Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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As a result shortages of goods continued to mount, queues lengthened and

popular disquiet intensiﬁed.

Did Soviet integration hinder economic progress in the various republics,

as national activists claimed? Membership of the Soviet Union entailed sub-

ordination to an increasingly sclerotic planned economy, underwritten by the

authority of the Communist Party. Arguably, it was the failings of the economic

system, not their incorporation in the Soviet Union per se, that disadvantaged

the constituent republics. The slowdown in economic growth that became

apparent from the 1970s helped to encourage nationalist dissatisfaction. Some

nationalists saw opportunities to proﬁt from secession rather than from con-

tinued membership of the Soviet state, regarding independence as a means of

escape from Soviet (Russian) domination and exploitation. It dawned on them

that tight central control and the imposition of uniform solutions to economic

problems had disastrous consequences. Dissatisfaction over the deceleration in

economic growth went hand in hand with cultural complaint, which glasnost’

fuelled in uncompromising fashion. The process was not conﬁned to the non-

Russian republics; Boris Yeltsin appropriated and Russiﬁed the most important

all-Union institutions. Given the opportunity to secede, the nationalists took

it unhesitatingly.

The radical privatisation impulse (ii): post-1991

experiments and consequences

The collapse of Communism ushered in a period of prolonged political uncer-

tainty and socio-economic turmoil. Output plummeted. Investment remained

weak and expectations of an inﬂux of foreign capital went unrealised, thereby

compounding the problems posed by an already obsolescent capital stock.

Consumption declined. The Russian Federation found it immensely difﬁcult

to establish a secure and viable tax base. Economic relations with others in the

Commonwealth of Independent States remained fragile. At the same time,

this was an era of radical experimentation with capitalist economic forms. The

advocates of economic transformation maintained that the costs of transition

were exaggerated.

The post-Communist governments set great store by a radical privatisa-

tion of enterprise. In echoes of the Stolypin land reforms, the contemporary

exponents of economic transition pinned much of their hopes on privatisation

and the entrepreneurial ﬂair that it was expected to unleash. However, the

results were mixed. To be sure, the private sector expanded; by 1996 around

two-ﬁfths of the labour force was employed in the private sector, compared

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to one-tenth a decade earlier. But there were signiﬁcant costs. The so-called

‘voucher privatisation’ scheme in 1992–4 transferred ownership of thousands

of enterprises, mostly to existing management and employees. It guaranteed

neither good management of those enterprises nor the prospect of attracting

outside investment. The loans-for-shares scheme of 1995–7 enabled powerful

oligarchs to acquire cheaply from the state through rigged auctions some of

Russia’s most valuable oil companies including Yukos, Sibneft and Sidanco.

In addition, predatory and criminal cliques ﬂourished, hindering the potential

viability of new enterprises and limiting the possibility for engaging with new

markets and embracing technical change. So far as the agricultural sector is

concerned, little land was transferred into private ownership from 1991.As

under Soviet socialism, Russian peasants produced fruit and vegetables on

household plots. The large collective farms continued in existence, but this

probably testiﬁed to inertia rather than to their viability as integrated institu-

tions that once supplied a range of services to the rural population. Peasant

farmers did not rush to embrace the institutions of a market economy.

Some authors, such as Anders Aslund, offer a more upbeat assessment of

the post-Communist economy. They point out that ofﬁcial output data need

to be adjusted to take account of unregistered activity. Allowance must also

be made for the high degree of waste in Soviet-era GDP. Taking these factors

into account, the decline in output was much less marked. More broadly, they

emphasise the shortcomings of the old economic system and the magnitude

of the crisis that was bequeathed to the new regime. Even privatisation, it is

argued, contributed to a strengthening of democratic potential in the former

Soviet Union. (One might add that the results of privatisation, like the Stolypin

land reform, will take at least a generation to be fully realised.) Finally, if tran-

sition was so disastrous, the argument runs, why was there so little resistance

to radical reform?

One explanation may be the short-term recourse to mechanisms of self-

help and barter. Barter reﬂects a loss of conﬁdence in the domestic currency

and a readiness to conceal transactions from the tax authorities. The partners

involved in non-monetary transactions are predisposed to trust one another

rather than to put their faith in the market and in ﬁnancial institutions.

