The ‘peasant problem’ in the Russian revolution(s), 1905–1929

ABSTRACT

This highly selective paper covers some key aspects but certainly not all of the ‘peasant problem’ in Russia on the cusp of the twentieth century, in the revolution of 1905–1907, the revolution of October 1917 and the civil war that followed, and during the Soviet 1920s until collectivization. Among its concerns is why the Bolsheviks found it so difficult to ‘resolve’ that problem in the 1920s to the moment of Stalin's collectivization from late 1929. A final section offers some propositions about the then and there of the Russian revolution and the here and now of peasant studies (and politics) today.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• peasants
• populism
• Russian revolution

Henry Bernstein is Adjunct Professor in the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing, and Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London. He is grateful for comments on earlier drafts by four anonymous reviewers for the Journal, and for a host of fruitful analytical and empirical questions from Gavin Capps, Ben Cousins, Alpa Shah and Subir Sinha – indeed, too many to attempt to answer adequately. He suspects that conversations with Ben Cousins and Jens Lerche in recent years have influenced the conclusion of the article. Responsibility, as ever, remains the author's alone.

Notes

1 Both men were born in Vilnius, Lewin in 1921 and Shanin in 1930. Lewin lived in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1946 and worked on a collective farm and in a metal plant before joining the Red Army; his later scholarly career took off in Paris. Shanin is writing an autobiography which, one hopes, will contain a full account of his youth in Siberia and Samarkand from 1941 to 1947. The peasantry ‘is still too often marginalized in accounts of the Revolution’ (Smith 2017, 5), especially on the left, for example, in the ‘centenary’ volume by Ali (2017).

2 Russian agriculture was overwhelmingly grain farming, and the demarcation of grain-surplus and grain-deficit regions is a widely used convention (Wheatcroft 1991, 136–42). Fluctuations in grain supply to deficit areas and the cities are central throughout the period addressed here.

3 Unless otherwise stated, emphases in quotes are given in the original. The subsequent decline of the gentry as a rentier class, despite its Emancipation dividend, was marked by the estimated sale of nearly one-third of its land between 1877 and 1905 (Perrie 1972, 124 note 3), especially to peasant communes.

4 The famine had an immediate and major political effect outside the countryside (Figes 1997, 157–61), if not within it (Shanin 1986, 82). In this period Russia was a major grain exporter, as it is again today in different social and world market conditions. Between the early 1860s and early 1900s, grain production increased by 160 percent while exports increased by five to six times (Hobsbawm 1987, 293), much of this growth from the ploughing of former grazing lands.

5 A view not shared by Danilov (1988), among others. It is often remarked that repartition drove high rates of fertility (aiming for sons) to establish future claims on commune land.

6 Allen (2003, Chapter 4) considers the North American Great Plains a more relevant comparator for Russia than Western Europe. This suggests similarity in grain yields, but much lower labour productivity in Russia where farm technologies in 1900 were similar to those of North America a century before. He further explains the gap in labour productivity by Russia's peasant commune which ‘acted like a giant sponge, soaking up labor by creating small farms’ (2003, 73).

7 Lenin (1973c, 89) wrote of ‘a new generation of peasants … who had worked as seasonal labourers in the cities and had learned from their bitter experience of a life of wandering and wage-labour’.

8 For discussion of available statistics, their methods and limitations, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, see inter alios Shanin (1972, 47–57), Kingston-Mann (1991).

9 Moreover, ‘exploitation of the poor peasants by the kulaks appeared in patriarchal forms as well as capitalist ones’ (Figes 1988, 16) – that is, within ‘traditional’ structures of inequality in the mir rather than manifesting capitalist accumulation. Figes (1997, 232–39, 786–88) illustrates this with the fascinating biography of Sergei Semenov, ‘progressive farmer and reformer’, and his long-running conflict with a conservative (and rich) patriarch of his village, which culminated in Semenov's murder in 1922. In Figes’ view neither qualified as a ‘kulak’ in the Leninist sense, but surely Semenov approximated the ideal of the ‘entrepreneurial peasant’ embarked on a path of technical progress and accumulation? Otherwise, kulak is widely used to designate rich peasant farmers, by Lewin (1968) and Danilov (1988), among others.

10 For careful critique, both analytical and empirical, of Chayanov, see Harrison (1975, 1977b), and of Shanin (1972), see Harrison (1977a) and also Cox (1979). Both Shanin (1972) and Danilov (1988) discarded a specific element of Chayanov's model, namely the household producer–consumer ratio.

