Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms: Statistics, Land Allotments, and Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1700-1921 9780773556201

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note about Translations, Transliterations, and Dates
Introduction The New Land Allotment Tradition, the New Moral Economy
1 Setting the Precedent: The State of Sufficiency
2 Serf Emancipation: Sanctifying the Normed Nadel, Measuring Its Sufficiency
3 Normalizing the Nadel and Peasant Economy: History and Zemstvo Statistics
4 “Normal” Households: Economic Development and the Middle Peasant
5 Stolypin’s Wager on the Middle: Land Norms and “Sufficiency”
6 Land Norms as Social Justice in Revolution, Civil War, and Beyond
Conclusion The Legacy of Serfdom and Persistence of the Sufficient Nadel
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T sa r d o m o f S u f f ic ie n cy, Empi re of Norms

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T SA RDOM O F  SUF F ICI ENCY, EMPIRE O F NORMS Statistics, Land Allotments, and Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1700–1921

D av i d W . Da r row

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5507-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5620-1 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5621-8 (eP UB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Darrow, David W., 1962–, author Tsardom of sufficiency, empire of norms: statistics, land allotments, and agrarian reform in Russia, 1700–1921 / David W. Darrow. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-5507-5 (cloth). – is bn 978-0-7735-5620-1 (ep d f ). – isb n 978-0-7735-5621-8 (ep ub) 1. Allotment of land – Russia – History.  2. Allotment of land – Russia – Statistics – History.  3. Land reform – Russia – History.  4. Agriculture and state – Russia – History.  5. Agriculture and state – Russia – Statistics – History.  6. Peasants – Government policy – Russia – History.  7. Peasants – Russia – Economic conditions – Statistics.  8. Russia – Rural conditions – Statistics.  I. Title. HD1992.D37 2018

338.1094

C 2018-903886-1 C2018-903887-X

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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This one’s for you, dad. Donald R. Darrow (1939–2013)

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note about Translations, Transliterations, and Dates  xiii Introduction: The New Land Allotment Tradition, the New Moral Economy 3   1 Setting the Precedent: The State of Sufficiency  18   2 Serf Emancipation: Sanctifying the Normed Nadel, Measuring Its Sufficiency 54   3 Normalizing the Nadel and Peasant Economy: History and Zemstvo Statistics  94   4 “Normal” Households: Economic Development and the Middle Peasant 131   5 Stolypin’s Wager on the Middle: Land Norms and “Sufficiency” 165   6 Land Norms as Social Justice in Revolution, Civil War, and Beyond 214

Conclusion: The Legacy of Serfdom and Persistence of the Sufficient Nadel 242 Notes 251 Bibliography 293 Index 347

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Acknowledgments

There were times when I wondered if I’d ever get to writing this part of the book, although as the dog knows, I rehearsed multiple iterations on our walks. At the same time, I have some confidence that my tortoise approach to the project has resulted in a better book than I would have written had I attempted to be the hare. I started out to write a book on zemstvo statisticians, but came to realize that statistics in Russia meant so much more. Working it all out, and going through the sources (let alone the writing), took time. This work would not have been possible without the assistance, support, friendship, and love of more people than I could possibly remember, let alone have time to thank specifically. First, I offer thanks to the archivists and librarians who assisted me at various stages of the project: in Saint Petersburg at the Russian State Historical Archive, the Central State Historical Archive of Saint Petersburg, and the National Library of Russia (especially Alla Tikhonovna and her assistance in the VEO Zemstvo Collection); in Moscow at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Central Historical Archive of Moscow, the Russian State Library (forever the Leninka in my heart) and my favourite place to work, the State Public Historical Library. The archivists at the Hoover Institution Archives made work there rewarding and pleasant, and I have received immense assistance from the librarians at my home institution, U D ’s Raymond Roesch Library, especially from Heidi Gauder, Chris Tangeman and Fred Jenkins. In a world of dwindling resources for this sort of work, I have received generous financial assistance from a variety of sources. A University of Iowa Department of History Laurence Lafore Research

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x Acknowledgments

Fellowship and a grant from the American Council of Teachers of Russian-State Department Title VIII program funded the earliest stages of the project. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Research and Exchange Board, as well as the University of Dayton Research Council, facilitated additional research, and funds from the University of Dayton Department of History and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences allowed me to write and run down loose ends in the archive. I have been fortunate. I could not have written this book without the friendship, criticism, mentorship, and intellectual stimulation of many. At the University of Iowa, Steve Hoch encouraged me to aim high and think about big questions. He also taught me that peasants were legitimate subjects for historical investigation. This was good news for an Iowa boy whose best childhood memories were of evenings on a farm near Olin, Iowa. Jaroslaw Pelenski taught me that ideology and ways of conceptualizing power and authority had deep roots. Alan Spitzer taught me self-awareness as a historian and the joy of a good fish story. I offer thanks to my UD colleagues Marybeth Carlson, Una Cadegan, Janet Bednarek, Larry Flockerzie, and Bill Trollinger, who mentored me through tenure and into the present. They are fonts of wisdom, patience, and comradery. Dr Meghan Henning of our Religious Studies department was the very best of writing buddies, modeling 1,000word mornings that I strove to match or exceed. My colleague Dorian Borbonus provided helpful advice and comment and helped me maintain the proper work atmosphere of the library’s sixth floor. Caroline Merithew has been a good colleague, sounding board, and friend. Musical colleagues in the Back Porch Jam – Fearless Leader Bill Scheurman, Kurt Mosser, Maura Donahue, Mark Brill, the late Eric Suttman, Mike and Beth, and others provided needed laughter and amusement along the way (and even some decent musical performances now and then). Within the field, Scott Seregny took me under his wing. He taught me how to work like a Stakhanovite in the archive and the library, making use of each waking moment, and timing work venues to make meals coincide with the best of the institutional stolovaias available, or with a visit to Lagidze for khatchapuri and solianka. In the states, he modelled pie connoisseurship and introduced me to the music of Steve Earle and the friendship of Ben Eklof, both of which have improved my work and my life. He was my staunchest critic and my best friend. I still miss him.

