Peasant Petitions Research Articles

Cattle pasturing as a traditional form of forest use and conflicts between peasants and forestry administration in the long nineteenth century (the case of Białowieza Primeval Forest)

Abstract The article deals with one of the key resources for peasants of Eastern Europe, wood pastures. Relying on new archival material, we demonstrate that peasant communities, in the spirit of James Scott, consistently sabotaged state efforts to ban livestock pasturing in the forests. The state, over the long nineteenth century, strengthened control over many aspects of the economic life of the village, which gradually made the conflicts of the peasants with the state forest administration more acute. We apply a case study approach to investigate the relations between peasants and the local and metropolitan administration in the Białowieża Forest. A unique feature of the Białowieża Forest is its long and continued history of effective protection measures, which facilitated finding sources on this topic. Our research reveals the motivation in the struggle for control over forest resources between the peasants and the administration, as experts in ‘rational’ forestry. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the peasants used all means of resistance available to them: petitions to the authorities at all levels, sabotage of administrative orders, bribes to forestry personnel and direct violations of orders. These conflicts, which lasted for many decades, demonstrate that peasant communities only partially followed the rules introduced by the state administration, which tried to change the principles of forestry management, making forests more profitable and ‘rational’ from the point of view of the experts of the time. The administration spent significant resources on the control of wood pasturing, but achieved very modest results, both in terms of reducing the number of livestock in the forest and in terms of collecting compensation for damage made by ungulates. The most important changes occurred in the second half of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century and were associated with more consistent and strict control over the traditional forest resources, especially during the final appanage period (1889–1915). If we consider the reaction of the administration to peasant petitions regarding wood pastures, we see sympathy and positive reactions both at the provincial and at the ministerial levels. Obviously, this tolerance was connected with both the shortage of pasture and fodder, and the general paternalistic sentiments of the Russian government. The administration tried not so much to increase the income from wood pasturing as to ‘accustom’ the peasants to the idea that the forests were not public, but rather private, state or appanage property.

Peasant Petitions: Social Relations and Economic Life on Landed Estates, 1600–1850, by R.A. Houston

Peasant Petitions: Social Relations and Economic Life on Landed Estates, 1600–1850, by R.A. Houston

Shifting Boundaries between the State and Society: Village Cadres as New Activists in Collective Petition

AbstractDespite the central government's efforts in reducing fiscal burdens on peasants through fiscal reforms in the early 2000s, collective petitions in rural China remain. Complementary to the arbitrary and weak government explanations of state–society conflict, this article reveals the role of village cadres as activists in collective petition. Drawn from extensive fieldwork, I argue that by reducing local government revenues and recentralizing fiscal autonomy to the county level, central fiscal reforms have unintentionally induced a new force of resistance: village cadres. Being disenfranchised from previous privileges, village cadres are now allies rather than adversaries of peasant petitions. This article advances existing literature on China's contentious politics in two ways. First, it recognizes a new group of activists whose savoir-faire improves peasant knowledge of the state capacity in containing state–society conflict. Second, it proposes a dynamic understanding of contentious politics by highlighting the shifting boundaries between the state and society.

« Nous ne désobéirons pas à Sa Majesté, mais nous refusons de rester » : les perceptions du droit, de la justice et d’une « juste autorité » dans les pétitions de paysans russes de la seconde moitié du xviiie siècle

This article presents a case study of the perceptions and ideas of justice and just authority in eighteenth-century Russia. The analysis focuses on factory peasants’ uprisings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on peasant petitions and other documents, it shows how peasants perceived unjust authority and describes the practices they used to (re)establish justice and the nature of their communications with the authorities. In their conceptions and practices of justice, peasants combined irrational utopianism and “naive monarchism” with highly evolved pragmatism in handling the law and communicating with the authorities. This leads to the conclusion that, concerning justice, Russian peasants were not at all passive toward authority and possessed their own well-defined set of ideas and practices.

:Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348-1434

Introduction Part I. Culture, Demography, and Fiscality: 1. Networks of culture and the mountains 2. Mountain civilization and fiscality, 1393 3. Fiscality and change, 1355-1487 Part II. Peasant Protest in the Mountains: Three Views: 4. Peasant insurrection in the mountains: the chroniclers' view 5. Peasant insurrection in the mountains as seen in the criminal records 6. Rebellion as seen from the provvisioni Part III. Governmental Clemency and the Hinterland: 7. Florentine peasant petitions: an institutional perspective 8. The reasons for assistance 9. What the peasants won Conclusion Appendices Bibliography.