11 The social origins of the intelligentsia shifted over time from the aristocracy and gentry to those of humbler provenance, the raznochintsy, ‘men of different ranks’, including the provincial or rural intelligentsia often associated with zemstvo government as teachers, agronomists, medical practitioners and so on. The Russian intelligentsia ‘was less a class than a state of mind … [of] radical and uncompromising opposition to the tsarist regime, and a willingness to take part in the struggle for its overthrow’ (Figes 1997, 125); see also Shanin (1985, 203–06, 211–13).

12 For overviews of the mir Watters (1968) and Shanin (1972, 32–38; 1985, 72–81); Edelman (1987, 62–63) point out that many practices of the mir were also present in communes of so-called ‘hereditary’ tenure (non-repartitional communes). Shanin (1972, 168–79) outlines internal divisions of the mir along lines of wealth (‘centrifugal’ mechanisms, above) gender and generation, together with that well-known phenomenon in the political sociology of peasantries: ‘considerable tensions in every community went together with overriding unity when facing outsiders’ (Shanin 1986, 135). Decline in the strength of the mir followed by its revitalization in 1917–1921 is a key dimension of the narrative of the period (below).

13 See especially Shanin (1983) for the various drafts of Marx's reply to Zasulich, and a number of commentaries. There was an acerbic review of Shanin (1983) by Desai (1986) in this journal with a response by Sayer (1987); see also Hobsbawm's sceptical comment (1977, 198) and Walicki's observation (1969, 193) that ‘the drafts of Marx's letters to Zasulich reflect the exaggerated hopes which both Marx and Engels placed on imminent revolution in Russia’ (also 1969, 180–81) although he confirms the impact of Russian radical populism on Marx and Engels (1969, 188–89, 192 note 3, 194). For discussions in the context of Marx's interest in ‘primitive’ social forms and social evolution later in his life, see Anderson (2010, 224–36) and Stedman Jones (2016, 568–86, 589–95).

14 Nonetheless, Plekhanov and Lenin ‘provided valuable evidence about peasant indebtedness, rents, and tax rates’ and the economic pressures underlying peasant (wage) labour in agriculture and industry (Kingston-Mann 1991, 10–11). On Russian industrialization, including its financing by peasant taxation, grain exports and foreign capital, see Portal (1965), Shanin (1985, Chapter 3) and Allen (2003, Chapter 2); and see Hobsbawm (1987, 292–301) for how ‘Tsarist Russia exemplified all the contradictions of the globe in the Age of Empire’. Lenin's attention was firmly fixed on class formation and political struggles inside Russia; he barely considered the international capitalist economy and state system until the eve of World War I.

15 On the inspirational Chernyshevsky see Venturi (1966, Chapter 5); on the significance of revolutionary populism to Lenin's thought and indeed political personality see Lih (2011); on Lenin's battles against the ‘Legal Populists’, see Lenin (1973a, Chapter 1); Walicki (1969, 165–79); Harding (1977, Chapters 4–7).

16 Trotsky (1967, Volume 1, 34) described the Russian bourgeoisie as ‘semi-comprador’. Shanin portrayed it as, in effect, a ‘dependent bourgeoisie’ in his elaboration of Russia as a ‘developing society’ akin to the contemporary Third World (1985, Chapter 5).

17 Large-scale rural revolts like those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were absent from nineteenth-century Russia, although there were significant rural disturbances in 1859–1864, 1874, 1884, and again in the years before 1905. Wolf (1969, 52) considered the great upheavals of Razin (1667–1671) and Pugachev (1773–1775) as Cossack rebellions against state centralization rather than peasant rebellions against serfdom.

18 The Ukrainian provinces on the ‘right bank’ (of the Dnieper) were an area of large-scale commercial production of winter grains, potatoes and above all sugar beet, and agricultural processing (distilleries, refineries), and a major site of rural disturbances in1905–7 (Edelman 1987). Although renting of estate land to peasants had not been widespread there, it became second in importance to wage increases as a peasant demand in 1905–7 (1987, 66–67, 80–81, 127–28).

19 ‘Similarity of context bred similarities of peasant response all throughout Russia’ (Shanin 1986, 111). That response was forged through continuous debate in villages: ‘a grandiose and spontaneous effort at political understanding and self-education by millions of illiterate and half-literate villagers’ (1986, 130). Albeit on some issues, like that of the tsar, there was a ‘particular mixture of peasant radicalism and peasant conservatism (or caution)’ (Shanin 1986, 125); the tsar, of course, was distant from peasant lives, as were more abstract constructions of democracy and constitutional change – what was closer and real was the gentry and its agents in the local state.

