Editing Russian Revolution of 1905 (section)

===Agrarian problem===
Every year, thousands of nobles in debt mortgaged their estates to the noble land bank or sold them to municipalities, merchants, or peasants. By the time of the revolution, the nobility had sold off one-third of its land and mortgaged another third. The peasants had been freed by the [[emancipation reform of 1861]], but their lives were generally quite limited. The government hoped to develop the peasants as a politically conservative, land-holding class by enacting laws to enable them to buy land from nobility by paying small installments over many decades.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 19">Harcave 1970, 19</ref>

Such land, known as "allotment land", would not be owned by individual peasants but by the community of peasants; individual peasants would have rights to strips of land to be assigned to them under the [[open field system]]. A peasant could not sell or mortgage this land, so in practice he could not renounce his rights to his land, and he would be required to pay his share of redemption dues to the village commune.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 19" /> This plan was intended to prevent peasants from becoming part of the [[proletariat]]. However, the peasants were not given enough land to provide for their needs:<ref name="Harcave 1970, 20">Harcave 1970, 20</ref> 
<blockquote>Their earnings were often so small that they could neither buy the food they needed nor keep up the payment of taxes and redemption dues they owed the government for their land allotments. By 1903 their total arrears in payments of taxes and dues was 118 million rubles.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 20" /></blockquote>

The situation worsened as masses of hungry peasants roamed the countryside looking for work and sometimes walked hundreds of [[kilometre|kilometer]]s to find it. Desperate peasants proved capable of violence.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 20" /> "In the provinces of [[Kharkiv|Kharkov]] and [[Poltava]] in 1902, thousands of them, ignoring restraints and authority, burst out in a rebellious fury that led to extensive destruction of property and looting of noble homes before troops could be brought to subdue and punish them."<ref name="Harcave 1970, 20" />

These violent outbreaks caught the attention of the government, so it created many committees to investigate the causes.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 20" /> The committees concluded that no part of the countryside was prosperous; some parts, especially the fertile areas known as the "[[Chernozem|black-soil region]]", were in decline.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 21">Harcave 1970, 21</ref> Although cultivated acreage had increased in the last half century, the increase had not been proportionate to the growth of the peasant population, which had doubled.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 21" /> "There was general agreement at the turn of the century that Russia faced a grave and intensifying agrarian crisis due mainly to rural overpopulation with an annual excess of fifteen to eighteen live births over deaths per 1,000 inhabitants."<ref name=pipes>{{cite book |last = Pipes |first = Richard |title = A Concise History of the Russian Revolution |year = 1996 |publisher = Vintage |location = New York |pages = 8 }}</ref> The investigations revealed many difficulties but the committees could not find solutions that were both sensible and "acceptable" to the government.<ref name="Harcave 1970, 21" />