In many parts of the Russian Empire, the social identities of peasants were organised according to a set of hierarchies that subordinated younger people and females to the authority of the household patriarch. In addition to childcare, women were expected to cook the household's food, fetch water, sew, wash clothes, weave cloth, care for poultry and livestock, endure beatings and tend the family's 'private' garden plot (usad'ba). Granted a modicum of respect for their labour contributions and a right to the product of 'women's work' (weaving, poultry raising, etc.), women were otherwise wholly subordinated to the authority of fathers, husbands and elder sons; they gained a measure of power only after achieving the status of mother-in-law (with authority over daughters-in-law).
In 1900, most peasant households were primarily devoted to agricultural pursuits. But particularly in the northern provinces of St Petersburg, Moscow, Archangel and Nizhnii Novgorod, an increasing number sought to meet escalating tax burdens by leaving their villages to become hired labourers (otkhodniki). In workplaces far distant from their homes, peasants absorbed new ideas, customs and practices and took care to establish strategic relationships grounded in networks of kin and neighbours.3 However, leaving the village rarely signified a repudiation of village ties; otkhodniki frequently 'raided the market' by sending money back to their home villages[21] (where opportunities for women expanded in the absence of the usually dominant males).[22] Peasants did not retain their 'old ways' unchanged. Instead, they infused time-honoured traditions with new combinations of indigenous and imported meanings. As Moshe Lewin has suggested, the rural populace was changing, but 'the interplay between new and old formations did not conform to theory and kept complicating the picture and baffling the thinker and the politician'.[23]
Although wealthy peasants exerted a disproportionate influence in village life, scholars continue to debate the extent to which early twentieth-century economic differences were reproduced from generation to generation as class formations or mitigated through periodic repartition. Since commune repartitions usually apportioned allotments according to family size or labour capacity, larger households were often 'richer' in land; newer and smaller households received smaller allotments.[24]
In general, rural innovation was not confined to 'privatised' farming districts. In Tobol'sk and Kazan', contemporary statisticians and economists documented commune strategies specifically crafted to reward individual innovation while limiting the growth of rural differentiation. In Tambov, commune peasants who fertilised their allotments either received special monetary payments at the time of repartition, a similar allotment or the right to retain their original holdings. In 1900, 127 commune villages in a single district of Moscow province introduced many-field crop rotations; by 1903,245 out of 368 villages had done so.[25] While innovation was not widespread either within or outside the commune, irreversible changes in farming practices were becoming manifest in the early years of the twentieth century.
Breaking the peasant commune (1): Stolypin's 'wager on the strong'
In 1905, when Russia's first twentieth-century revolution erupted, communes organised the seizure of gentry land, and commune-sponsored petitions demanding land and liberty, abolition of private property rights and 'return' of land to the tillers of the soil poured into the capital from every corner of the empire.[26] In response, the government introduced a programme to eliminate the peasant commune and replace it with a rural constituency of 'strong' and conservative private farmers. 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 (otruby and khutora); in this process the household property formerly owned by the household was to become the private property of the bol'shak.
In the decade that followed, few of the government's hopes for privatisation were realised. Many requests for separation came not from the strong, but from 'weak' families that had suffered misfortune that could cost them land in repartitions determined according to family size or labour capacity.[27]Equally significant was the depth ofpeasant opposition, and the role ofwomen. Because soldiers were traditionally less likely to fire on women, andbecausethe income and status of women were so intimately linked with the household's garden plot that had been transferred to the bol'shak, women were frequently
esther kingston-mann
visible at the forefront of anti-enclosure confrontations with the authorities.11 Although the government offered 'separators' generous legal and extra-legal support, financial subsidies and preferential credit rates, peasants nevertheless returned to the commune in increasing numbers on the eve of the First World War. By 1916, violence against 'separators' had become so intense that the Stolypin reforms were suspended.
In general, privatisation did not lead 'separators' to change their farming practices. Communities that chose to eliminate periodic land repartition took care to retain not only their common lands but also the welfare supports that communes traditionally provided.[28] Overall, the Stolypin reforms failed to demonstrate that newly enclosed private farms were significantly more or less productive or profitable than communes. Ironically, the most dramatic change in the Russian countryside during this period was initiated not by the government but by commune peasants, who engaged in massive purchases of gentry holdings and appreciably levelled the economic playing field between 1906 and 1914.[29]
War and revolution, 1914-17
In 1914, world war, invasion, military disaster and a state-sponsored scorched- earth policy destabilised and displaced the populace of Russia's western provinces; by 1916, a predominantly peasant army had suffered 2.5 million casualties and internal refugees numbered 2 million. In this brutal and brutalis- ing context, Russia's second twentieth-century revolution erupted in February 1917 and quickly toppled the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. As in 1905, peasant communes took centre stage by organising land seizures and forcibly returning 'separators' to their former communes. From a political standpoint, the Revolution of 1917 was significant because peasants participated in it not only as soldiers but in their own right, as peasants, in the urban-led revolutionary movement to establish soviets nationwide. Inspired by traditional labour principles, the first 'Order' issued by the All-Russian Conference of Soviet Peasant Deputies in May 1917 declared: 'All peasants deserve the right to labour on the land; private ownership is abolished.' Throughout 1917, the language of peasant petitions invoked 'God-given' rights to land 'stolen' by wicked landlords and officials.
During the second half of 1917, peasant political allegiances shifted - not towards Marxism, about which they knew little-but towards a Bolshevik Party that consistently demanded the immediate transfer of land to the peasantry and withdrawal from the war. In the face of economic collapse and the devastation produced by German invasion, peasants in Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia as well as Russia began to voice support - or at least neutrality - towards a Bolshevik seizure of power.[30] However, although peasant support was crucial to Bolshevik success, it never convinced the Bolsheviks that they needed to rethink their urban-centred perspectives. While Lenin optimistically declared that in future peasants would test their petty bourgeois illusions 'in the fire of life'[31] (and presumably move towards socialism), such remarks were no substitute for a principled Marxist peasant policy.
21
J. Burds, 'The Social Control ofPeasant Laborin Russia: The Response ofVillage Communities in Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1961-1904', in Kingston-Mann and Mixter,
22
See B. Engel,
24
See the early discussion of this process in N. N. Chernenkov,
26
See discussion in Teodor Shanin,
27
P. N. Zyrianov,
Judith Pallot,
29
G. Ioffe and T. Nefedova,
30
See discussion in R. G. Suny,