The consequences of barter include disincentives to develop new methods

of production or new products. The phenomenon represents a diversion of

entrepreneurial talent and time, and promotes other inefﬁciencies, because

resources are tied up in storing and ofﬂoading stocks. But, as Paul Seabright

suggests, barter arrangements are not unlike krugovaia poruka (‘collective obli-

gation’, or ‘mutual responsibility’) whereby peasants sustained themselves by

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a system of mutual dependency. Barter became widespread in Russia and

Ukraine during the 1990s, even though inﬂation was brought under control

and conﬁdence in money was restored. Enterprises engaged in barter as a

means of exchange and as settlement of inter-enterprise debt. Firms lacking

sufﬁcient working capital (perhaps because the government failed to settle its

obligations) paid wages in the form of their own output. As well as being an

inefﬁcient arrangement the increased recourse to barter were a symptom of

wider political and economic dislocation. But equally its prevalence suggests

the durability of social networks that were established prior to the ‘transition’.

The rupture of inter-republican links following the collapse of the USSR

posed major problems of adjustment. Enterprises had to renegotiate contracts

with suppliers or to ﬁnd new sources of supply. Products were now traded at

world market prices, rather than being subsidised by the Soviet state. Some of

the successor states exploited opportunities to engage in international trade,

specialising on the basis of natural resource endowments, such as natural gas

in Turkmenistan. Political instability and military conﬂict in Tajikistan and

Georgia, for example, helped to depress economic activity. On the other hand,

the Baltic states successfully stabilised their budgets,reducedinﬂation rates and

promoted foreign direct investment, as preparation for joining the enlarged

European Union in May 2004. Within the resource-rich Russian Federation,

non-Russian ethnic groups sought to redress ‘wrongs’ done during the Soviet

period. Thus a vocal Siberian lobby, speaking on behalf of 32 million people,

demanded compensation for environmental damage.

Demographically the transition was extremely painful. To be sure, the

project of Soviet ‘modernity’ itself bequeathed a legacy of environmental

degradation, declining health conditions and increasing infant mortality. But

transition has thus far done little to reverse the decline. Adult male life

expectancy plummeted. Many citizens, including some of the former inmates

of remote Soviet prison camps, reverted to a subsistence economy. Ordinary

citizens often required two or more jobs in order to compensate for meagre

and/or uncertain wages. Again, mutual support networks played an important

part in maintaining a basic standard of living. A more extreme response was

emigration; according to ofﬁcial ﬁgures between 1992 and 1998 some 700,000

people left Russia to settle in countries outside the former Soviet Union.

Germany was by far the most popular destination.

Account also needs to be taken of the demographic consequences of the sud-

den disintegration of the USSR in 1991. Around 280 million ex-Soviet citizens

17 Julie DaVanzo and Clifford Grammich, Dire Demographics: Population Trends in the Russian

Federation (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2001), ch. 2.

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were now scattered amongst ﬁfteen sovereign states. More than 25 million Rus-

sians lived beyond the borders of the Russian Federation (this ﬁgure is taken

from the 1989 census), and it has not been difﬁcult to portray them as vestiges

of Soviet ‘colonialism’.

Throughout the 1990s concerns were expressed about

their status, entitlements and prospects. Those who made their way to Russia

survived by capitalising where possible upon networks of mutual support. But

the lack of housing and of state beneﬁts has rendered their position in Russia

precarious.

Conclusions and assessment

The economic history of Russia’s twentieth century is full of absolutist pre-

scriptions for improved economic performance. Before the revolution, the

talk was of foreign investment and enterprise (under Witte), and of ‘rational’

land consolidation (under Stolypin). Under NEP the emphasis shifted to a

combination of state control and circumscribed private enterprise, with con-

tinued espousal of the doctrine of improvement for the peasant economy,

primarily by means of expert intervention from outside the rural sector. Stalin

preferred the twin instruments of central economic planning and terror, in

order to realise his vision of Soviet socialist modernisation. Khrushchev pinned

his hopes on extracting greater efforts from workers and peasants, partly by

means of incentives, but also by exhorting them to work harder and to become

pioneer settlers on virgin land. The advocates of perestroika after 1985 believed

in a mixture of state control and market mechanisms, accompanied by the

reform of property rights. Post-Soviet prescriptions have favoured the route

of privatisation, claiming that the shortcomings of transition are the result

of timidity in engaging with the challenge of economic transition. Each suc-

cessive nostrum has been accompanied by a set of campaigns, to pinpoint

the ‘problem’ (including aberrant personal behaviour) and/or to identify the

‘enemy’ to be confronted, unmasked and defeated.