20 This was a ‘strange, fractured party’ as Miéville (2017, 335) terms it. Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government(s) from July to October 1917, was formally a member of the SRs.

21 Peasant action included the roles of rural migrant workers, and soldiers returning from Russia's war with Japan (Perrie 1972, 136–38); Russia's defeat was another nail in the coffin of tsarist authority.

22 Lenin (1973b, Chapter 5) provided a detailed account of the positions of ‘classes and parties’ in the Second Duma debates on the land question. He believed that the peasant deputies favoured land nationalization which, he argued, was the most progressive measure for the full development of capitalist farming, breaking from the ‘medieval’ character of both gentry landed estates and peasant allotment holding through the mir.

23 This is within a periodization of Lenin's thought by Shanin (1986, 283ff). Lih (2011) seems to suggest a fundamental continuity in Lenin's perspective on the peasantry as oppressed and (bar kulaks) exploited, hence a key constituency of democratic revolution, albeit with some shift of emphasis in face of the realities of 1917–21 (below). Harding's detailed study of Lenin's political thought (1977, 1981) proposes its major turn from his later analysis of imperialism and all that followed.

24 In the 1890s the government responded harshly to the large scale of peasant tax defaults, but in 1903 shifted the burden of tax arrears from the commune to the individual household which, together with the abolition of flogging, in Wheatcroft's view did much to weaken its authority in the countryside on the eve of 1905 (1991, 167–70, 171–72).

25 From Trotsky's immensely detailed account (1967, first published in English in 1932–1933) to Miéville's recent month-by-month narrative from February to October 1917 (2017). The thought and actions of Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks continue to be intensely debated on the Marxist left.

26 Brest–Litovsk sharply divided the Bolsheviks and the wider Russian left at the time (Liebman 1970, 300–12). It has been calculated that as a result of Brest–Litovsk, Russia lost a third of its population, nearly a third of its agricultural land, over half of its industrial enterprises, and 89 percent of its coalmines (Figes 1997, 548); by 1922 its losses had been reduced to 3.7 percent of its territory and 31–32 million people (Smith 2017, 195).

27 For surveys of the civil war see Figes (1997, Chapters 12–14) and his pioneering study of the Volga region (Figes 1991a); see also Smith (2017, Chapter 4) and Steinberg (2017, Chapter 4).

28 Desertion was also a major problem for the Bolsheviks at certain moments during the civil war (Figes 1997, 599, 680), although ‘the Red Army was generally able to mobilize the peasants in the villages immediately behind their front lines (on account of the peasantry's fear of the return of the landowners)’ (Figes 1991a, 178; see also Figes 1997, 668–69, 681). There was massive recruitment from the Red Army to the Bolshevik party (Figes 1997, 602) – ‘the army proved to be a training ground for the core of activists that would staff the party and state apparatuses in the 1920s’ (Smith 2017, 183).

29 The SR leader Chernov, while Kerensky's Minister of Agriculture, ‘favoured the immediate transfer of all land into the hands of the land committees for distribution among the peasants’ (Gill 1979, 92) but was constantly thwarted. One factor deterring governments between February and October from embracing land reform was their fear that it would intensify desertions of peasant soldiers to claim land in their home areas (Smith 2017, 126–27).

30 Smith (2017, 172) also emphasizes greater Russian chauvinism as the ‘Achilles heel of White policy’, and (2017, 183–97) traces the positioning of the Bolsheviks – whether principled or opportunistic – in relation to the non-Russian nationalities of the former empire as a key factor in their victory, and despite the ‘loss’ of Finland and Poland to political independence.

31 These ‘peasant wars’ shared ‘many common features, despite the huge distances between them and the different contexts in which they took place’ (Figes 1997, 753, 753–58 passim).

32 There was massive reduction of peasant households farming under private enclosed tenure from 1916 (above), to less than two percent in the major agricultural regions in 1922 (Figes 1991a, 56). Danilov (1988, 142–53) seems to suggest that numbers of (kulak) ‘separators’ grew again in the very different conditions of the 1920s, but without the means to register (and entrench) private title made available by the Stolypin reforms.

33 One imagines that this was one problematic reality, among many, for Lenin. There seemed no prospect of taking up the nationalization of land he had advocated so strongly in 1907 (see note 22 above).

34 This was the ‘extinction of the proletariat’, as Lewin (1975a, 6) termed it, producing, in his vivid phrase, ‘A dictatorship in the void’ (1975a, Chapter 1).

