Peasant Studies As a New Direction in Modern Studies of Russian Agrarian History

Abstract

This article describes the circumstances under which a permanent interdisciplinary international seminar “Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development” arose in 1992. The roles of the Russian historian V.P. Danilov at the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences (IRH RAS) and the English historian-sociologist T. Shanin (Manchester University, Britain), as well as the role of the problems discussed at the meetings at the seminar and the publication of the seminar’s materials by the journal Otechestvennayaistoriya (Russian History) in the development of a new direction in Russian agrarian historical research, in the creation of this forum are shown. Suggestions are made about why the methodological approaches that gained popularity in the 1960s in Western Peasant Studies are difficult to apply to Russian-language historical publications on agrarian issues. An idea is given of some works of modern domestic historians that can rightfully be attributed to the direction of research called peasant studies.