There is another dimension to the Soviet economic project. The USSR confronted capitalism with a rival economic system. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, capitalism 'won', but it differed greatly from the system that had conquered the world during the nineteenth century. One reason for its transformation was the challenge it faced from Soviet socialism.[19] Nor should an exposure of the failings of the Soviet economic experiment blind us to the shortcomings of capitalism. To be sure, the Soviet Union left a legacy of debt, environmental degradation and struggling enterprises. But those who gloat over flaws in the system and its uneven economic performance would do well to reflect on the evidence of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, ill-health, environmental damage, debt burden and inequality that are the hallmarks of large parts of the globe. No amount of triumphalism from the privileged few can disguise the fact that the fortunes of so much of twentieth-century humanity have been mixed. An objective reading of the Soviet 'experiment' might conclude that the laudable ambition to realise the social and economic potential of the majority remains as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.
Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: Dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development
ESTHER KINGSTQN-MANN
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'.1 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.
In 1900, the peasants of Imperial Russia continued to struggle - like their parents and grandparents before them - against the constraints of a land and climate largely inhospitable to productive farming. In regions where rainfall was reliable, soils were poor; more fertile areas were routinely afflicted by drought.
I am deeply indebted to the work of Moshe Lewin, Teodor Shanin and Caroline Humphrey and to the insightful readings of this essay by David Hunt, Rochelle Ruthchild and James Mann.
1 Caroline Humphrey 'Politics of Privatisation in Provincial Russia: Popular Opinions Amid the Dilemmas of the Early 1990s', Cambridge Anthropology 18,1 (1995): 46.
These drawbacks persisted regardless ofprevailing political or socio-economic systems, and despite historical efforts either to privatise or collectivise the land. As the most impoverished and least literate of the tsar's subjects, peasants bore the economic and non-economic burdens imposed by a variety of more or less importunate elites. By 1900, they constituted 80 per cent of the population; the majority were women, and a substantial proportion of them were ethnically non-Russian. As in other predominantly peasant societies, the rural populace of the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet eras opposed some changes - often in collective fashion, with women in the forefront - but selectively appropriated others. In times of crisis, they deployed the symbols and rituals of their secular and religious cultures to reinforce demands for social justice and for vengeance against malign forces within and outside the household and community.
Labour, communes, households
Like many other peasantries, the rural inhabitants of Imperial Russia viewed labour as an economic necessity, as the source of legitimate rights to land use and as the basis for status claims within the household and community. In the communes to which most peasants belonged, the number of adult labourers per household frequently determined land-allotment size. In times of unrest and rebellion, peasants asserted that the gentry had 'stolen' the land from the tillers of the soil who were its rightful owners. In the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, they demanded that land be 'returned' to the labouring peasantry. At no time did peasants acknowledge the legitimacy of claims to landowner- ship by persons who did not labour on it. In 1900, labour claims infused the operations of the peasantry's basic institutions: the commune and the peasant household.
The peasant commune (mir or obshchina) was the dominant institution in the early twentieth-century Russian countryside. The object of centuries of idealisation and demonisation by a variety of radicals, reformers and government officials, its distinguishing feature was the periodic repartition of land among member households according to family size, number of adult labourers per household or some other collective social principle. Within the commune framework, member households possessed exclusive but temporary rights to use scattered strips of land (allotments) and could freely decide how to dispose ofthe product oftheir farm labour. Neither wholly collective norpri- vate, communes were mixed economies within which individual, household and communal rights to ownership coexisted in social configurations that varied regionally and changed over time. Individual members owned their personal belongings and could bequeath them to others. Women possessed unconditional ownership rights to a 'woman's box' (the product of weaving and other gendered activities).
Within the commune, households possessed collective and hereditary rights to a house, garden plot and livestock - the latter properties constituted a key source of economic inequality between peasant households. Periodic repartition was relatively rare in the north and west of the empire, where most peasants held land in hereditary (podvornoe) tenure. However, it is significant that even in more privatised areas, peasants relied on the use of common lands. More like English commons-users than yeoman farmers, they collectively shared out and collected the obligations owed to landlords and the state, devised and enforced rules for use of common lands and provided a variety of welfare supports to their members.[20]
Although the powers that the patriarch (bol'shak) exercised over the daily life of his household were virtually absolute, when he died, household property reverted to the household group under a new head (a son, brother or sometimes a widow). In the case of household divisions, a village assembly (skhod) composed of the heads of member households and led by elected village elders generally oversaw the distribution of property. Although communes were plagued by corruption, nepotism and individual profit-seeking, they nevertheless obliged wealthier families to link their fate with poorer neighbours and required ambitious individuals to obtain the consent of their neighbours before introducing significant changes. At best, they provided a framework capable of satisfying both a family's desire for a holding of its own, and the desire for protection against the monopolising of resources by wealthier families/households within the community.
19
Eric Hobsbawm,
20
Esther Kingston-Mann, 'Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation', in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter(eds.),
Timothy Mixter, 'The Hiring Market as Workers' Turf: Migrant Agricultural Labourers and the Mobilisation of Collective Action in the Steppe Grainbelt of European Russia, 1853-1913', in Kingston-Mann and Mixter,