Their agrarian program is in this respect the most
striking example. It is worked out in great detail and is aimed at a
betterment of the condition of peasants without deep injury to the present
landowners. It recognizes the right of the peasant to more land, it
provides for future state ownership of land to prevent it from falling into
wrong hands, but does not condemn the principle of landownership, nor the
injustice of present ownership, and for that reason elaborates a method of
compensation for compulsorily alienated land through universal taxation.
To avoid excessive burden to the impoverished peasant the compensation is
to be in the shape of bonds representing the average value of the land in
each particular case, only the interest on these bonds to be paid yearly
from universal taxes--a topsy-turvy mortgage system, as it were, in which
the state becomes the proprietor and mortgagor of the land, while its
present owners are turned into forced mortgagees. Under this system the
peasants will get all land available, but 90 per cent will have to pay for
what is owned by a small fraction of even the remaining 10 per cent of the
entire population. The proposed scheme proved to be too radical for the
tsar's government in 1906 and caused the downfall of the first Duma. It
provoked at the time bitter comment in Germany also, where the conservative
and national-liberal press accused the Russian Constitutional Democratic
party of putting forward impossible demands and of attacking the very
principle of property ownership.
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