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Peasants, Nation, and Local Government in Wartime Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Scott J. Seregny
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Extract

More than a decade ago, in a discussion in this journal, Leopold Haimson argued that peasant soldiers’ perception of Soviet power in 1917-18 “did not encompass any conception of the relationships between themselves, their village communities, or even the peasant estate as a whole, and other social groups—let alone any generalized view of the Russian body politic as a whole.” He went on to note that this peasant particularism “reflected a continuity in the mentalité of Russian peasants stretching back to the very inception of the Russian state.” Peasants rejected any superordinate authority and consistently acted out “a profound urge to be left alone.” Haimson's description of Russian peasants at the outset of civil war is a powerful evocation of peasant mentalités, not only of peasants in Russia but of peasants the world over, and would seem to preclude their inclusion in a nation.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 336 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

1. Haimson, Leopold H., ‘The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia,” Slavic Review 47, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 13, 16, 19. Emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

2. See Wildman, Allan K., TheEnd of the Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt, March-April 1917 (Princeton, 1980)Google Scholar.

3. On peasant reception of refugees, see Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, 1999), 65–68.Google Scholar

4. Mark Baker, “A View from Below: The Social Impact of the Great War in Kharkiv Province” (paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, St. Louis, November 1999). Unlike Josh Sanborn, I would suggest that this oft-remarked behavior of Russian peasants is best interpreted as peasant particularism rather than evidence of peasants' own “vision of the nation.“

5. Moeller, Robert G., German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914—1924: The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, 1986).Google Scholar

6. Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe betiveen the Txvo World Wars (Seattle, 1974), 14–18 Google Scholar; Bideleux, Robert and Jeffries, Ian, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London, 1998), 444-45.Google Scholar

7. Teodor Shanin, Russia, 1905-1907: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (New Haven, 1986), 133.

8. Scott J. Seregny, “A Wager on the Peasantry: Anti-Zemstvo Riots, Adult Education and the Russian Village during the First World War: Stavropol’ Province,” Slavonic and East European Review (forthcoming).

9. Seregny, “A Wager on the Peasantry“; Tikhon J. Polner, et al., Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven, 1930), 295-96.

10. Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1989).

11. “Soedinennoe soveshchanie predstavitelei Ufimskoi gubernskoi i Belebeevskoi uezdnoi zemskikh uprav po voprosam vneshkol'nogo obrazovaniia na 12 i 13 fevralia 1915 goda,” Biulleten’ otdela narodnogo obrazovaniia Ufimskoi Gubernskoi Zemskoi upravy, 1915, no. 2: 60-61.

12. The Japanese historian, Kimitaka Matsuzato, has criticized Anglo-American historians for overemphasizing the failure to democratize zemstvos after 1905 and neglecting the immense practical work that they achieved before the war; see Matsuzato, , “The Fate of Agronomists in Russia: Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911 to 1916,” Russian Review 55 (April 1996): 172–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Matsuzato, , ‘The Role of Zemstva in the Creation and Collapse of Tsarism's War Efforts during World War One,” Jahrbucher fur Ceschichte Osteuropas 46, no. 3 (1998): 312-37Google Scholar. I think he is right on the second score, but wrong on the first.

13. I. P. Belokonskii, “Ozhivlenie deiatel'nosti zemstva v sfere narodnogo obrazo van'ua.“ Russkaia shkola, 1908, no. 12:1-13; V. Vasilevich, “Uezdnye zemskie sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 1909 goda,” Russkaia shkola, 1909, no. 10:35-43; V. Vasilevich, “Gubernskie zemskie sobraniia ocherednoi sessii 1909-1910 goda,” Russkaia shkola, 1910, no. 3:35-41; 1. Zhilkin, “Provintsial'noe obozrenie,” VestnikEvropy, 1913, no. 2:365-77, no. 11:350-57, and no. 12:383-92; Ruth Delia MacNaughton and Roberta Thompson Manning, “The Crisis of the Third of June System and Political Trends in the Zemstvos, 1907-1914,” in Leopold H. Haimson, ed., The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905-1914 (Bloomington, 1979), 200-202.

14. The absence of such appeals to the tsar after 1914 may indicate the potency of appeals to the nation but also probably reflects the rapid desacralization of the monarchy brought about by rumors of treason, German influences at court, and Grigorii Rasputin: see Figes, Orlando and Kolonitskii, Boris, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999), 9–29.Google Scholar

15. On zemstvo discussion of electoral reform, see Zhilkin, “Provintsial'noe obozrenie,“ Vestnik Evropy, 1913, no. 2:365-66. On the zemstvos in 1917-18, see Gerasimenko, G. A., Zemskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii (Moscow, 1990)Google Scholar, and Rosenberg, William G., “The Zemstvo in 1917 and Its Fate under Bolshevik Rule,” in Emmons, Terence and Vucinich, Wayne S., eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), 383–421.Google Scholar