Skaldin's criticism of the consequences of the Reform, therefore, were new at that time.
“What first of all strikes the contemporary reader, who is accustomed to the Narodniks’ sickly gushing over the peasant Reform, is the extreme sobriety of Skaldin’s views on the subject. He looks at the Reform without any illusions or idealisation; he sees it as a transaction between two parties, the landlords and the peasants, who until then had used the land in common on definite terms and now had divided it, the division being accompanied by a change in the legal status of both parties. The factor which determined the mode of division and the size of the share of each party was their respective interests. These interests determined the ambitions of both parties, while the fact that one of them was able to have a direct hand in the Reform itself, and in the practical working-out of the various questions connected with its implementation, determined, among other things, that party’s dominant position.” (p 495-6)
Unlike the Narodniks, Skaldin did not talk about “land poverty”, but, rather, focused on the excessive amounts of land that was cut off from the peasants' allotments. It is a common feature, as seen with the English Enclosures, that former common land, used for grazing, hunting and wood collection, becomes cut off from the use of peasants. Skaldin notes the comments of peasants to this effect.
““‘Our land has been so trimmed down by him’” (author’s italics) “‘that we can’t live without this cut-off land; he has surrounded us on all sides with his fields and we have nowhere to pasture our cattle; so you have to pay for your allotment, and on top of that you have to pay for the cut-off land, just as much as he asks.’” “‘How does that better us?’ said one literate arid experienced muzhik, a former quit-renter. ‘We are paying the same quit-rent as before, though our land has been trimmed down.’”” (Note *, p 496)
Skaldin also set out the effects of the redemption payments, “supports his statements with many facts. “Inordinate taxation,” reads a sub-title to the third essay (1867), “is the chief cause of their” (the peasants’) “poverty,” and Skaldin shows that taxation is higher than the peasants returns from the land, and he cites from the Proceedings of the Commission on Taxation data relative to the incidence of taxation of the upper and lower classes in Russia which show that 76% of the taxation falls on the lower classes and 17% on the upper, whereas in Western Europe the correlation is everywhere incomparably more favourable to the lower classes.” (p 496-7)
Again, these consequences of land reform, as part of every bourgeois revolution, can be seen as peasants need money to pay taxes and interest, and, in order to obtain money, they must become commodity producers, producing for the market, which sets in an inevitable process of competition, accumulation, and development of capital in agriculture, just as these same factors had previously led to the development of capital in the towns. Lenin notes,
“We cite these excerpts—which, in themselves, are of little interest and are in part out-of-date—in order to show how energetically the peasants’ interests were defended by a writer who was hostile to the village community and whose opinions on a whole number of questions were those of a true member of the Manchester School. It is very instructive to note that nearly all the useful and non-reactionary precepts of Narodism fully coincide with those of this Mancunian. It goes without saying that, such being Skaldin’s opinion of the Reform, he could not possibly sentimentally idealise it in the way the Narodniks did, and still do, when they say that it sanctioned people’s production, that it was superior to the West-European peasant reforms, that it made a tabula rasa of Russia, and so on.” (p 497-8)
Indeed, rather than seeing land reform, in Russia, as something special, and advantageous, Skaldin saw it as less advantageous than it was for peasants in the West. In the West, for example, Germany, the land was considered to be their property, and redemption payments only “redemption of their compulsory service to landlords.” (p 498)
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