The application of Marxist concepts to Russia has long served to obscure some of the main lines of Russian development, for there is probably no country in Europe in which Marxism has so little relevance as in Russia. Marxist studies of the labor problem in Russia are particularly subject to great confusion, since two of Marxism's fundamental tenets are directly contradicted by any realistic study of Russian labor. It has, for example, been no secret to specialists who have read something on Russian labor other than the works of Lenin and Stalin that Russia did not have a proletariat in the Western sense of the term. The workers in Russia were for the most part peasants who remained members of a village commune and possessors of allotment land. Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings from the land, a part of them were seasonal workers, who came to seek work in the factories in the fall and winter, and regularly returned to their land in time for the harvest.