The Political Consciousness of the Russian Peasantry in the Revolution of 1905-1907: Sources, Methods, and Some Results

Abstract

Historians who must assimilate a large quantity of letters, petitions or other similar documents are likely to suffer confusion. They sense patterns, relationships or tendencies, but find it difficult to ascertain and articulate them with precision. In this dilemma, they can rely on intuition and experience, but they may be uneasy about their findings, even if they offer them with outward assurance. Oleg Bukhovets's article, in which he assaults a particularly massive and complicated body of (relatively familiar) documents, shows another way out of dilemma: documents are reduced to variables, variables collapsed into a smaller number of categories, and categories subjected to statistical analysis. Even historians who are not drawn to quantitative methods will find this way inviting. Yet they may lament, and with some justice, what is lost in process of reduction (which is just what intuition grasped most surely). To say, I don't think Monica should have another baby right now, may, in certain circumstances, have same significance as I support a woman's right to choose, but terms of expression suggest very different auspices and influences. By same token, peasants who maintained that the land is gift of God had same objective as those who called for nationalization of land, but form of expression is as important as demand itself. It is now feasible, as perhaps it was not when Bukhovets began his research, to enter an entire corpus of historical texts into a computer and to subject every word (if need be) of these texts to analysis-an analysis that would neither preclude nor efface kind of analysis Bukhovets carries out here. Someone should carry out that kind of analysis on peasant petitions and resolutions from Revolution of 1905-1907, but it is even more important that Bukhovets and other historians continue along way he has blazed and, in particular, adhere to system of variables and categories that he has so carefully worked out.