Resolved and Unresolved Problems in the History of Peasant Wars in Russia

Abstract

Three major stages in the study of Russia's peasant wars of the 17th and 18th centuries by Soviet historians are identifiable. The first, which lasted to the mid-1930's, was characterized by researchers' efforts to develop a Marxist- Leninist model for the history of peasant wars as a whole and their efforts to give it specific content by using partly the archives that became available after the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution and partly the writings of noble landlord and bourgeois scholars (S. F. Platonov, N. I. Kostomarov, A. N. Popov, N. N. Firsov, N. F. Dubrovin, and others). Works of this type, written by M. N. Pokrovskii, V. I. Picheta, B. N. Tikhomirov, M. N. Martynov, S. G. Tomsinskii, S. A. Piontkovskii, and others, were for the most part in the nature of popular science. Nevertheless, these books and articles, usually brief, generally contained efforts to shed new light on the causes of the peasant wars, their motive forces, the goals of the movements, the reasons for the failures, the significance of these wars, and the place of each of them in the overall course of struggle of the oppressed classes. Despite the fact that many of these writings were somewhat immature, they certainly promoted the defeat of bourgeois conceptions and the affirmation in Soviet scholarship of Marxist-Leninist views of the history of the peasant wars in Russia. (1) But as early as the mid-1930's, the treatment of the history of peasant wars revealed certain shortcomings characteristic of our historical scholarship during those years, above all a simplified sociological approach to certain phenomena of the past. This circumstance was noted in the well-known decrees of the Communist Party and Soviet government of 1934-1936, subsequent to which Soviet historical scholarship entered upon a course of decisively overcoming the vulgarization of history.