Imagining the rational landscape in late imperial Russia

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 273-291

  Pallot, Judith ^a  

^a CHRIST CHURCH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

IMPERIALISM; LAND REFORM; PEASANT AGRICULTURE; RURAL HISTORY;

RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 0034176012     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1006/jhge.2000.0215     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford 1989).
2. Ibid., 19.
3. There is a large literature on utopianism in Russia. For other works on peasant Utopias see, B. M. Petenaude, Peasants into Russians: the Utopian essence of war communism, Slavic Review 54 (1995) 552-570;
4. K. Clark, The city versus the countryside in Soviet peasant literature of the twenties: a duel of Utopias, in A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites (Eds), Boslehvik Culture (Indiana 1985) and several of the essays in Russian History/'Histoire Russe special issue, Utopia in Russian History, Culture, and Thought: a Symposium 11 (1984).
5. In identifying the reform as Utopian I am in the good company of Michael Confine. See M. Confine, Russian cutomary law and the study of peasant mentalités, The Russian Review 44 (1985), 35-44.
6. The process of forming individual enclosed farms was termed uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo. It was different from group land settlement gruppovoe zemleustroistvo, also allowed under the law, which involved the consolidation of a whole village's land. The important difference between unitary and group projects was that the former necessarily involved the conferment of title, whereas the latter simply rearranged land within the context of communal tenure.
7. The phrase is a play upon prime minister Stolypin's description of the reform as a 'wager on the strong' peasant and was coined by David Macey, one of the reform's principal Western historians. See D. J. Macey, A wager on history: the Stolypin agrarian reforms as process, in J. Pallet (Ed.), Transforming Peasants. Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861-1930: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995 (Basingstoke 1998) 149-173. Stolypin's original words have been widely misinterpreted, especially by Soviet scholars, as meaning that the reform was disigned primarily for rich peasants. In fact, peasants across the socio-economic scale were supposed to benefit from the reform.
8. The question of whether liberalism in the pre-revolutionary Russian context was Utopian is discussed in C. Pape, On the margins of Utopia? Zemstvo liberals and the peasant commune, Russian History/Histoire Russe, 11, (1984) 220-235.
9. On the Westernizer versus Slavophile controversy see, A. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Oxford 1975).
10. The intellectual history of the reform from the Emancipation to its final enactment in 1906 is discussed in D. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia 1861-1906: The Pre-History of the Stolypin Reforms (Northern Illinois 1987).
11. S. P. Frank, Confronting the domestic other: rural popular culture and its enemies in fin-de-siecle Russia, in S. P. Frank and M. D. Steinberg (Eds), Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton 1994) 74-107.
12. The fullest elaboration of the rural Utopia based on farm individualization, in fact, dated back to the 1880s to the ideas of P. A. Bakunin (a younger brother of the anarchist) who envisaged a rural idyll of enclosed farms in which man achieved an 'inner whollness' as a result of toil on his own farm. See Pape, op. cit., 228-229.
13. C. A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late-Nineteenth Century Russia (Oxford 1993).
14. K. la. Vorob'ev, Drobnost" i chrezpolosnost' zemel' pri obshchinnom zemlevladenii, in Trudy s"ezda deiatel'ei agronomicheskoi pomoshi mestnomu khoziaistvu, 10-19 Fev. 1901 (Moscow 1901).
15. A. Bilimovich, Zemleustroitel'nie zadachi i zemleustroitel'noe zakonodatel'stvo Rossii (Kiev 1907) 10-1; P. M. Lokhtin, Kak sdelal'sia kresl'ianam bogache (Kiev 1906).
16. R. A. Leman, Kniga dlia krest'ian nechernozemnykh gubernii Rossii (Moscow 1908) 7.
17. B. lurevskii, Zemleustroitel'nii smotr (St Petersburg 1912) 53.
18. V. V. Vorontsov, Progressivnye techeniia v krest'ianskom khoziastve (St Petersburg 1892) 498-499; 404.
19. Bilimovich, op. cit., 11.
20. A. A. Riittikh, Zavisimost' krestian ot obshchini i mira (St Petersburg 1903) 38-39.
