It is therefore by no means surprising to find that speedy ruin is the debtor’s fate. In the period from 1887 to 1890, 8.8 per cent. of all the land purchased with the aid of the Peasant’s Bank, was relinquished by the mortgageors, the failures amounting to 7,637,034 rubles, or to 14 per cent. of all the loans granted by the Bank.[182] The operations of the Bank necessarily suffered a diminution.[183] However, all these inconveniences are but matters of secondary importance. Had everything gone smoothly, the Bank would nevertheless have effected no actual change in the economics of the village. As may be remembered, the village community needs about one-half more land in order to enable all its members to hold their position as farmers. To put peasant landholding upon a proper footing in the famine-stricken region, many times more land would be required than that purchased by all the peasants throughout Russia with the aid of the Peasant’s Bank.[184] It may be questioned whether the operations of the Bank have been even sufficient to counterbalance the further parcellation of peasant holdings which has resulted from the growth of population. The economic tendencies prevalent in the village during the first year of the present reign may be regarded as being even more pronounced to-day. The present catastrophe was consequently by no means unexpected, and there has been no lack of alarming symptoms within the past ten years. In 1883, 1884 and 1885 famine stalked alternately through western Siberia, through the northeast, and through certain of the central provinces of European Russia (Vyatka, Kazañ, Kursk, etc.). Famine was again reported in 1889.[185] To such an extent was the peasantry already exhausted that even the extraordinarily good harvest of 1890[186] was unable to prevent a subsequent failure of crops from resulting in a famine. It is only in the area affected that the present failure is distinguished from its precursors.[187] The cause of the various famines is at bottom always essentially the same, viz: the backwardness of Russian agriculture. The surface of the soil has become finally exhausted and the wooden plough of the Russian peasant is unable to reach down to the deeper layers where the soil is yet virgin. Deep ploughing is impossible with only one horse, and that horse fed on straw. It is further not only the peasant land, but also the major part of the landlord’s fields, that is cultivated with the peasant’s stock and implements. Thus the crisis of peasant agriculture is at the same time the crisis of Russian landlord farming.[188] The famine has brought about at one single stroke the dissolution which had been slowly going on in the village since 1861.