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visible at the forefront of anti-enclosure confrontations with the authorities.

Although the government offered ‘separators’ generous legal and extra-legal

support, ﬁnancial subsidies and preferential credit rates, peasants nevertheless

returned to the commune in increasing numbers on the eve of the First World

War. By 1916, violence against ‘separators’ had become so intense that the

Stolypin reforms were suspended.

In general, privatisation did not lead ‘separators’ to change their farming

practices. Communities that chose to eliminate periodic land repartition took

care to retain not only their common lands but also the welfare supports

that communes traditionally provided.

Overall, the Stolypin reforms failed

to demonstrate that newly enclosed private farms were signiﬁcantly more or

less productive or proﬁtable than communes. Ironically, the most dramatic

change in the Russian countryside during this period was initiated not by the

government but by commune peasants, who engaged in massive purchases of

gentry holdings and appreciably levelled the economic playing ﬁeld between

1906 and 1914.

War and revolution, 1914–17

In 1914, world war, invasion, military disaster and a state-sponsored scorched-

earth policy destabilised and displaced the populace of Russia’s western

provinces; by 1916, a predominantly peasant army had suffered 2.5 million

casualties and internal refugees numbered 2 million. In this brutal and brutalis-

ing context, Russia’s second twentieth-century revolution erupted in February

1917 and quickly toppled the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. As in 1905, peasant

communes took centre stage by organising land seizures and forcibly return-

ing ‘separators’ to their former communes. From a political standpoint, the

Revolution of 1917 was signiﬁcant because peasants participated in it not only

as soldiers but in their own right, as peasants, in the urban-led revolutionary

movement to establish soviets nationwide. Inspired by traditional labour prin-

ciples, the ﬁrst ‘Order’ issued by the All-Russian Conference of Soviet Peasant

Deputies in May 1917 declared: ‘All peasants deserve the right to labour on the

land; privateownership is abolished.’ Throughout 1917, the language of peasant

11 Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of

Rural Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 181–3 and 193–4; see also J.

Humphries, ‘Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women’, Journal of Economic History 50,

2 (1990): 17–41.

12 O. Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo (Moscow, 1914), p. 355.

13 G. Ioffe and T. Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia: A Geographical Perspective

(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), p. 56.

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petitions invoked ‘God-given’ rights to land ‘stolen’ by wicked landlords and

ofﬁcials.

During the second half of 1917, peasant political allegiances shifted – not

towards Marxism, about which they knew little – but towards a Bolshevik Party

that consistently demanded the immediate transferof land to the peasantry and

withdrawal from the war. In the face of economic collapse and the devastation

produced by German invasion, peasants in Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia as

well as Russia began to voice support – or at least neutrality – towards a

Bolshevik seizure of power.

However, although peasant support was crucial

to Bolshevik success, it never convinced the Bolsheviks that they needed to

rethink their urban-centred perspectives. While Lenin optimistically declared

that in future peasants would test their petty bourgeois illusions ‘in the ﬁre

of life’

(and presumably move towards socialism), such remarks were no

substitute for a principled Marxist peasant policy.

War Communism, 1918–20

They [the Bolsheviks] didn’t understand peasants very well.

(Moshe Lewin, The Making of Soviet Society)

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. Between 1918 and

1921, the Soviet Union was invaded and dismembered by Imperial Germany,

torn apart by civil war, weakened by Allied military intervention and deprived

of its major grain and fuel-producing territories. The destruction of gentry

privilege and the relative powerlessness of the central government provided

peasants with the opportunity – for perhaps the ﬁrst time in their history – to

construct their lives free of the constraints traditionally imposed by various

social and political elites. In what has been described as a post-October ‘anti-

Stolypin revolution’,

96 per cent of the rural population in thirty-nine out of

forty-seven provinces had become commune members by 1920.

Attempting

14 See discussion in R. G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the

Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 57.

15 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. xxxv (Moscow, 1958–65), p. 27.

16 See S. Maksudov, Neuslyshannye golosa: Dokumenty Smolenskogo Arkhiva,bk.1: Kulaki i

Partiitsy (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987), p. 23.

