--- RE <earnest at tallynet.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
Well I am about 10,000,000 versts from being an expert on the subject, but I do have a couple of comments that may or may not be relevant.
>
> "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.
The version of history I am familiar with says that
the peasantry as a class was becomign increasingly
destitute from aroung the time of the abolition of
serfdom on (please correct me anyone if I am wrong --
I am not on my territory, and my facts are mainly
taken from Figes). The size of a peasant farm was
determined by the size of the family. Obviously, this
led to huge families, and the peasant population grew
from 50 million to 79 million (!) from 1861-1897,
despite movement to the cities. (I seem to remember
from what's his name's book Planning the Socialist
Metropolis that the population of Moscow increased
something like 50% in the latter decade or two of the
1800s due largely to immigration from the country.) As
a result, available arable land started to run out and
farms got progressively smaller, and soil became
exhausted by being overworked, resulting in even less
arable land, and herds could not be supported. By the
end of the century, one-third of peasant households
did not even own a horse. Some people moved to
Siberia, where colonists could get land. Some moved to
the cities (as mentioned). Others supported themselves
by supplementing their income from produce (if there
was any left over beyond feeding the family) by
logging, weaving, carpentry or so forth, but they were
increasingly unable to compete with the growing urban
working class. (According to Figes, BTW, it was the
newly urbanized peasants, with their hatred of rural
life, that formed the back of support for Bolshevism.)
>
> 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.
I don't get this -- who is the "rural proletariat"? Peasants aren't proletarians.
The country folk supported the SRs and the anarchists, not the Bolsheviks, AFAIK.
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.
Well, the economic interests of the peasantry, who are property-holders by definition, did not lie in socialisation of the means of the production. They lay in land reallocation (and here you do get a difference in interest between poorer and richer peasants, because, unless you're not talking about landed estates owned by the aristocracy, since the land for the poorer peasants would have to come from the richer. Actually, I believe that the de-kulakization was originally supported by the poorer peasants because they believed the land would be given to them, not become collective farms.)
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...."
>
That sounds right. How are peasants going to survive que peasants without trade? They live by selling their goods in the city, once they move past the subsistence farming level.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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