21. For a longer discussion of the rationality of the land holding system in the commune see J. Pallet, Land Reform in Russia 1906-1917. Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Plan for Rural Transformation (Oxford 1999) Chapter 3. The principal contemporary Russian authors who wrote of the positive affects of repartitioning were Vorontsov, op. cit., and V. Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedeniipo moskovskoi gubernii. Kresti'anskoe khoziastvo, Vypusk 1 (Moscow 1879).
22. The detailed provisions of the reform and establishment of the administration are discussed in G. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize. Agrarian Reform in Russia 1861-1930 (Urbana 1982).
23. On education reforms see B. Ekloff, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 (Berkeley 1986); on gathering socio-ecnomic data on the peasants, M. Echlin, The Statistics on the Russian peasantry in the nineteenth century (unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford); on social agronomy, Y. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia 1861-1914 (London 1999).
24. J. Pallet, Khutora and otruba in Stolypin's program of farm reorganisation, Slavic Review 42 (1984) 242-245.
25. Russkii gosudarstvennii istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter RGIA): f. 408, opis' 1, 1909, no. 116, 1. 441.
26. Ibid., 1. 214.
27. RGIA, f. 408, opis' 1, 1914, no. 272, 1. 61.
28. RGIA, f. 408, opis' 1, 1914, no. 518, 1. 14.
29. RGIA, f. 408, opis' 1, 1911, no. 161, 1. 12.
30. Zemleustroistvo 1907-1910, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg 1911)41.
31. A. A. Kofod, Khulorskoe razselenie (St Petersburg 1907).
32. Trudy, op cit., 45.
33. A. A. Kofod, Krest'ianskie khutora na nadel'noi zemle, Vols I and II (St Petersburg 1905).
34. Kofod, Krest'ianskie khutora, Vol. I, 225.
35. The nadel was the land allotted to peasant communes from the lords' demesne or the state under the terms of the Emancipation settlement. It was covered by different laws with respect to sale and purchase from land acquired on the open land market.
36. Ibid., 213.
37. Ibid., 140.
38. Ibid., 89.
39. This comment was made in 1909 by the academician B. D. Brutskus at a seminar of the Imperial Free Economic Society. See Trudy vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva nosl-2 (1909) 50.
40. P. Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (Basingstoke 1998) Chapter 4.
41. Zemleustroistvo: 1907-1910 gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg 1911).
42. L. Siegelbaum, Exhibiting kustar' industry in late imperial Russia/exhibiting late imperial Russia in kustar' industry, in J. Pallet (Ed.), Transforming Peasants, 38.
43. According to Russkoe Bogatstvo peasants were paid to display their vegetables and other produce at agricultural shows. At one show in Simbirsk a variety of exotics was displayed including cauliflowers, tomatoes, french beans and leeks, seeds for which had been distributed to khutor farmers by the local land settlement commission. See Russkoe Bogatstvo 10 (1910) 81.
44. Katalog sostoiashchei pod vysochaishum ego imperatorskogo velichestva pokrovitel'stvom ts-arkosel'skoi 1710 iubileinoe 1910 vystavki, (St Petersburg 1911,
45. Novoe vremia, 14 August (1911) 3.
46. Rech1 21 September, (1911) 2; 8 October (1911) 5.
47. Rech' 9 October (1911) 5.
48. Rossiia, 9 October (1911) 1.
49. B. lurevskii, Chto dostignutno zemleustroistvom (St Petersburg 1912) 20.
50. A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 2nd ed (St Petersburg 1914) 155.
51. See Kratkii ocherk za desiatiletie. Komitet po zemleustroitel'nym delam (St Petersburg 1916) 22.
52. Although disagreeing upon when precisely the reforms' authors backed off the idea of khutora, both David Macey and George Yaney argue that the reform aimed at a much more general rationalization of peasant land holding than argued in this paper. See Macey, A wager on history, and Yaney, op. cit.
53. For this view of the reform see Pallet, Land Reform in Russia.
54. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward (1999), op cit., argues that the land reform was essentially abandoned by the government in favour of agricultural extension operated through the zemstvos from 1910. A slightly different view that sees the land reform merging into agrarian reform is developed by K. Matsuzato, Stolypinskaia reforma i rossiiskaia agrotekhnologicheskaia revoliutsiia, Otechestvennaia istoriia 6 (1992) 194-200.
55. For a review of the works see, D. J. Macey, Stolypin is risen! The ideology of agrarian reform in contemporary Russia, in D. Van Atta (Ed.), The Farmer Threat (Boulder, Colorado 1993), 97-120.