"kulak" was an invented category. To my way of thinking, "peasant" involves a certain position in the tsarist-era social order; it doesn't just mean agricultural laborers. Cossacks were also agricultural laborers, but were not peasants."
Right, real class consciousness is often hard to find within objective/economic classes. And "peasant" is a subjective thing wherever one goes, proudly claimed by some who have no right to the name, and regarded as shameful by others.
But where does the classical distinction between betraks,bednyaks, serednyaks, etc come from? Are these 20th C neologisms?
"Russia acquired almost all of its Jews when the Empire assimilated (PC word there) Poland, didn't it? Presumably that population would have retained its previous way of life, or at least parts of it. What was the mode of life of the Polish Jewish population at that time?"
The Russian Empire acquired a lot of Jews in its Polish conquests, but probably not most of them. I have a little, probably dangerous, knowledge of modern Russian and modern Jewish history, but I shouldn't get carried away when it comes to Poland *lol*
Note that one of the sources [Daniel Romanowski, date unknown, "Jewish History of Ukraine" http://www.heritagefilms.com/UKRAINE.html ] I cited earlier said that in 1897, 2.9% of the Jews in Ukraine (more than 50,000 people) had agriculture as an occupation. Given that kulaks (arguably) did not exist before 1906, what class/es can we say these people belonged to?
regards,
Grant