This chapter intends 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. Between 1906 and 1911, Prime Minister Stolypin's reforms invited peasant households to separate from the commune and establish themselves on enclosed, self-contained farms. The policy of War Communism emerged in response to a series of material disasters, each one sufficient to overwhelm and destroy a stable political order, much less a fragile hierarchy of soviets controlled at the top by a few hundred revolutionaries wholly without administrative experience. From the peasantry's perspective, the most notable feature of the post- Stalin era was the abandonment of mass murder and deportations as core instruments of state policy. During the Leonid Brezhnev years, the tension between socio-economic improvements and a command system of economic and political governance continued to mount.

A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the civil war to focus on military operations, allied intervention and politics at the top. The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War. War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerging Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolution. Bent on retaining power and the symbols of legitimacy, the Bolsheviks disagreed over how best to implement new cultural practices, which they saw as essential to the success of their revolution. Centring on procurement, Bolshevik economic practices alienated the peasantry and contributed to the famine of 1921-23.