gaps, which the present author has had in part to fill by selecting material from various parts of the book and computing the appropriate data.” (p 357-8)

Lenin emphasises that his analysis is based on the data and the economic reality as it is. The point is made, because the Narodniks continually analysed data within the confines of their view of how economic reality “should be” rather than how it is. In other words, they filtered it through the prism of the moral socialist view of how Russia's development should take place, had it not been led down a wrong path of capitalist development. By contrast, Lenin looks at the data in the context of the economic realities, and also explains, from a materialist perspective, why those realities were inevitably what they were, and not something else.

“As to extending the conclusions drawn from the data on Perm Gubernia to “our handicraft industries” in general, the reader will see from what follows that such an extension is quite legitimate, for the forms of “handicraft industry” in Perm Gubernia are exceedingly varied and embrace every possible form ever mentioned in the literature on the subject.” (p 358)

Lenin emphasises that, in this work, it divides into two elements, firstly the analysis of the data, and secondly, his discussion of the Narodnik conclusions drawn from it.


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