What have been the results of these various economic visions? The Soviet

economic project came to dominate the twentieth century. It is worth reﬂect-

ing on what this means. First, for more than seven decades the experience

of millions of Soviet citizens was closely bound up with a centralised sys-

tem of economic administration and a lack of exposure to overseas economic

stimuli. But the domination of the Soviet system did not rest wholly or even

18 The Russian census originally scheduled for 1999 was delayed by the ﬁnancial crisis in

1998. It ﬁnally took place in October 2002.

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largely on the instruments of terror, even under Stalinism. The state also

derived a degree of legitimacy from the promise and the reality of economic

growth, technological modernisation and social progress. There were gen-

uine and important gains in literacy and life expectancy from one generation

to the next. In the words of a broadly hostile critic, Soviet economic policies

secured ‘some broad acquiescence on the part of the people’.

That acquies-

cence rested upon Soviet-style welfare provision and opportunities for upward

social mobility, which generated a sense of civic commitment and left a posi-

tive legacy. On the other hand, Soviet economic modernisation also left scars

on the landscape, in the form of large, dirty and obsolescent factories, decrepit

farms and polluted waterways and lakes.

There is another dimension to the Soviet economic project. The USSR

confronted capitalism with a rival economic system. As Eric Hobsbawm has

pointed out, capitalism ‘won’, but it differed greatly from the system that

had conquered the world during the nineteenth century. One reason for its

transformation was the challenge it faced from Soviet socialism.

Nor should

an exposure of the failings of the Soviet economic experiment blind us to

the shortcomings of capitalism. To be sure, the Soviet Union left a legacy of

debt, environmental degradation and struggling enterprises. But those who

gloat over ﬂaws in the system and its uneven economic performance would

do well to reﬂect on the evidence of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, ill-health,

environmental damage, debt burden and inequality that are the hallmarks

of large parts of the globe. No amount of triumphalism from the privileged

few can disguise the fact that the fortunes of so much of twentieth-century

humanity have been mixed. An objective reading of the Soviet ‘experiment’

might conclude that the laudable ambition to realise the social and economic

potential of the majority remains as relevant today as it was nearly a century

ago.

19 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 29.

20 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London:

Michael Joseph, 1994).

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Transforming peasants in the twentieth

century: Dilemmas of Russian, Soviet

and post-Soviet development

esther kingston-mann

Contexts for change

By the dawn of the twentieth century, most predominantly peasant societies

were already colonised or otherwise subjugated by the world’s industrialised

modern empires. For nations not yet subjected to the full force of this pro-

cess, the penalties of backwardness were increasingly manifest. In Imperial

Russia and the Soviet Union, the fear that backwardness might invite foreign

conquest led a succession of heads of state to target peasants as producers

of the grain needed to ﬁnance ambitious, government-sponsored projects for

industrialisation. However, although peasants were crucial to the success of

any development scenario, both reforming and revolutionary elites tended to

discount the possibility of peasant agency. Peasants typically viewed as ‘raw

material’ rather than as co-participants in the development process were – in

the words of Caroline Humphrey – ‘never in possession of the master narra-

tive of which they were the objects, and had no access to the sources from

which it was reaching them’.

The following discussion is intended 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.

In 1900, the peasants of Imperial Russia continued to struggle – like their

parents and grandparents before them – against the constraints of a land and cli-

mate largely inhospitable to productive farming. In regions where rainfall was

reliable, soils were poor; more fertile areas were routinely afﬂicted by drought.

I am deeply indebted to the work of Moshe Lewin, Teodor Shanin and Caroline

Humphrey, and to the insightful readings of this essay by David Hunt, Rochelle Ruthchild

and James Mann.

1 Caroline Humphrey,‘Politics ofPrivatisationin Provincial Russia: Popular Opinions Amid

the Dilemmas of the Early 1990s’, Cambridge Anthropology 18, 1 (1995): 46.

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These drawbacks persisted regardless of prevailing political or socio-economic

systems, and despite historical efforts either to privatise or collectivise the land.