35 Tax in kind was replaced with a money tax from 1924 (Dobb 1966, 129 note 3), which was reduced in spring 1925: ‘the economic year 1925–6 may be said to mark the apogee of NEP … [when] official policy … was at its most favourable to the peasantry’ (Smith 2017, 267). NEP represented a turn that many Bolsheviks were unprepared for, that Lenin struggled to formulate and justify as a transitional programme, and that, seen as a ‘retreat’, generated many tensions and uncertainties in the party, as Lewin emphasized (1975a, Chapter 2, Chapter 8).

36 At the Eighth Party Congress in 1919 Lenin had said that ‘Soviet policy must reckon with a long period of cooperation with the middle peasantry’ (Dobb 1966, 105).

37 The importance of Bukharin was highlighted by Erlich (1967, Chapters 1 and 6), and by Lewin (1968, especially Chapter 12); see also many of the essays in Lewin (1975b), and Cohen's pioneering biography (1974), all of which explored shifts in Bukharin's thinking during the 1920s; for another version of the debate see Dobb (1966, Chapter 8). Lewin (1968, 168, note 40) considered Preobrazhensky (1965) ‘the best work … written on the economic problems of the Soviet Union at this time’.

38 Lenin and others had urged the need to provide incentive goods to the countryside during the civil war, but this proved impossible given the pervasive economic devastation, including destruction of communications, which stimulated a localized ‘semi-natural’ economy of farming and rural artisanal production (Figes 1991b, 388–91). Trotsky (1967, Volume 3, 29) later wrote of 1917, with specific reference to the grain supply problem, that ‘The problem of economic correlation between the country and the city … to become the central problem of the Soviet economy, was already showing its threatening face’.

39 Generated by technical improvement of peasant farming (1967, 151–52). Figes (1997, 789) suggests (with some exaggeration?) that ‘NEP witnessed a whole range of agronomic improvements which amounted to nothing less than an agricultural revolution’, including consolidation of arable strips and new multi-field crop rotations. Preobrazhensky advocated indirect taxation of the peasantry through the price mechanism rather than its direct taxation which he saw as politically more problematic.

40 Allen (2003, 78–86) points out that compulsion on peasants to sell their produce was reduced by much lower ‘surplus extraction’ via taxes and especially rents than before the revolution (also remarked by Preobrazhensky at the time); that there were lower sales of all farm products, and not just grain; and that the key indicator is the ‘transaction terms of trade’: wholesale prices for grain and retail prices for non-food manufactured goods.

41 By contrast, Dobb (1966, especially 223–29) provides a brief and anodyne narrative of the abrupt shift to comprehensive collectivization, noting in passing, and in the terminology of the Soviet party, the ‘excesses’ of its implementation (1966, 228). Lewin (1968, 476, 488, 494) points out that following Stalin's injunction on ‘liquidating the kulaks as a class’, ‘dekulakization’ took priority over collectivization for many local officials and cadres.

42 The English translation of his Theory of peasant co-operatives (1991) is of a revised version of a book first published in 1919. Danilov's informative introduction (1991, xxxi) points out that its first edition was consulted by Lenin when he dictated the article on cooperation from his sickbed.

43 Lenin's advocacy of cooperation represented ‘a complete doctrinal volte-face’ (Lewin 1975a, 114).

44 And this number is less as a proportion of rural population as many were poor peasant households with smaller than average family size.

45 With which Danilov, who presented a more positive picture of kolkhozy in the 1920s (1988, 291–302), would no doubt have agreed.

46 This occurred in the wake of several peasant risings following more stringent procurement campaigns, although mainly peasants deployed passive resistance and evasion (Lewin 1968, 393). With characteristic lack of concern for consistency, at the same time as blaming kulaks for the grain crisis Stalin claimed that great advances made by kolkhozy had prepared the mass of the peasantry to embrace collectivization.

47 Hence Allen's reference to Stalin's collectivization as ‘an extreme version of the Preobrazhensky proposal’ (2003, 60, and further 101–02, 109, and Chapter 9); but see also the next note.