17 D. G. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press), pp. 209 and 254.

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to foster traditional labour principles and social equality (poravnenie) in the

countryside, peasants were on occasion even willing to allot land to former

squires as commune members on condition that the squires were themselves

willing to labour on it.

Unsurprisingly, peasants placed a low priority on meeting the needs of

urban proletarians who provided them with little in exchange for the grain they

produced. Terriﬁed at the prospect of urban workers ﬂeeing to the countryside

in search of food, the Soviet government organised ‘Committees of the Poor’

(kombedy) to incite a rural class war between proletarians and kulaks, and

conﬁscate the latter’s ill-gotten gains. But since peasants were in 1918 more

materiallyand socially equal than ever before in their history,they chose instead

to close ranks against the kombedy and rejected Soviet efforts to divide them.

While the economist Preobrazhenskii contended that War Communism

embodied the highest socialist principle of taking from each according to

ability and giving to each according to need, Lenin was more honest: ‘we

actually took from the peasants all their surpluses, and sometimes even what

was not surplus but part of what was necessary to the peasant. We took it

to cover the costs of the army and to maintain the workers . . . Otherwise

we could not have beaten the landowners and the capitalists.’

By the end of

1918, the kombedy were dissolved, but the food crisis continued. Alongside the

legal channels of distribution, peasants constructed a black market and devised

systems of barter that rendered the formal organs of state control irrelevant

to the process of exchange.

Although government statistics indicated that most peasants produced no

merchandise, sold a fraction of their produce and reserved most of it for

internal family consumption,

it is signiﬁcant that they remained – from the

Soviet standpoint – an eternally petty bourgeois element, mired in the ‘idiocy of

rural life’. Urban-educated party enthusiasts conﬁdently assumed that peasants

understood nothing about farming, and inundated them with exhortations and

prescriptions for what, how much and even where they should sow their crops.

Although the Soviet government made use of peasant communes to collect

taxes, the Land Statute of 1919 oddly categorised communes as ‘individual’

holders of land. Trusting only their own institutions, Lenin and his supporters

constructed a network of rural soviets, and vainly encouraged peasants to join

collective and state farms. To obscure the commune’s dominant presence in

18 O. Figes, ‘Peasant Farmers and the Minority Groups of Rural Society: Peasant Egal-

itarianism and Village Social Relations during the Russian Revolution (1917–1921)’, in

Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, Culture,pp.382–5.

19 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. xliii,pp.219–20. 20 Lewin, Making, p. 51.

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the countryside, ofﬁcial documents referred to it as a rural society (sel’skoe

obshchestvo); but peasants themselves generally used the word mir.

From an economic and political standpoint, the policies of War Commu-

nism were disastrous. By 1920, grain production stood at 60 per cent of its

pre-war level, and Soviet leaders were powerless either to constrain or to

mobilise the peasantry. For their part, the peasantry’s 1917 support for the

Bolsheviks, subsequent action to minimise economic inequalities and support

for labour rights in the countryside did not win them acceptance as a core

political constituency for the Soviet Marxist leadership. It was extremely for-

tunate for the latter that their enemies in the civil war were frequently even

more brutal and repressive in their treatment of the peasant population.

NEP, 1921–8

Peasants are satisﬁed with their situation . . . We consider this more important

than any sort of statistical evidence. No one can doubt that the peasantry is

the decisive factor with us. (Lenin, 1922)

By March 1921, the civil war and the US/Allied intervention were over, and

forcible repression of the Kronstadt uprising was under way. The Red Army’s

brutal show of force against dissenters coincided with the abandonment of

War Communism. In its place, a New Economic Policy (NEP) attempted to

defuse peasant discontent and foster economic recovery by restoring a more

freely functioning market and more ﬂexible approaches to economic and non-

economic issues. An inﬁnitely cynical Stalin – expertly capturing the party’s

new and more tolerant stance towards the peasantry – derided the carelessness

with which the term ‘kulak’ was frequently used. ‘If a peasant puts on a new

roof,’ he joked, ‘they call him a kulak.’