As the most impoverished and least literate of the tsar’s subjects, peasants bore

the economic and non-economic burdens imposed by a variety of more or less

importunate elites. By 1900, they constituted 80 per cent of the population;

the majority were women, and a substantial proportion of them were eth-

nically non-Russian. As in other predominantly peasant societies, the rural

populace of the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet eras opposed some changes –

often in collective fashion, with women in the forefront – but selectively appro-

priated others. In times of crisis, they deployed the symbols and rituals of

their secular and religious cultures to reinforce demands for social justice and

for vengeance against malign forces within and outside the household and

community.

Labour, communes, households

Like many other peasantries, the rural inhabitants of Imperial Russia viewed

labour as an economic necessity, as the source of legitimate rights to land use

and as the basis for status claims within the household and community. In the

communes to which most peasants belonged, the number of adult labourers

per household frequently determined land-allotment size. In times of unrest

and rebellion, peasants asserted that the gentry had ‘stolen’ the land from

the tillers of the soil who were its rightful owners. In the Revolutions of 1905

and 1917, they demanded that land be ‘returned’ to the labouring peasantry.

At no time did peasants acknowledge the legitimacy of claims to landowner-

ship by persons who did not labour on it. In 1900, labour claims infused the

operations of the peasantry’s basic institutions: the commune and the peasant

household.

The peasant commune (mir or obshchina) was the dominant institution in

the early twentieth-century Russian countryside. The object of centuries of

idealisation and demonisation by a variety of radicals, reformers and govern-

ment ofﬁcials, its distinguishing feature was the periodic repartition of land

among member households according to family size, number of adult labour-

ers per household or some other collective social principle. Within the com-

mune framework, member households possessed exclusive but temporary

rights to use scattered strips of land (allotments) and could freely decide how

to dispose of the product of their farm labour. Neither whollycollective nor pri-

vate, communes were mixed economies within which individual, household

and communal rights to ownership coexisted in social conﬁgurations that

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varied regionally and changed over time. Individual members owned their

personal belongings and could bequeath them to others. Women possessed

unconditional ownership rights to a ‘woman’s box’ (the product of weaving

and other gendered activities).

Within the commune, households possessed collective and hereditary rights

to a house, garden plot and livestock – the latter properties constituted a key

source of economic inequality between peasant households. Periodic repar-

tition was relatively rare in the north and west of the empire, where most

peasants held land in hereditary (podvornoe) tenure. However, it is signiﬁcant

that even in more privatised areas, peasants relied on the use of common

lands. More like English commons-users than yeoman farmers, they collec-

tively shared out and collected the obligations owed to landlords and the state,

devised and enforced rules for use of common lands and provided a variety of

welfare supports to their members.

Although the powers that the patriarch (bol’shak) exercised over the daily

life of his household were virtually absolute, when he died, household prop-

erty reverted to the household group under a new head (a son, brother or

sometimes a widow). In the case of household divisions, a village assembly

(skhod ) composed of the heads of member households and led by elected

village elders generally oversaw the distribution of property. Although com-

munes were plagued by corruption, nepotism and individual proﬁt-seeking,

they nevertheless obliged wealthier families to link their fate with poorer

neighbours and required ambitious individuals to obtain the consent of their

neighbours before introducing signiﬁcant changes. At best, they provided a

framework capable of satisfying both a family’s desire for a holding of its

own, and the desire for protection against the monopolising of resources by

wealthier families/households within the community.

In many parts of the Russian Empire, the social identities of peasants were

organised according to a set of hierarchies that subordinated younger peo-

ple and females to the authority of the household patriarch. In addition to

childcare, women were expected to cook the household’s food, fetch water,

sew, wash clothes, weave cloth, care for poultry and livestock, endure beat-

ings and tend the family’s ‘private’ garden plot (usad’ba). Granted a mod-

icum of respect for their labour contributions and a right to the product

of ‘women’s work’ (weaving, poultry raising, etc.), women were otherwise

2 Esther Kingston-Mann, ‘Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation’, in Esther

Kingston-Mann andTimothy Mixter(eds.), PeasantEconomy,Culture and Politicsof European

Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 23–51; Steven Grant, ‘Obshchina

and Mir’, Slavic Review 35, 4 (1976): 636–51.

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esther kingston-mann

wholly subordinated to the authority of fathers, husbands and elder sons; they

gained a measure of power only after achieving the status of mother-in-law

(with authority over daughters-in-law).