A Rhetorical War of Fire: The Middle Volga Arson Panic of 1839 as Contested Legitimacy in Prereform Russia

Violent peasant resistance to the demands of the tsarist state oscillated, reaching extraordinary peaks during the Pugachev rebellion of the late eighteenth century and again with the 1905 Revolution. In between these apexes peasants usually utilized complex, but far less tumultuous, methods of resisting the authority and often the legitimacy of their overlords, methods simultaneously asserting the peasants' rights to live their lives within their own framework of meaning.1 These so called weapons of the weak represented a fundamental struggle between peasant and elite society over what Chinua Achebe has described as that which is and natural.2 However, periodically during the nineteenth century peasants substituted more lethal weapons passive ones. In examining these violent outbursts, recent scholarship has postulated the peasants' belief that the Old Regime was weak as the primary reason, a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century and primarily one associated with a perceived breakdown of the state's coercive power.3 That interpretation of late-nineteenth-century Russian history is not in question here; however, other forms of delegitimization of tsarist power were at work earlier in the century, processes that significantly undermined state authority well before 1905. This paper looks at one of those forces, the desanctification of the image of the during periods of significant social stress, in particular in 1839 during the height of an arson panic and chiliastic movement that swept the Middle Volga region.4 Arson, to be sure, has a long history in Russia. Examining its functionality, V.I. Semevskii, the foremost nineteenth-century Russian historian of the peasantry, noted that peasant petitions seldom led to any amelioration of conditions, and thus peasants were forced to resort to other forms of protest oppression. Chief among these, he argued, was arson.5 But Semevskii also contended that the peasants would use arson as a method to ruin their lords in hopes thereby of achieving a means to purchase their freedom. Therefore, he reasoned, arson should be viewed as either an explosion of peasant irrational frustration or evidence of their proverbial extraordinary craftiness [khitrost]. But there is significantly more at work here than prerational, primitive behavior. These fires became a contest definitional space, providing a focus a violent struggle to determine what view of the world as it should be would prevail. Elite society sought to justify the world as it presently existed, whereas the peasantry called into question not merely the gentry's right to exploit its labor but also the image of the tsar. In the process the arson panic of 1839 occasioned conflict over the meaning of the fires, with all who were caught up in the events submerging the fires into preexisting frameworks of thought and meaning.6 Through petitions and reports, a rhetorical struggle unfolded with gentry and officialdom attempting to preserve their hegemony during a moment of crisis, and the peasantry of the Middle Volga invoking alternative images as a mechanism to challenge authority. The gentry particularly desired to delegitimatize peasant disturbances by refusing to see them as forms of rebellion and instead conflating all peasant challenges to authority with crime.7 The peasants took the occasion of the fires as an opportunity transference, justifying an assault not merely on a suspected arsonist but on any who could be defined as an enemy.8 But more was disputed than simply gentry dominance or even membership in the community; in 1839 it was the very definition of tsar that was ultimately contested. Consequently our approach to the question of peasant naive monarchism requires rethinking, particularly the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather than being a question of whether the peasants were for or against the tsar, this study proposes that at this point in Russia's history several competing images of the were available to the peasantry in pursuit of their interests. …

Sotsial′nyie konflikty i krest′ianskaia mental′nost′ v Rossiiskoi imperii nachala XX veka: Novye materialy, metody, rezul′taty , and: Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (review)

