Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914 - Hardcover

Kotsonis, Y.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333725875 ISBN 13: 9780333725870

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

This book is the first monograph to examine the agricultural cooperative movement in Russia before 1914 - a movement which, with nine million members, was Europe's largest. Why, the author asks, were Russian peasants rendered `backward' no matter how impressive their achievement? Did 'progress' necessarily suggest that the objects of change would participate in their own transformation? To answer these questions, Professor Kotsonis places material and social change in the context of Russian political culture in order to show the possibilities and limitations of political and social integration under the Old Regime. Looking at a host of well-known historical figures, including Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, and Alexander Chaianov, and by drawing on a wide array of newly opened local and state archives in Russia, Kotsonis shows how the ideology of progress as practised in the cooperative movement reflected pan-European tensions in processes of economic, social, and political change.

About this title

Review:

'In his original and imaginative book, Dr Kotsonis considers the rival projects for peasant reform in Tsarist Russia, and their impact on life and work of the peasants. The author argues that all these schemes, from the conservative to the radical left, assumed that the peasants were 'backward', and should be guided to a better progressive future. This was the root of their failure, of the peasants own attempt to modify the agenda. This study, based on a wide variety of new sources, will arouse much interest and controversy.' - Professor R.W. Davies, University of Birmingham
'This interesting book will provoke much controversy.' - Slavic Review

'This study presents succinctly...the clearest and most thorough explanation yet available in the West of the failure of those ostensibly responsible for the welfare of Russia's peasantry to assist them toward the progress enjoyed by many of their contemporaries in Western and Central Europe...This work is...a major contribution to augmenting our understanding of a crucial failure plaguing the troubled history of late Imperial Russia.' - Oliver Hayward, EH. NET

Synopsis:

In this monograph on the Russian cooperative movement before 1914, economic and social change is considered alongside Russian political culture. Looking at such historical actors as Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, and Alexander Chaianov, and by tapping into several newly opened Russian local and state archives on peasant practice in the movement, Kotsonis suggests how cooperatives reflected a pan-European dilemma over whether and to what extent populations could participate in their own transformation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0333725875
• ISBN 13: 9780333725870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 255