48 Other explicit counterfactuals include what if World War I had not occurred when and how it did? Could Russia have proceeded on a different path of capitalist development and liberal reformism (Smith 2017, 376–77)? What if Bukharin's strategy of the late 1920s (modelled by Chandra 1992) had been pursued? And, most centrally for the Bolshevik leadership: What if proletarian revolution in Western Europe, above all Germany, had succeeded and was able to help a socialist Russia overcome its inherited ‘backwardness’? Allen's econometric counterfactuals in his model of the Soviet economy and its growth path in the 1930s (2003, Chapters 8, 9) concludes that ‘the collectivization of agriculture – perhaps the archetypical Stalinist policy and the one that resulted in the most avoidable death – made only a modest contribution to growth. Modifying the NEP to include central planning, high employment and the expansion of heavy industry was a program for growth in capital, output, and per capita living standards. Adding collectivization to that recipe contributed little to growth and corrupted socialism’ (2003, 171). Allen's perspective, of course, implies Russian peasants as commodity producers responding to market signals (also the Bolshevik position), not as exemplifying a distinct ‘social type’ à la Chayanov and Shanin.

49 Fitzpatrick is a review essay on recent books in these post-Soviet times with lucid insights into the historiography of the revolution in western scholarship. The only Marxist book she reviews is Miéville (2017) whose ‘hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form’, as she rightly observes. Van der Linden (2009) is a useful survey and assessment of (western) Marxist debates of the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Soviet experience (Chapter 2 on contemporary views of 1917 and the 1920s).

50 From notes written in 1918 before her murder, at a time of acute distress; first published in German in 1922 and in English in 1940. Of course, Lenin was only too aware of actual and likely ‘distortions’, and sources of ‘degeneration’ of the revolution’s aims and agencies, including the party, and that there was (too) much the Bolsheviks did not know, hence the inevitability of (serious) mistakes (Lewin 1975a).

51 The places of peasants in national formations are then aggregated from (generic) peasant ways of doing things, without the mediation of other (structural) concepts and methods of constructing national economies and their trajectories of development, including specific forms of social relations of production and reproduction and their interrelations; see for example Ploeg and Ye (2016) on China.

52 Including investigation of ‘missing peasants’ (to paraphrase O’Laughlin 1988), so often overlooked. Those who go ‘missing’ by extinction or migration, when they are poorer households, contribute to the ‘centripetal’ effect of levelling peasant differentiation (above, and Shanin 1972, 88–95) but, according to circumstances, may be a strong indicator of dynamics of differentiation. A further observation is pertinent here: while Chayanovian demographic versus class differentiation, and the virtues of peasant community, cannot be claimed as a means of explanation by deduction from a generic ‘model’ nor should they be dismissed on a priori grounds, both the sources and extent of differentiation, and the relative solidarity (or otherwise) of rural communities should be investigated empirically.

53 Indeed, it is impossible to recognize any unity of peasant ‘community’ from accounts of rural India. Also relevant here is Capps’ (2016) original theoretical elaboration of ‘tribal landed property’ in sub-Saharan Africa, which deploys a subtle amalgam of different determinations (and contingencies).

54 For example, McMichael's ‘third food regime’ (2013) and Ploeg's ‘food empire’ (2009).

55 Edelman (1987, 160) remarked: ‘If [Russian] peasants acted cohesively … that cohesion did not extend beyond the borders of their settlements … In the fundamental struggle between outsiders and insiders, every peasant was some other peasant's outsider’.

56 Prefigured in earlier hopes: ‘It is up to the agriculturalists of the whole world … to unite for the sake of the welfare of the people – to defend society, to assist the State on its way to peace, and to uphold agriculture; that is to say, by growing food and by the character of their own existence, to fulfil the principal agrarian idea in giving the people, the States and the nations a firm foundation for a life of material and moral well-being’ (Central Office of the International Agrarian Bureau, Prague, 1922; quoted by Mitrany 1961, 143). This could serve as the charter of La Vía Campesina, apart from some traces characteristic of its historical moment in its reference to ‘the State’ and ‘States’, and adding today's emphasis on the virtues of agroecology practiced by at least a vanguard of farmers.

57 The same applies, as far as I can see, to the writing of José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s on indigenous community (ayllu) in Peru as a basis for socialism, including his explicit parallel with the mir (Vanden and Becker 2011, 81–82).

58 This is so even if one agrees with Danilov that his study of Rural Russia under the new regime ‘demonstrated beyond doubt that peasant agriculture stood little chance of solving the production problem and no chance at all of solving the deep social problems of the countryside’ (1988, 304). There were, of course, much-debated attempts at socialist agriculture elsewhere, for example, China and Vietnam before their turn to capitalism, Cuba, and Sandinista Nicaragua.

59 The capacity exemplified by Lenin, according to Lewin's account of his last few years (1975a), which contrasts Lenin favourably with Trotsky and above all with Stalin who was launched on a different trajectory.

60 In the short-lived kombedy (poor peasant committees) of 1918–1919, and in some instances in the kolkhozy of the 1920s (above).