Reviewed by: Sotsial′nyie konflikty i krest′ianskaia mental′nost′ v Rossiiskoi imperii nachala XX veka: Novye materialy, metody, rezul′taty, and: Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 Aaron B. Retish O. G. Bukhovets, Sotsial′nyie konflikty i krest′ianskaia mental′nost′ v Rossiiskoi imperii nachala XX veka: Novye materialy, metody, rezul′taty. Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv. Desiat′ novykh uchebnikov po istoricheskim distsiplinam, 1996. 398 pp. ISBN 5-722-80038-4 (pb). Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies, 1998. xiv + 314 pp. ISBN 0-822-94049-3 (cl); 0-822-95655-1 (pb). $50.00 (cl); $22.95 (pb). Peasants often participate in grand social transformations through actions noted in most elite records as resistance. Several generations of scholars have postulated how the peasantry actually understood social transformations and how peasant understanding in turn influenced popular reactions to such changes. Yet, as Oleg Grigor'evich Bukhovets and Jeffrey Burds note, until recently most scholars have shaped and molded the peasantry to fit their own political ideology or world outlook. Both authors therefore begin with a similar notion – that the Marxist class analysis of the countryside has provided an insufficient interpretation of peasant actions. They diverge in methodology. Bukhovets employs a statistical quantitative analysis to study peasant protest and petition writing from 1905–1914, while Burds embraces a socio-cultural approach in his study of peasant migration (otkhodnichestvo). Bukhovets, a senior fellow at the Institute of History of the Belarussian Academy of Sciencess, Minsk, has published substantially on the peasantry's political consciousness during the 1905 Revolution and is a well-known figure in Russian peasant studies. The book under review is part of a series of ten historical monographs partially financed by Volkswagen. It has a significant print run (in comparison to other Russian monographs) and has received considerable attention by scholars in the West. The work is divided into three parts. The first section is an extended historiographical essay on social conflict and mass consciousness. The author actually uses the historiography as a backdrop for a more general exposition on the current "crisis of historical understanding and research agendas… theories, approaches, and methods" (14). In Russia, the crisis revolves around the place of Marxism in the post-Soviet age. Russian historians have been liberated from the dogmatic restrictions of Soviet Marxist analysis, only to replace these limitations with new blinders, as seen in their negative perception of [End Page 208] studies dealing with class and revolution (31–32). The western version of the crisis involves the rise of postmodernism and the resulting rejection of deterministic conceptions of history in favor of "objective nihilism." Historians therefore defend their arguments using only examples and illustrations, rather than analyzing data. Bukhovets' essay is a fascinating polemic by a skilled, traditional quantitative social historian uneasy with the rapidly changing academic field around him. His analysis of Russian historiography on peasant mentality is much stronger than his analysis of Western historiography. Bukhovets outlines not only the main arguments of prominent Soviet historians (most notably B. G. Litvak ), but he also surveys current archival holdings, noting that the central archives, especially the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) are surprisingly weak in their collection of petitions and resolutions. Western readers may be troubled by Bukhovets' almost total dismissal of the advantages of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Bukhovets believes that "marginal" areas of historical study (e.g., gender, nationality, and ethnicity) have invaded historical interpretation and threaten true historical scholarship. The author offers his antidote to the crisis with a massive quantitative analysis of mass peasant protests and the "resolution and petition movement" (prigovernoe dvizhenie) in parts two and three. Part two, "Riot and 'Revolutionary Consciousness': Political Mentality and Activities of Participants in the Petition Movement, 1905–1907," is the heart of the monograph. Bukhovets divides the petition movement into four periods: January–October 1905, October–December 1905, the session of the First Duma, and the first half of 1907. The author argues that the peasantry became more politically developed in the last three months of 1905. Peasant petitions and resolutions...

Discursive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province

The Russian peasantry at the turn of the century, for all the appearances of amorphous homogeneity, backwardness and crisis, was a much more heterogeneous, adaptable and complicated body of groups and individuals than much of traditional scholarship would have had us believe. Only in the past decade or so have historians, especially in the United States and Germany, begun to break out of the rigid framework that insisted on endowing the peasantry with essential characteristics and ignored both the context and contingency of peasant actions.' Thus a promising foundation exists for building a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the Russian peasantry, albeit one that is messier and less reducible to neat categories. Unfortunately, the very nature of the sources used to study Russian peasants has helped to perpetuate simplistic notions. Starting with prerevolutionary reports by well-intentioned Russian ethnographers, those sources usually have been of nonpeasant origin and thus have themselves been the products of a binary world view. Even in the relatively rare instances when the peasants have been allowed to speak for themselves, those utterances have usually been invoked selectively and impressionistically to illustrate certain a priori conclusions. More grievously still, there has been a pronounced tendency to treat the meaning of these unique documents as transparent, with the ironic result that their very existence and language have been interpreted in terms of nonpeasant discourses, whether Tsarist, Soviet, liberal or socialist, Populist or Marxist.2 Nowhere has this tendency been more in evidence than in the treatment of the thousands of peasant petitions that poured forth from the countryside in late 1905 and 1906 and that were varyingly addressed to Nicholas II, the new Duma, and its

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

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.