In 1900, most peasant households were primarily devoted to agricultural

pursuits. But particularly in the northern provinces of St Petersburg, Moscow,

Archangel and Nizhnii Novgorod, an increasing number sought to meet

escalating tax burdens by leaving their villages to become hired labourers

(otkhodniki). In workplaces far distant from their homes, peasants absorbed

new ideas, customs and practices and took care to establish strategic rela-

tionships grounded in networks of kin and neighbours.

However, leaving

the village rarely signiﬁed a repudiation of village ties; otkhodniki frequently

‘raided the market’ by sending money back to their home villages

(where

opportunities for women expanded in the absence of the usually dominant

males).

Peasants did not retain their ‘old ways’ unchanged. Instead, they

infused time-honoured traditions with new combinations of indigenous and

imported meanings. As Moshe Lewin has suggested, the rural populace was

changing, but ‘the interplay between new and old formations did not conform

to theory and kept complicating the picture and bafﬂing the thinker and the

politician’.

Although wealthy peasants exerted a disproportionate inﬂuence in village

life, scholars continue to debate the extent to which early twentieth-century

economic differences were reproduced from generation to generation as class

formations or mitigated through periodic repartition. Since commune reparti-

tions usually apportioned allotments according to family size or labour capac-

ity, larger households were often ‘richer’ in land; newer and smaller households

received smaller allotments.

In general, rural innovation was not conﬁned to ‘privatised’ farming dis-

tricts. In Tobol’sk and Kazan’, contemporary statisticians and economists

3 Timothy Mixter, ‘The Hiring Market as Workers’ Turf: Migrant Agricultural Labourers

and the Mobilisation of Collective Action in the Steppe Grainbelt of European Russia,

1853–1913’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, Culture, pp. 294–340.

4 J. Burds, ‘The Social Control of PeasantLabor in Russia: The Response of Village Commu-

nities in Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1961–1904’, in Kingston-Mann

and Mixter, Peasant Economy, Culture,pp.52–100.

5 See B. Engel, Between Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 34–63.

6 Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 290.

7 See the early discussion of this process in N. N. Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskogo

khoziaistva (Moscow, 1905), its later elaboration in A. V. Chaianov, On the Theory of Peasant

Economy, ed. D. Thorner et al. (Homewood, Ill.: R. D. Irwin, 1966), and a valuable more

recent discussion in Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in

a Developing Society, Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

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Transforming peasants in the twentieth century

documented commune strategies speciﬁcally crafted to reward individual

innovation while limiting the growth of rural differentiation. In Tambov, com-

mune peasants who fertilised their allotments either received special monetary

payments at the time of repartition, a similar allotment or the right to retain

their original holdings. In 1900, 127 commune villages in a single district of

Moscow province introduced many-ﬁeld crop rotations; by 1903, 245 out of 368

villages had done so.

While innovation was not widespread either within or

outside the commune, irreversible changes in farming practices were becom-

ing manifest in the early years of the twentieth century.

Breaking the peasant commune (i): Stolypin’s

‘wager on the strong’

In 1905, when Russia’s ﬁrst twentieth-century revolution erupted, communes

organised the seizure of gentry land, and commune-sponsored petitions

demanding land and liberty, abolition of private property rights and ‘return’

of land to the tillers of the soil poured into the capital from every corner of the

empire.

In response, the government introduced a programme to eliminate

the peasant commune and replace it with a rural constituency of ‘strong’ and

conservative private farmers. Between 1906 and 1911, Prime Minister Stolypin’s

reforms invited peasant households to separate from the commune and estab-

lish themselves on enclosed, self-contained farms (otruby and khutora); in this

process the household property formerly owned by the household was to

become the private property of the bol’shak.

In the decade that followed, few of the government’s hopes for privatisa-

tion were realised. Many requests for separation came not from the strong,

but from ‘weak’ families that had suffered misfortune that could cost them

land in repartitions determined according to family size or labour capacity.

Equally signiﬁcant was the depth of peasant opposition, and the role of women.

Because soldiers were traditionallyless likely to ﬁre on women,andbecause the

income and status of women were so intimately linked with the household’s

garden plot that had been transferred to the bol’shak, women were frequently

8 For other examples, see Kingston-Mann, ‘Peasant Communes’, pp. 36–9.

9 See discussion in Teodor Shanin, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth: The

Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century, vol. ii (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1986), pp. 79–137.

10 P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina evropeiskoi Rossii 1907–1914 (Moscow: Nauka,

1992), pp. 111–15.

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