called private plots, and the sale of a portion of their produce at farm markets, which were free from state control. Consequently, peasant agriculture did not disappear with collectivization and continues to survive in Russia during the early twenty-first century, but on a much reduced scale. See also: CHAYANOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; PEASANTRY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chayanov, A. V. (1966). The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith. Homewood, IL: Irwin. Danilov, Viktor P. (1988). Rural Russia under the New Regime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, James C. (1976). The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The original agriculturists of the northern Eurasian plain lived a communal, seminomadic existence, based on slash-and-burn cultivation. By the time of Kievan Rus, the defining characteristics of a peasantry were in already in evidence: an agricultural population bound by trade and tribute to a wider world, but in an incomplete and dependent way. Princes imposed taxes and compulsory services, but only with the rise of Muscovy (from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) were peasants enserfed- permanently bound to their lords or lands. Despite periodic revolts, this condition continued until 1861.
Peter I inaugurated a campaign of Westernization that imitated European modes of life and government. Perhaps ironically, in an age when Western Europe was abandoning serfdom, these initiatives increased the exploitation, as well as the traditionalism, of Russian peasants. St. Petersburg’s Italianate palaces were built with conscripted peasant labor, and Russia’s new Western-style army and bureaucracy were supported by a range of new taxes, among them the “soul tax” that was now demanded of peasants on top of the dues they paid their lords. Exploitation, however, was often indirect. The village commune (obshchina) distributed lands and obligations among its members, serving as a buffer between peasants and the outside world.
Although peasants generally regarded the cities and the Europeanized elite with suspicion, they were not totally isolated from urban society. Permanently bound to the soil, they could still depart temporarily to earn money in crafts, trade, or wage employment. In some provinces more than half the adult males engaged in work away from villages. A few even became millionaires.
Peasant agriculture flourished among the Slavic (and mainly Orthodox Christian) population of the Russian Empire. During the eighteenth century arable cultivation expanded into the steppe grass1153
PEASANTRY
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– 4* Russian peasant women in the 1930s show their support for efforts to strengthen the collective farm system. © AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS lands of the south and southeast, and some serf-owners tried to introduce new crops and systems of cultivation into these regions. Most, however, left peasants to organize and cultivate the land according to traditional norms. Under communal tenure, which flourished among Russian peasants but not among Ukrainians and other non-Russians, each household received strips of land in many different fields. The number of these could be increased or decreased to match a family’s ability to work. Grains were planted in a fixed rotation, and crop yields were often disappointing, even in areas of higher fertility.
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1855) convinced its leaders to modernize, and the result was a vast array of reforms, foremost among them emancipation of the serfs in 1861. For the sake of social stability, former serf owners were generously compensated, retaining a substantial share of the land. Freed peasants had to reimburse the state for their land. The commune kept the job of distributing lands and tax obligations. This arrangement produced little innovation and less prosperity, though migration to Western Siberia during the later nineteenth century did offer some hopeful signs of change. At the end of the nineteenth century crop yields grew more rapidly than the population, and the Russian Empire became a major exporter of grain and other agricultural products.
In the general census of 1897, the empire had a population of 125,000,000, of whom roughly three-fourths were legally classified as peasants, and an even greater proportion resided in rural areas. Peasant unrest was endemic, and in the revolution of 1905-1907 peasants rose up to confiscate private lands and drive off their former lords. Harsh punishment was followed by a new (“Stolypin”) land reform promoted by Prime Minister Peter
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Stolypin, designed to replace communal tenure with private ownership, but the outbreak of World War I prevented its full implementation. In 1917, unrest returned. Private lands were seized and redistributed and manor houses destroyed. The village commune took on a new life.
At this time peasants were roughly eighty percent of Russia’s population, impoverished, tradition-minded, and suspicious of outsiders. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik (Communist) Party tried to enlist them in its revolution, but needed their grain and labor power more than their goodwill. During the Civil War of 1917-1922 and later during the industrialization drive of the 1930s the Party resorted to confiscation and coercion. Poor and landless peasants were thought to be natural allies of the urban proletariat, but efforts to promote class warfare in the villages produced instability and food shortages. Under Josef Stalin’s leadership collective agriculture was forcibly introduced, but instead of producing efficiency it caused disruption and starvation, with the loss of millions of lives. After several years of turmoil peasants were assured the right to cultivate small private plots alongside their duties to the collective farm (kolkhoz). Throughout the following decades these plots produced a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s food.
The Soviet Union became an urban industrial society, but its rural roots were poorly nourished. At the time the USSR ceased to exist, some twenty-five percent of Russia’s population continued to lived on the land, resistant (for the most part) to privatization or economic reform. See also: AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; ENSERFMENT; PEASANT ECONOMY; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. New York: Addison-Wesley. Robinson, Geroid T. (1932). Rural Russia Under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Company. Shanin, Teodor. (1985). The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Also known as “Peasant wars”; peasant uprisings in broad usage, were a number of rural-based rebellions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a typical form of protest in Russia against socioeconomic, religious, and cultural oppression and, occasionally, against political power holders.
Peasant uprisings in the narrow sense belong to the period of serfdom. Most of them followed a significant worsening of the conditions of the peasantry. The four major rebellions of this period were led by: 1) Ivan Bolotnikov, 1606-1607; 2) Stepan (“Stenka”) Razin, 1667-1671; 3) Kondrat Bulavin, 1707-1708; and 4) the largest of all, by Yemelyan (“Yemelka”) Pugachev, 1773-1775. The leadership in each case was largely symbolic, as an inherent feature of peasant wars was anarchic spontaneity with little organization, subordination, and planning.
The geographic center of the uprisings was in Southern Russia, between the Don and the Volga rivers and between the Black and the Caspian seas. However, they spread over wider territories and, in the case of the Bolotnikov rebellion, involved a battle in the vicinity of Moscow (which the rebels lost, in December 1606). The key