Described by Lenin as a ‘retreat’ in the direction of capitalism, NEP revealed

in full measure the improvisatory political skills that originally propelled the

Bolsheviks to victory in October 1917. Replacing forced grain requisitions with

ﬁxed taxes on individual households, the state left peasants free to trade with

the remainder, and granted freedom of choice in forms of landholding. The

Land Code of 1922 permitted individualstofarm the land with their ownlabour,

and hire labour on condition that employers worked alongside employees. In

a ‘balancing act’ typical of the NEP era, the Soviet state reverted to pre-

1905 peasant customary law by abrogating Stolypin’s transfer of household

21 P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 1977), pp. 8–9; 316.

22 Stalin, quoted in Atkinson, End,p.281.

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property to the bol’shak, but challenged peasant tradition by declaring women

to be equal members of the household, with equal rights to participate in the

commune assembly alongside males.

Hopeful that state-created rural soviets could persuade ‘middle’ and poorer

peasants to join collective and state farms, NEP reformers celebrated the eco-

nomic achievements of the so-called ‘Red khutors’ of Nizhnii Novgorod. At

the same time, the economic successes unexpectedly manifest in commune

districts brieﬂy inspired M. I. Kalinin to hope for ‘the transformation of the

mir from an organisation of darkness, illiteracy and traditionalism into, as it

were, a productive cooperative organisation’.

In the words of K. Ia. Bauman,

socialisation of the individual production process of the whole village (cultiva-

tion, threshing and so on) was proceeding ‘like an avalanche (sploshnoi lavinoi)’.

In a single district in Moscow province, 5,204 out of 6,458 commune villages

introduced new systems of crop rotation during the year 1926 alone.

In the 1920s, the agricultural picture was indeed mixed. Old-fashioned,

low-technology farming continued to persist among most small producers;

in 1925, one-third of the spring sowing and half of the grain harvest was still

being gathered by hand.

Nevertheless, a no longer wholly backward Russian

countryside restored grain production to its pre-1914 level by 1926.In1927, the

total land area sown in grain increased slightly, but adverse climatic conditions

produced a harvest 6 per cent lower than the previous year’s bumper crop.

Agricultural recovery was fairly steady – but given the Russian Empire’s always

unpredictable climatic ﬂuctuations – as precarious as ever.

Breaking the peasant communes (ii): forced

collectivisation and the liquidation of the kulaks

as a class

Who will direct the development of the economy, the kulaks or the socialist

state? (M. I. Kalinin, 1929)

Although the revival of the economy’s agricultural sector had been a key Soviet

priority ever since the Bolshevik seizure of power, the recovery of the agricul-

tural population was met with some ambivalence. Changes that would have

23 Kalinin, quoted in Hiroshi Okuda, ‘The Final Stage of the Russian Peasant Commune: Its

Improvementand the Strategy of Collectivisation’,in Roger Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune

and Peasant Community in Russia (New York: St Martins Press; Basingstoke: University of

London, 1990), p. 257.

24 Okuda, ‘Final Stage’, pp. 259–62. 25 Atkinson, End,p.259.

26 Ibid., p. 250. On subsequent revisions of the data, see S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Reliability

of Russian Prewar Grain Statistics’, Soviet Studies 26, 2 (1974): 157–80.

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been joyfully welcomed in other developing societies – increased grain deliv-

eries to urban centres, rising consumer demand and revitalised community

institutions – appeared somehow ominous in the Soviet context. The spectre

of a resurgent peasantry aroused fears that a primitive, consumption-hungry

rural populace might dictate its own terms in the disposal of agricultural out-

put.

If peasants possessed a signiﬁcant measure of autonomy, would they

proceed to reject state directives that set price levels far below what the mar-

ket could provide? By the late 1920s, manifestations of peasant autonomy were

becoming intolerable to a party bureaucracy and Soviet that wished to use

peasants as a reservoir to supply the needs of more strategically and politically

desirable social groups, and to assert the claims to unlimited power and control

characteristic of ‘high Stalinism’.

In 1927, V. M. Molotov warned against the dangerously rapid growth of

kulaks, contending that as many as 5 per cent of the peasantry fell into this cat-

egory.

However, the term ‘kulak’ was never legally deﬁned, and ofﬁcial data

failed to demonstrate that kulak numbers were increasing – the government’s

own ﬁgures indicated instead that the peasant ‘upper strata’ remained negli-

gible in comparison with the 15 per cent level of the pre-1917 era. During the

late 1920s, kulaks were accordingly charged with quite contradictory failings.

Evidence of heavy involvement in marketing grain was taken as proof that

they were capitalist enemies of socialism, but evidence that they marketed less

grain – were guilty of hoarding – inspired identical accusations.

Images of a

Janus-like peasant enemy – in one guise, a cunning and crafty investor of cap-

ital (the kulak) and in another, a hopeless primitive – were deployed to justify

abandonment of the New Economic Policy. Reports on commune-based inno-

vation disappeared from press publications after 1929,

as Stalinists vanquished

critics like Bukharin and Chaianov (as well as alleged ‘communophiles’ like

N. N. Sukhanov and A. Suchkov).

A Gosplan recommendation that

27 See Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems

of Russian Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 175–80;and

discussion by Akhiaser, cited in Ioffe and Nefedova, Continuity,p.60.

28 V. M. Molotov, Piatnadtsatyi s’’ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) Stenograﬁcheskii

otchet (Moscow, 1928), vol. ii,p.1183.

29 Atkinson, End,pp.282–7. One government survey reported that 750,000 rural

entrepreneurs employed a grand total of 1 million labourers in 1927; the most pros-

perous possessed two to three cows and up to 10 hectares of sowing area for an average

family of seven. Lewin, Making,p.212.

30 Okuda, ‘Final Stage’, p. 266.

31 See esp., N. Sukhanov, ‘Obshchina vsovetskom agrarnom zakonodatel’stve’,Naagrarnom

fronte 11–12 (1926); and A. Suchkov, ‘Kak ne nado rassmatrivat’ vopros o formakh zemle-

pol’zovaniia’, Bolshevik 2 (1928).

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communes be considered one of the institutional variants that could facili-

tate a transition to collectivisation was ignored.

Claiming that the survival of socialism was at stake, the party demanded a

drastic upward revision of the state’s grain procurement quotas; grain alloca-

tion requirements for the cities and the army were increased by 50 per cent

in 1930. When – unsurprisingly – state demands were not met, the shortfall

was attributed to a ‘kulak grain strike’.

However, since the state’s own data

suggested (and Stalin himself admitted) that current shortages were due to

escalating government demands for grain,

it seems fair to say that the crisis

that triggered the ‘Great Turn’ was more political than economic. In a series

of wildly unrealistic pronouncements, party leaders allotted one and a half

years for the wholesale collectivisation of the rural population.

Forced collectivisation was to replace an ‘Asiatic’ peasant agriculture with

modern, scientiﬁc, large-scale farming.

Peasant land, livestock and tools

became the property of collective or state farms. Tasks traditionally the respon-

sibility of peasants – ploughing, sowing,weedingand harvesting – became state

activities, planned and regulated according to a variety of ‘scientiﬁc’ quotas and

indicators. Peasants were to work a minimum number of labour days (trudodni)

under the supervision of managers who ensured fulﬁlment of state directives.

To counter peasant resistance, the Soviet state deployed the tactics of all-out

war, complete with the murder of suspected kulaks, mass killings and deporta-

tions to forcedlabour camps. The RSFSR Criminal Code was cited to justify the

bombardment of peasant villages judged guilty either of ‘failure to offer goods

for sale on the market’ or unwillingness to meet state-assigned grain quotas.

To many peasants, the government-directed onslaught of the 1930s rep-

resented the coming of the anti-Christ. Proclamations ‘from the Lord God’

prohibiting peasants from entering collective farms mysteriously appeared in

one part of Siberia; in European Russia, a peasant proclamation declared, ‘God

has created people to be free on the land, but the brutality of communism

has put on all labourers a yoke from which the entire mir is groaning’.

