The policy of the Government has always been to admit redistributions in principle, but to prevent their too frequent recurrence.  For this purpose the Emancipation Law stipulated that they could be decreed only by a three-fourths majority of the Village Assembly, and in 1893 a further obstacle was created by a law providing that the minimum term between two re-distributions should be twelve years, and that they should never be undertaken without the sanction of the Rural Supervisor.

A certain number of Communes have made the experiment of transforming the Communal tenure into hereditary allotments, and its only visible effect has been that the allotments accumulate in the hands of the richer and more enterprising peasants, and the poorer members of the Commune become landless, while the primitive system of agriculture remains unimproved.

Up to this point I have dealt with the so-called causes of peasant impoverishment which are much talked of, but which are, in my opinion, only of secondary importance.  I pass now to those which are more tangible and which have exerted on the condition of the peasantry a more palpable influence.  And, first, inordinate taxation.

This is a very big subject, on which a bulky volume might be written, but I shall cut it very short, because I know that the ordinary reader does not like to be bothered with voluminous financial statistics.  Briefly, then, the peasant has to pay three kinds of direct taxation:  Imperial to the Central Government, local to the Zemstvo, and Commune to the Mir and the Volost; and besides these he has to pay a yearly sum for the redemption of the land-allotment which he received at the time of the Emancipation.  Taken together, these form a heavy burden, but for ten or twelve years the emancipated peasantry bore it patiently, without falling very deeply into arrears.  Then began to appear symptoms of distress, especially in the provinces with a poor soil, and in 1872 the Government appointed a Commission of Inquiry, in which I had the privilege of taking part unofficially.  The inquiry showed that something ought to be done, but at that moment the Government was so busy with administrative reforms and with trying to develop industry and commerce that it had little time to devote to studying and improving the economic position of the silent, long-suffering muzhik.  It was not till nearly ten years later, when the Government began to feel the pinch of the ever-increasing arrears, that it recognised the necessity of relieving the rural population.  For this purpose it abolished the salt-tax and the poll-tax and repeatedly lessened the burden of the redemption-payments.  At a later period (1899) it afforded further relief by an important reform in the mode of collecting the direct taxes.  From the police, who often ruined peasant householders by applying distraint indiscriminately, the collection of taxes was transferred to special authorities who took into consideration the temporary pecuniary embarrassments of the tax-payers.  Another benefit conferred on the peasantry by this reform is that an individual member of the Commune is no longer responsible for the fiscal obligations of the Commune as a whole.