ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was faced with an agrarian situation which had to be dealt with and improved at all cost. Financially, Russia could not exist with the great bulk of her population in such economic conditions as those revealed by the inquiries of the "Commission of the Centre" in 1901. The situation was brought to a crux by the Japanese War and the revolution of 1905, which rendered Russia the same service as that for which she was indebted to the Crimean War of exactly half a century before. Russia needed a positive programme of agrarian reforms, which would reorganize her countryside and her agricultural industry on modern lines. The early years of the twentieth century, accordingly, saw the first tentative attempts on the part of the Government, while sternly suppressing agrarian riots, to improve the legal and economic position of peasantry.
