Peasant Economy and Peasant Revolution at the Turn of the Century: Neither Immiseration nor Autonomy

Abstract

long-term capacity of the tsarist regime to survive since the optimists-andpessimists debate subsided two decades ago. That argument did not-could not-end conclusively, but the two most memorable contributions were Leopold Haimson's Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917, which found tsarist society fatally riven by a dual socio-political polarization (government vs. society, society vs. masses); and Theodore Von Laue's Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, which argued that the ill-integrated society of prerevolutionary Russia could not bear the strain imposed by unavoidable competition with more developed Western countries.1 What was most remarkable about those essays was not that Haimson and Von Laue argued so forcefully for the necessity of the revolution, but that they shed the historian's customary reluctance to make a claim, in any forum more public than a classroom, for the necessity of a particular historical outcome. Teodor Shanin now enters the lists with two volumes that partly reconceptualize the pessimists' case and match Von Laue's work in their exceptional vigor. The effect would be bracing, if only Shanin were surer in his handling of the evidence. Shanin focuses particularly upon Russia's peasants, whom he holds responsible for Russia's otherness, her incapacity to follow the path of moder development blazed by Western Europe. Peasants, he says, did not behave in a manner compatible with the development of agricultural capitalism, nor did the changing industrial economy much affect their behavior. From their economic autonomy stemmed their autonomy as political actors; they rebelled