Some years ago a friend cited this article when I asked about kulaks, and I wonder if it's still considered adequate to the question. Teodor Shanin argued that if you took a snapshot of the Russian peasantry you saw kulaks, but if you shot a movie you'd get very blurred class lines. I've strung some quotations together. SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA, 1905-30, Soviet Studies, 23:2 (Oct, 1971)
"Yet, in spite of the seemingly self-evident truth of the suppositions discussed above, and the important empirical support provided for it by the evidence of the Budget Studies and Rural Censuses, the story of polarization as the main socio-economic process among the Russian peasantry is not true, or, more precisely, is not the whole truth. More sophisticated methods of study suggest that the main form of socioeconomic mobility in Russian peasant households at this time was multi-directional. The polarizing trends were powerfully challenged by simultaneous mobility of the opposite type in which large numbers of wealthy households deteriorated while the position of a considerable number of the poorer ones improved, at least in relative terms. Iloreover, a substantial number of peasant households seemed successively to ascend and descend with cyclical regularity-the higher the relative socio-economic position of a household the greater on the whole the chance that it would begin to deteriorate. Conversely, the lower the position the better the chance of improvement. On the face of it, this sounds quite incredible, especially to an observer trained in neoclassical or Marxist traditions of economic thought.
A number of processes of a levelling nature: a) Among Russian peasants there was a strong positive correlation between uealth of household and size of household; the richer the household the bigger its membership, and consequently the more numerous the units resulting from division of the household between the sons according to egalitarian inheritance or partitioning customs. (The word inheritance is in fact misleading: the majority of peasant sons received their share before their parents died.)" b) A substantial number of mergers between peasant households (mainly by marriage) was reported, on the whole negatively correlated with household size, i.e., the smaller and poorer households had the best chance of an increase in size, and hence in prosperity. The poorest and smallest households often lacked one of the production factors essential to a peasant economy, such as male labour, or horses; a merger would restore such a household to 'normality'. In some cases it IT as the richest m hich found it profitable to acquire family labour or land by 'swallowing' the poor. c) A high rate of extinction and emigration of peasant families was reported in nega t i ~ e correlation with size and wealth, i.e., the poorer and smaller the household the greater the chance of its disappearing. The selective extinction and emigration of households constantly purged villages of their poorest and deteriorating members, which led again to a powerful le~elling trend in the d a g e community. The differential character of all the processes of substantive change (orgnnicheskie izrnenenzjra in the accepted Russian terminology) in peasant households, i.e., of partitioning, merger, extinction and emigration provided for a considerable egalitarian trend. It reinforced egalitarian communal land redistribution in those places in which this still operated....
The simultaneous operation of polarizing and levelling trends found expression in multi-directional and cyclical mobility. 3. Two more ongoing processes were multi-directional or cyclical by their very nature: a) Peasant families went through a life cycle to which Chayanov drew attenti~n.~' This cycle consisted of three stages: the young family struggles hard to feed an increasing number of children; then pressures ease as the children become old enough to help ; finally, the parents age, partitioning takes place and decline sets in. This biological cycle would be the more distinct where units of production were small and resources limited. b) The chance factors in peasant life increase multi-directional mobility, in particular the powerful, arbitrary and uncontrollable impacts of nature, market and state policies on the peasant economy of limited resources....
The crucial fact of Russian rural history in this period is that the predicted major development both of the class structure and of the political response of the peasants did not happen. The richer farmers and the rural wage-earners (or poor peasants) on the whole failed to act as independent factions. One can scarcely doubt the fact of socioeconomic differentiation in Russian peasant society in the period; the evidence is ample-at the beginning of the century Russia led the world in studies of peasantry (the data collected by zemstvo regional authorities alone approached 4,000 volumes by 1917). Yet, in spite of the socio-economic differentiation revealed by those studies, Russian villages went on showing remarkable political cohesiveness and unity of action. This is particularly striking in the 1905-06 and 1917-19 revolutions and during collectivization, but seems to hold true for the whole of the period 1905-30. ...
Finally, the October revolution marked an attempt by the new government to 'put the wager' on the rural proletariat, to activate and unify the rural poor as the natural allies of the urban proletarian revolution. Rural Committees of the Poor (Kombedy) were set up to secure food requisitions for the needs of the towns but also to socialize the countryside by mobilization of the rural poor for a second revolution agsinst the wealthy peasants. Yet within less than a year this policy had to be abandoned and the 'Committees of the Poor' which had been set up disbanded. This step is described by a leading historian of the period as 'timely recognition of failure-a retreat from untenable pcsitions'.~imilar results occurred with the so-called policy of 'directed agriculture' in 1920.~~ The attempts of the Soviet government to split the peasantry and establish a Bolshevik foothold among the rural poor failed. The New Economic Policy at the end of 1920 amounted to a government surrender to the pressure of peasant will, and an explicit recognition of the Russian peasantry as a cohesive, specific and powerful social class...."