Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and
                      post-Soviet development

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.017

15 - Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development

from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Esther Kingston-Mann

Edited by

Ronald Grigor Suny

Show author details

Ronald Grigor Suny: Affiliation:
University of Chicago and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Contexts for change

By the dawn of the twentieth century, most predominantly peasant societies were already colonised or otherwise subjugated by the world’s industrialised modern empires. For nations not yet subjected to the full force of this process, the penalties of backwardness were increasingly manifest. In Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, the fear that backwardness might invite foreign conquest led a succession of heads of state to target peasants as producers of the grain needed to finance ambitious, government-sponsored projects for industrialisation. However, although peasants were crucial to the success of any development scenario, both reforming and revolutionary elites tended to discount the possibility of peasant agency. Peasants typically viewed as ‘raw material’ rather than as co-participants in the development process were – in the words of Caroline Humphrey – ‘never in possession of the master narrative of which they were the objects, and had no access to the sources from which it was reaching them’. The following discussion is intended to situate the peasant majority of the population as both agents and victims within the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and to locate them on the shifting terrain of the post-Soviet era.

Keywords

Russian government Leonid Brezhnev peasant households post-Soviet era Stolypin reforms War Communism Soviet

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 411 - 439

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abraham, Ray, ‘The Regeneration of Family Farming in Estonia’, Sociologia Ruralis 34, 4 (1993).Google Scholar

Atkinson, Dorothy, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983).

Caskie, Paul, ‘Back to Basics: Household Food Production in Russia’, Journal of Agricultural Economics 51, 2 (May 2000).Google Scholar

Chaianov, A. V., On the Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. Thorner, D. et al. (Homewood, Ill.: R. D. Irwin, 1966).

Chernenkov, N. N., K kharakteristike krest’ianskogo khoziaistva (Moscow, 1905).

Davies, R. W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Engel, Barbara, Between Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Farnsworth, Beatrice, and Viola, Lynne (eds.), Russian Peasant Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Grant, Steven, ‘Obshchina and Mir’, Slavic Review 35, 4 (1976).Google Scholar

Hivon, Myriam, ‘Local Resistance to Privatisation in Rural Russia’, Cambridge Anthropology 18, 2 (1995).Google Scholar

Humphrey, Caroline, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge Anthropology 18, 2 (1995).Google Scholar

Humphrey, Caroline, ‘Politics of Privatisation in Provincial Russia: Popular Opinions Amid the Dilemmas of the Early 1990s’, Cambridge Anthropology 18, 1 (1995).Google Scholar

Humphrey, Caroline, ‘The Domestic Mode of Production in Post-Soviet Siberia’, Anthropology Today 14, 3 (June 1998).Google Scholar

Humphrey, Caroline, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Humphries, Jane, ‘Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Economic History 50, 2 (Mar. 1990).Google Scholar

Ioffe, Grigory, and Nefedova, Tatyana, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia: A Geographical Perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997).

Kerblay, Basile, Modern Soviet Society, trans. Sawyer, Rupert, foreword by Lewin, M. (London: Methuen, 1983).

Khauke, O., Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo (Moscow, 1914).

Kingston-Mann, Esther, and Mixter, Timothy (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Kingston–Mann, Esther, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Kurashvili, B. P., ‘Ob”ektivnye zakony gosudarstvennogo upravleniia’, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 43 (1983).Google Scholar

Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols. (Moscow: Gosizdpolit, 1958–65).

Lewin, Moshe, Stalinism and the Seeds of Soviet Reform: The Debates of the 1960s (Armonk N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991).

Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

Liefert, W., ‘The Food Problem in the Republics of the Former USSR’, in Atta, D. Van, The Farmer Threat: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).Google Scholar

McCauley, Martin (ed.), Stalin and Stalinism (London: Longman Press, 1995).

Ofer, Gur, Soviet Economic Growth: 1928–1985 (Los Angeles: Rand, UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, 1988).

Olcott, M. B., The Kazakhs (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1987).

Pallot, Judith, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

Rykov, A. I., V bor’be za sukhoi i golodom (Moscow, 1924).

Shaffer, Harry (ed.), Soviet Agriculture: An Assessment of its Contributions to Economic Development (New York: Praeger, 1977).

Shanin, Teodor, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

Sukhanov, N. N., ‘Obshchina v sovetskom agrarnom zakonodatel’stve’, Na agrarnom fronte 11–12 (1926).Google Scholar

Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

Tauger, Mark, Davies, R. W., and Wheatcroft, S. G., ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932–1933’, Slavic Review 54, 3 (1995).Google Scholar

Ward, Chris, Stalin’s Russia (London: Arnold, 1993).

Wheatcroft, S. G., ‘The Reliability of Russian Prewar Grain Statistics’, Soviet Studies 26, 2 (Apr. 1974).Google Scholar

XIX Vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 28 iiunia - 1 iiulia 1988 g.: Stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988).

Zyrianov, P. N., Krest’ianskaia obshchina evropeiskoi Rossii 1907–1914 (Moscow: Nauka, 1992).

Book contents

15 - Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive