Land, freedom, and discontent: Russian peasants of the central industrial region prior to collectivisation

Abstract

THE REVOLUTION OF 1917 seemed to usher in a golden era of land and freedom for the Russian peasantry. The flight of the nobility and tsarist officials from the countryside left peasants with both dramatically increased landholdings and greater autonomy. Moreover, the distribution of newly acquired land reduced the disparity between rich and poor peasants, seeming to create a contented and homogeneous peasantry, impervious to change. Yet at the end of the 1920s Russian peasants experienced a cataclysmic transformation that imposed a new system of village administration and land tenure and that destroyed age-old rural structures forever. Even given the Soviet government's massive use of coercion during collectivisation, we must still account for the peasantry's relative lack of unity in the face of violent change. Were there not social tensions and discontent among Russian peasants that left them divided and unwilling to resist challenges to the traditional village order? The purpose of this article is to point out sources of friction and ferment among peasants of the Central Industrial Region in the 1920s. Among such sources were the demographic disruptions of the First World War, Revolution and Civil War. These disruptions, involving the return of millions of otkhodniki and veterans to the village, accelerated forces of rural change and heightened the level of peasant discontent. In turn, newly created Soviet institutions offered discontented peasants a means to articulate their desire for change and to challenge village traditions and hierarchies. The Soviet authorities were to exploit the resulting tensions within the peasantry when they launched the all-out collectivisation drive of 1929-30.