Peasant Economy Culture And Politics Of European Russia 1800 1921

This collection of original essays provides a rare in-depth look at peasant life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European Russia. It is the first English-language text to deal extensively with peasant women and patriarchy; the role of magic, healing, and medicine in village life; communal economic innovation; rural poverty and labor migration from the village perspective; the agricultural hiring market as workers' turf; and the regional components of the late nineteenth-century agrarian crisis. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This ground-breaking work documents Russian efforts to appropriate Western solutions to the problem of economic backwardness since the time of Catherine the Great. Entangled then as now with issues of cultural borrowing, educated Russians searched for Western nations, ideas, and social groups that embodied universal economic truths applicable to their own country. Esther Kingston-Mann describes Russian Westernization--which emphasized German as well as Anglo-U.S. economics--while she raises important questions about core values of Western culture and how cultural values and priorities are determined. This is the first historical account of the significant role played by Russian social scientists in nineteenth-century Western economic and social thought. In an era of rapid Western colonial expansion, the Russian quest for the "right" Western economic model became more urgent: Was Russia condemned to the fate of India if it did not become an England? In the 1900s, Russian liberal economists emphasized cultural difference and historical context, while Marxists and prerevolutionary government reformers declared that inexorable economic laws doomed peasants and their "medieval" communities. On the eve of 1917, both the tsarist regime and its leading critics agreed that Russia must choose between Western-style progress or "feudal" stagnation. And when peasants and communes survived until Stalin's time, he mercilessly destroyed them in the name of progress. Today Russia's painful modernizing traditions shape the policies of contemporary reformers, who seem as certain as their predecessors that economic progress requires wholesale obliteration of the past.

The nature of rural life and food production is changing dramatically but remains overlooked by the major media. The Invisible Farm provies the first substantial accounting of this problem, addressing issues such as habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and soil degradation. Pawlick supplies readers with frightening examples of events taking place worldwide without public awareness. As these environmental problems get worse, farm reporters are disappearing from newspapers and television. Rural news and environmental issues are increasingly neglected. Pawlick argues that this lack of interest is partly due to less agricultural journalism training at universities. As a result, massive changes in farming, distribution, and production continue unabated while the consuming public is left uninformed. A Burnham Publishers book

This book addresses fundamental issues about the last decades of Tsarist Russia, exploring the social, economic and political impact of successive outbreaks of cholera and the politics of public health policy. It makes a significant contribution to current debates about how far and how successfully modernisation was being implemented by the Tsarist regime.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Charles E. Timberlake. The contributors include his former colleagues and students. The first section deals with “Liberalism and Civil Society in Russia and Eastern Europe.” Alla Barabtarlo discusses unfinished research conducted by Charles Timberlake on the liberal activist Ivan Petrunkevich. Evgeny Badredinov analyzes research on the Russian village conducted by an important liberal lawyer and sociologist, Maksim Kovalevskii. Andrew Wise examines commentary by Polish liberals and their exiled Russian colleagues published in the Warsaw press from 1920–1923. The second section deals with “Orthodoxy and Cultural Identity in Late Imperial Russia.” Robert Nichols explains the role in Russia’s monastic revival played by Gethsemane skete, a monastic cloister that was founded in 1844. Sally Stocksdale details the motivations of a self-cloistering Russian noblewoman (Praskovia Yazikova) of the nineteenth century. Jesse Murray explores the cultural and religious identities of residents in the Baikal region. David Borgmeyer focuses on the response to the works of Pablo Picasso by one art critic, Sergei Bulgakov. The third section deals with “Civil Society in the Post-Soviet Era.” Byron Scott demonstrates that press freedom has been a contentious issue in these societies. James McCartney analyzes the reforming of the educational system in independent Georgia.

This volume introduces readers to an age-old question that has perplexed both Russians and Westerners. Is Russia the eastern flank of Europe? Or is it really the heartland of another civilization? In exploring this question, the authors present a sweeping survey of cultural, religious, political, and economic developments in Russia, especially over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Based on the inter-disciplinary Russian studies program at Dickinson College, this splendid collection will complement many curricula. The text features highlight boxes and selected illustrations. Each chapter ends with a glossary, study questions, and a reading list.

The narrative of peasant unrest in Russia during 1905–1906 combines a chronology of incidents drawn from official documents, with close analysis of the villages associated with the disorders based upon detailed census materials compiled by local specialists. The analysis concentrates on a single province: Kursk Oblast, bordering the now independent Ukraine. In place of the general surveys of the revolution that dominate the literature, Miller focuses on local events and the rural populations that participated in them. Documents the degree to which the peasant community had been pushed onto the path of change by the end of the nineteenth century, how much the “peasantry” itself had become increasingly heterogeneous in outlook and occupation, and the rapidity with which these processes had begun to corrode the legitimacy of the older order. Miller concludes that unrest was concentrated mostly among peasant communities for whom the benefits the vital interactions between social unequals that had maintained a fragile social peace in the countryside had been radically eroded; he furthermore identifies the prominent role played by that spectrum of persons that retained their ties to their villages, but stood toward the margins of rural life.

The current dominant approach to Russian peasant behaviour emphasizes rural resistance to reform in broad terms, and to the introduction of market forces in particular. Bringing together some of the finest scholars on rural Russia, this groundbreaking volume examines this perception with an analysis of both historical and contemporary patterns of rural adaptation in Russia. Four articles included analyze peasant responses in the post-Soviet era, and focus on: * the relationship between poverty and rural adaptation * the social origins of private farmers in southern Russia and Ukraine * response patterns by large farms (formerly collective and state farms) * household adaptation using a standardized set of criteria. This fascinating book gives an illuminating picture of the ways in which peasants respond to new environmental conditions and stimuli created by reform. The substantive material included draws on fieldwork and survey data collected from rural Russia, from the Stolypin reforms in the pre-Soviet era, and collectivisation of agriculture during the 1930s in the Soviet era. This book was previously as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.