The Russian Peasant And The Revolution

In this book, conceived and written for the general reader as well as the specialist, Robert Edelman uses a case study of peasant behavior during a particular revolutionary situation to make an important contribution to one of the major debates in contemporary peasant studies. Edelman's subject is the peasantry of the right-bank Ukraine, and he uses local and regional archives seldom available to Western scholars to give a detailed picture of the ways in which the inhabitants of one of Russia's most advanced agrarian regions expressed their discontent during the years 1905-1907. By the 1890s, the landlords of Russia's Southwest had organized a highly successful capitalist form of agriculture, and Edelman demonstrates that their peasants responded to these dramatic economic changes by adopting many of the forms of political and social behavior generally associated with urban proletarians.

Excerpt from The Russian Peasant and the Revolution The Russian Revolution came at the wrong hour. It should have come before or after the war, but not in the midst of it. While the war lasted, we were so passionately engrossed in it, that we were not prepared to tolerate anything that was likely to interfere with our military success. That was quite natural. The war loomed as the biggest thing in our life. We felt that everything we respected, loved and enjoyed would be annihilated, unless we smashed the threatening force. As long, therefore, as the Russian Revolution appeared to us to be a gain for our cause, - as it had in the early days, when we imagined that it was essentially a revolt against the pro-Germain oligarchy - we sang hymns of praise to it. But when it became apparent that the Revolution was much more than that, that it was a rebellion against the entire social order which the old regime had reared, and that instead of strengthening, it had actually weakened Russia's military power, we grew suspicious and wroth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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A Stanford University Press classic.

As the first study in any language of the crucial social 'link' in rural Russia between broader society (obshchestvo) and the people (narod), Seregny's book will be read with great interest by all students or the late imperial period, Soviet and Western." --William G. Rosenberg This book is a timely and worthy addition to the... body of work on the 'democratic intelligentsia' of 'third element' in prerevolutionary Russia." --The Russian Review ... compelling and moving." --History Today ... this substantial volume provides detailed evidence of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the day-to-day zamstvo-teacher-peasant relationship in the period preceding the 1905 Revolution." --The Slavonic Review ... carefully researched and well documented... " --The Journal of Peasant Studies

How did peasants experience and help guide Russia's war, revolution, and civil war? Why in the end did most agree to live as part of the Bolshevik regime? Taking the First World War to the end of the Civil War as a unified era of revolution, this book shows how peasant society and peasants' conceptions of themselves as citizens in the nation evolved in a period of total war, mass revolutionary politics, and civil breakdown. Aaron Retish reveals that the fateful decision by individuals to join the Revolution or to accommodate their lifestyle within it gave the Bolsheviks the resources and philosophical foundation on which to build the Soviet experiment and reshape international politics. He argues that peasants wanted more than land from the Revolution; they wanted to be active citizens. This is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of the Russian Revolution and peasant-state relations.