Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development

Abstract

This chapter intends to situate the peasant majority of the population as both agents and victims within the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and to locate them on the shifting terrain of the post-Soviet era. Between 1906 and 1911, Prime Minister Stolypin's reforms invited peasant households to separate from the commune and establish themselves on enclosed, self-contained farms. The policy of War Communism emerged in response to a series of material disasters, each one sufficient to overwhelm and destroy a stable political order, much less a fragile hierarchy of soviets controlled at the top by a few hundred revolutionaries wholly without administrative experience. From the peasantry's perspective, the most notable feature of the post- Stalin era was the abandonment of mass murder and deportations as core instruments of state policy. During the Leonid Brezhnev years, the tension between socio-economic improvements and a command system of economic and political governance continued to mount.