11 - The nature of the peasant movement

Summary

The problem of the ‘true’ nature of the peasant movement which played such a crucial rôle in the events of 1905 was, as we have seen, the topic of much lively debate within the rival socialist parties, who believed that the socio-political character of the revolution would be determined by the aspirations of the peasantry. In order to assess the extent of SR influence on the peasant movement, and to compare the relative merits of the conflicting SR and SD views of its class character, it may be useful to examine the evidence concerning the social composition of the movement, and the forms which it assumed.

The peasant disturbances which began in the spring of 1905 assumed the same range of forms as the earlier movement of 1902–3, although on a much wider scale, and over a longer period – unrest continued until the summer of 1907, but in terms of the number of incidents, the peak periods were the autumn of 1905 and the early summer of 1906. The Soviet historians Dubrovskii and Shestakov have investigated the forms of the movement and its regional distribution. Their findings are incorporated in Tables 1–3.

Table 1 shows that the great majority of incidents (about 75 %) involved conflicts between the peasants and the gentry landowners; the conflicts with state officials, police and troops (about 15%) usually developed as a consequence of their intervention in the movement against the landowners.