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The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods - it is, for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy this left in the post-Soviet era.The book paints a full picture of peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and, through Boris Gorshkov''s original ecology paradigm for understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships between the physical environment, peasant economic and social practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of peasant social and political institutions within the context of these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions, tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.>
List of contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Author's Preface
Introduction: Institutional, Historiographical and Conceptual Framework
1. A Life under Russian Serfdom: Peasant Society and Politics under Serfdom
2. Peasant Agriculture
3. Peasants, Childhood and Gender roles
4. The Field and the Loom: Peasant Economy
5. Peasants and Russia's Early Industrialization
6. The Peasant and the Formation of Industrial Labor Forces
7. From Peasant to Industrialist: Social Mobility of the Peasantry
8. Peasant Public Sphere
9. Peasants and the End of Serfdom
10. Post-Emancipation Peasant Economy and Society
11. Peasants and the Russian Revolutions
12. Realpolitik: From the Red Terror to the New Economic Policy
13. Peasant Life during Collectivization
Afterword: Demise of the Russian Peasantry
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Boris B. Gorshkov is Lecturer in History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. He is the author of Russia's Factory Children, Society, and the State: Childhood, Apprenticeship and Law, 1800-1917 (2009) and A Life under Russian Serfdom: Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-68 (2005).
