What the Party of People's Freedom Wants

If there is more land in a district than needed, the remaining land will be assigned to settlers from other places.

Land should be allotted for permanent use according to the current number of people in the entire local landless and land-poor population, both those having their own household and those renting land or hired for agricultural work.

Rural societies, having received the added land, must decide for themselves whether this land will be held in communal or individual ownership.

In this, the Party of People's Freedom differs from the Social Democratic and Social Revolutionary parties, which want, in Russia—either now or in time—no private ownership of land at all, so that all land belongs to communes, or zemstvos local self-government assemblies, or cooperatives, or artels, but not to individuals. The Party of People's Freedom thinks differently; it does not insist that a completely identical order of life be established throughout all of Russia; let the people arrange land use in each locality as they are accustomed, and as is more convenient in that locality.

For the assigned lands, the treasury will collect a special annual fee, which will vary in different localities depending on the profitability of the land. This fee must be established by a special law through the State Duma. It will not be large or burdensome. In 1907, State Duma member N. N. Kutler believed that it would amount to approximately 2 rubles per dessiatine, and in many localities even less, where the land is worse.

Let us now examine which lands the Party of People's Freedom considers not subject to expropriation. First of all, the current peasant allotment lands cannot be expropriated. Furthermore, private lands under homesteads, orchards, vegetable gardens, vineyards, nurseries, and special seed farms also should not be expropriated. Such lands are not large, and therefore their division would little help the working people, while the destruction of valuable orchards and gardens would be harmful to the entire population that needs vegetables and fruits.