Ye t

within this apocalyptic discourse of opposition lay a complex challenge to a

32 Lewin, Making, p. 117.

33 Chris Ward, Stalin’s Russia (London: Arnold, 1993), pp. 556–9.

34 Atkinson, End,p.324 andR.W.Davies,The Industrialization of Soviet Russia vol. i: The

Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 432.

35 Lewin, Making, pp. 269–70.

36 A. I. Rykov, V bor’be za sukhoi i golodom (Moscow, 1924), p. 1.

37 However, as Viola notes, much of the discourse of peasant opposition was quite secular,

and couched in political and economic terms. See Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under

Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–64, 118.

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Soviet state that repeatedly forced peasants to choose between compliance or

obliteration. For their part, Soviet leaders remained ideologically blind to the

wide array of collectivist economic and non-economic practices characteristic

of pre-1917 peasant village life, and to the similarities between the labour prin-

ciples enshrined in the collective farm statutes of the 1930s and the traditions

of the pre-revolutionary village.

Peasant resistance thus represented more than the familiar conﬂict between

collectivism and the individual. It reﬂected as well a refusal to accept (1) the

loss of hard-won individual, household and commune-based autonomy, (2)

the state’s appropriation of the material basis of peasants’ livelihood, and (3)

the government’s savage effort to annihilate everything that peasant families

and communities had built up over many generations.

Ofﬁcial promises of a

brilliant future were cold comfort to peasants whose lives were quite devoid

of material security.

In regions distant from Moscow, forced collectivisation was not always

imposed with equal brutality. In Tajikistan, new collective farms drew on tra-

ditional kinship networks, while in Georgia, collectivisation frequently repli-

cated traditional settlement patterns and distributions of wealth.

But in areas

where change was most inﬂexibly imposed, many peasants not only denied

to the Soviet state the fruits of their labour but attempted as well to avoid

the dread designation of ‘kulak’ by destroying massive quantities of grain and

slaughtering their livestock. In Kazakhstan, where collectivisation entailed

the forcible settlement of a nomadic population, the populace responded by

destroying 80 per cent of their herds.

By the end of the 1930s, acts of ‘self-

de-kulakisation’ erupted from Siberia to European Russia and resulted in a

45 per cent decline in the number of livestock.

Although Soviet ofﬁcials

downplayed all evidence of peasant solidarity, collective resistance seems to

have been a signiﬁcant feature of rural opposition.

By all accounts, women played a leading role in the resistance to forced

collectivisation; in 1930 alone, 3,712 mass disturbances (total 13,754) were almost

exclusively women;inthe other cases, womenconstituted either a majority or a

signiﬁcant proportion of the participants. A contemporary Soviet report noted

that ‘in all kulak disturbances the extraordinary activity of women is evident’.

38 Caroline Humphrey, ‘The Domestic Mode of Production in Post-Soviet Siberia’, Anthro-

pology Today 14, 3 (1998): 5.

39 Suny, Revenge,pp.113–17.

40 M. B. Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), pp. 179–87.

41 Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Col-

lective Farm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 171.

42 Viola, Peasant Rebels,pp.183–5.

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esther kingston-mann

Pravda explained it, women’s ‘petty bourgeois instincts’ were regrettable man-

ifestations of the ‘individualistic female spirit’.

However, it is useful to recall

that women were also frequently in the forefront of opposition to Stolypin’s

privatisation reforms. In 1930 as in 1906, they resisted appropriation of the

household garden plot upon which a signiﬁcant measure of their security

and household status depended. Together with the men of their households,

women fought to secure the survival of their families.

