Discursive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province

Abstract

The Russian peasantry at the turn of the century, for all the appearances of amorphous homogeneity, backwardness and crisis, was a much more heterogeneous, adaptable and complicated body of groups and individuals than much of traditional scholarship would have had us believe. Only in the past decade or so have historians, especially in the United States and Germany, begun to break out of the rigid framework that insisted on endowing the peasantry with essential characteristics and ignored both the context and contingency of peasant actions.' Thus a promising foundation exists for building a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the Russian peasantry, albeit one that is messier and less reducible to neat categories. Unfortunately, the very nature of the sources used to study Russian peasants has helped to perpetuate simplistic notions. Starting with prerevolutionary reports by well-intentioned Russian ethnographers, those sources usually have been of nonpeasant origin and thus have themselves been the products of a binary world view. Even in the relatively rare instances when the peasants have been allowed to speak for themselves, those utterances have usually been invoked selectively and impressionistically to illustrate certain a priori conclusions. More grievously still, there has been a pronounced tendency to treat the meaning of these unique documents as transparent, with the ironic result that their very existence and language have been interpreted in terms of nonpeasant discourses, whether Tsarist, Soviet, liberal or socialist, Populist or Marxist.2 Nowhere has this tendency been more in evidence than in the treatment of the thousands of peasant petitions that poured forth from the countryside in late 1905 and 1906 and that were varyingly addressed to Nicholas II, the new Duma, and its