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

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.017

15 - Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet andpost-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

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

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Summary

Contexts for change

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

Keywords

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

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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

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