Peasants were unable to block the government’s onslaught. However, rural

resistance – above all, by women – won an extraordinary and rare concession

from the Stalinist state. In 1935, a Model Collective Farm Code legitimised

peasant claims to a measure of personal and household autonomy in the form

of ‘private’ household allotments of land and farm animals. These plots of land

were not freehold property in the Western sense of the term. Households did

not purchase their plots, and could neither sell nor lease them. Collectives

provided seeds, farm implements and hay from the common meadow and

granted pre-1917 commune-style household rights to pasture animals on com-

mon land. Nevertheless, the ‘private’ plots introduced – on however minimal

alevel–atraditional peasant notion of mixed economy into the brutally

dichotomised, ‘all or nothing’ strategies of the Soviet state. As in the days of

the commune, women bore primary responsibility for labour on the ‘new’

private plots, cared for livestock and marketed their produce. Then and later,

Soviet ofﬁcials downplayed both the magnitude of the state’s capitulation and

the women’s agency that triggered it. Stalin himself took care to trivialise

the conﬂict as ‘a little misunderstanding with collective farm women. This

business was about cows.’

Although the household plots were categorised by the state as ‘temporary’,

subsidiary (podsobnoe) property, they acquired immense signiﬁcance at a time

when collective farm wages were paid only after the state appropriated its

share – in 1937, 15,000 collective farms paid no salaries at all to their peasant

labourers.In addition, the cruel dislocations of collectivisation–exacerbatedby

the dismal climatic conditions that defeated Russian and Soviet expectations

in both more and less repressive times – produced millions of famine dead

in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan.

In this precarious context,

private plots became a relatively secure source of material support. As peasants

43 Atkinson, End,p.367. 44 Lewin, Making,pp.178–9.

45 A particularly useful discussion of this controversial topic is M. Tauger, R. W. Davies

and S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932–1933’, Slavic Review

54, 3 (1995): 642–57.

424

Transforming peasants in the twentieth century

ﬂed their villages at a rate of 3 million per year, the state responded by imposing

an internal passport system to prevent unauthorised departures. Additional

millions were deported as kulaks, as were peasants arrested for the theft of

collective farm property or failure to meet minimum work norms. Sent to

forced labour camps in the north and east, peasant deportees built much-

needed roads and canals, and were largely responsible for the construction of

new cities like Magnitogorsk.

Lacking representatives of their own or legal rights to organise in defence

of their interests, peasants assiduously cared for their ‘private’ plots. The slow

agricultural recovery that began in the second half of the 1930s was dispropor-

tionately fuelled by these ‘subsidiary’ holdings. By 1938, 45 per cent of Soviet

agriculture’s total farm output was being produced on 3.9 per cent of the

sown (private) land (approximately 0.49 hectares per household).

On this

predominantly women’s ‘turf’, women turned out to be the most productive

and efﬁcient – but by far the least acclaimed – economic actors in the Soviet

countryside.

The ‘private’ plots prospered within a radically transformed agricultural

sector. By 1940, collective and state farms were cogs in the machinery of

a vast, Moscow-based bureaucracy (Gosplan SSSR) whose ofﬁcials decided

what each republic, region, province, district and even state and collective

farm should produce; farm managers were then obliged to supply agricultural

products for sale to the government at Gosplan-determined prices.

The

‘false’ egalitarianism of the peasant commune gave way to the inequalities

of socialism, with each person rewarded for personal contributions to the

collective effort. Rural Stakhanovites like Pasha Angelina – the ﬁrst woman

tractor driver in the Soviet Union – were rewarded for over-fulﬁlment of plan

quotas.

But since quotas were typically set at levels far beyond the capacity

of the farms to fulﬁl, the new system accelerated the growth of a vast informal

network of insider negotiations, nepotism and other forms of favouritism, and

massive corruption all along the bureaucratic chain of command.

The brutal decade of the 1930s was framed by an ofﬁcial discourse that

demonised opponents and evoked public fearthat devious internal and external

enemies were joined in a conspiracy to weaken the Soviet Union and leave it

46 Lewin, Making,pp.180–3.

47 S. Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women’s Roles in Rural Development in the Soviet

Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 14.

48 Caroline Humphrey, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge Anthropology 18, 2 (1995): 2.

49 R. T. Manning, ‘Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II, 1935–

40’, in B. Farnsworth and L. Viola (eds.), Russian Peasant Women (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), pp. 218–20.

425