Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance by Gorshkov Boris (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 365 Poles to experience immense disillusionment during the first decades of the twentieth century when dealing not with the ‘children of a common mother Poland’, but with the Ukrainian nation striving for independence (p. 555). By way of conclusion, this erudite and penetrating study makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the Habsburg world and modern Polish and Ukrainian nationhood. The volume belongs on the shelves of all serious scholars of Galicia in the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, some shortcomings can be attributed to the book’s sponsor. In addition to the muddled treatment of the ‘Ruthenian’ language by Frank Sysyn in the preface, the use of the term ‘Ruthenian’ in reference to the language spoken by the Ukrainians in Galicia is not a winning move. Although commonly used in historiographic works, this learned term has an imperial connotation with regard to the Ruthenian inhabitants of the Austrian partition. In order to stress a certain degree of nonidentification of Austrian Ukrainians with Russian Ukrainian, which was not so obvious in Galicia from the late 1860s onward, the translator should resort to the indigenous term Rusian. Pace University Andrii Danylenko Gorshkov, Boris. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance. The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2018. xiii + 209 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $102.60: £85.00. Boris Gorshkov, a visiting professor of history at Kennesaw State University, has written a synthetic history of the imperial Russian and early Soviet peasantries aimed at advanced students and non-specialist readers. Over thirteen thematic chapters that are arranged roughly chronologically, this largely well-written study covers the period from serfdom through Soviet collectivization. The focus is on the Orthodox and ethnically Russian rural population of the peasant social estate — the krest´ianstvo — in European Russia. The evolving social, economic and political lives of this peasantry is interpreted through an ‘ecological’ framework which, as Gorshkov describes, emphasizes the multi-faceted nature of peasant lives in connection to their physical, socio-economic and political environments. This framework is presented as an intermediate viewpoint between communitarian ‘moral economy’ perspectives and individualistic rational choice conceptualizations of peasant life. Throughout, Gorshkov asserts the importance of considering the Russian peasantry not as a passive, isolated (and backward) collective acted upon by elites and the state but as individuals, families or communities SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 366 actively producing their own history, at least until 1917. The goal is a micro-level ‘history from below’ (p. 8) that is expressive of the Russian peasant’s ‘ecological mentality’ (p. 11). The primary chapters of Gorshkov’s volume each examine an aspect of the lived experience of the Russian peasantry, beginning with the institution of serfdom (ch. 2); proceeding through descriptions of peasant agriculture (ch. 3), gender roles and childhood (ch. 3), non-agricultural and industrial employment (chs 4–6), social mobility (ch. 7), and public engagement (ch. 8); before outlining the evolution of Russian peasant life from the abolition of serfdom in 1861 through to forced collectivization in the 1930s (chs 9–13). While the result is a concise book that sacrifices some detail for summary, albeit with some considerable repetition and odd structural choices, Gorshkov does several things worth commending. The study provides a thorough and useful introduction and survey of a large secondary literature across several disciplines and sub-fields (although this reviewer would have appreciated more careful citations and critical discussion of important sources and secondary literature). Throughout the book, Gorshkov offers a valuable corrective by emphasizing the critical importance of non-grain agriculture activities in the economic lives of the Russian peasantry. From livestock, to forest products, to a variety of cottage industries and local wage employment opportunities, to migration and industrial work, peasant economic activity was rarely grounded solely in grain cultivation, with the particular mix of occupations dependent on the prevailing environmental, market and policy conditions. Finally, there are certain topics — peasant childhood and the growing involvement of peasants in Russian civic and political life over period are stand outs — where Gorshkov’s original archival and primary source work does generate novel insights. In such a work of synthetic history, particularly...