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Acknowledgments xi

Over the years, my work has benefited from the thoughtful and supportive criticism of Willard Sunderland, Paul Werth, Franziska Schedewie, Katja Bruisch, Ella Saginadze, and the audiences for countless panels at A SE E E S, its SC SS affiliate, BAS E E S , and the Midwest Russian History Workshop. A conference organized by Katja Bruisch and Klaus Gestwa at the German Historical Institute in Moscow was instrumental in figuring out an end for the story and sharpening my argument, as was a 2015 conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of Sergei Witte’s death hosted by Boris Kolonitskii and the European University in Saint Petersburg. I offer special thanks to key Russian colleagues. Alexander Semyonov at the Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, and his Boundaries of History Seminar were generous in their visa support and willingness to critique early stages of the work over the last three years. Alexander Polunov has been a helpful resource. The late Natalia Mikhailovna Pirumova, whom I met at a conference on the zemstvo that she organized in Tver’ in 1994, introduced me to the State Historical Library and, most importantly, to her students, including Galina Ulianova. I continue to benefit from Galya’s insights, particularly her keen knowledge of Russian history and all things Moscow (past and present), and from her friendship. Most significantly, I have been blessed by the collegial friendship of a quartet of Columbia grads who have been my constant sounding board. David McDonald, Yanni Kotsonis, Frank Wcislo, and Peter Holquist have generously shared their deep knowledge of imperial Russian history, their friendship, and their patience. They are my intellectual soul mates who have pushed me to be better, convinced me that I could write this book, put up with me yelling at the T V during football and basketball games, answered text messages from the archive with enthusiasm matching my own, written letters for grants, and read my prose at its worst. I am forever grateful that I found them and that they adopted me into their tribe. Neither words nor riches can convey the debt I have accumulated with my family. Not many spouses would willingly let their partner traipse off to Saint Petersburg six weeks after bringing a new Irish Setter puppy into the house. Maura did. She has been my rock, my solace, my cheerleader, and my critic. She has tried to break me of the habit of starting stories in the middle, worried about my health, and listened to me ramble about peasants and the State Peasant Land Bank more than I’m sure she ever intended. For this and her generous

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xii Acknowledgments

love, I am so blessed. Thank you. Finally, one of the joys of finishing this project is being able to show it to the kids. They, too, have put up with a lot and have turned into fine young men and women despite (or perhaps because of?) my absences and preoccupations. I am especially proud of my daughter Claire who, like her grandpa (to whom I’ve dedicated this book) and father, has heard the call to be inquisitive and to teach. I wish to thank the publishers of Continuity and Change, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and The Russian Review for permission to use parts of earlier articles at various points in the book. I offer special thanks to the publishers of Cahiers du monde russe for permission to use work published there as the core of Chapter 6. Finally, this work has benefited greatly from the support and input of my editor Richard Ratzlaff, the guidance of managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and the staff at MQUP , and the excellent copy editing of Matthew Kudelka. They and all the others mentioned above, as well as the anonymous readers for the press, have made this a better book. Thank you. Any deficiencies that remain are on me. 17 February 2018 Oakwood, Ohio

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A Note about Translations, Transliterations, and Dates

All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Russian words appear according to the Library of Congress transliteration system with the exception of common names and plurals, which have been Anglicized for the convenience of the reader. Hence, zemstva appear as zemstvos, desiatiny appear as desiatinas, and so on. Russian terms such as these are defined in the notes as they emerge in the narrative. Imperial Russia operated on the Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was thirteen days behind the calendar used in United States (thus the February Revolution of 1917 happened in March if you were sitting in New York), and remained so until the Bolsheviks adopted the Gregorian calendar in February 1918.

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T sa r d o m o f S u f f ic ie n cy, Empi re of Norms

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In t ro du cti on

The New Land Allotment Tradition, the New Moral Economy

This book is about the social construction of knowledge and the impact of this process on the fate of the Russian Empire. At the centre of the discussion is the peasant land allotment (nadel). The nadel was the fundamental measure of peasant well-being in Russia. Like other categories, it has its own history. The nadel linked peasant well-being to access to a quantity of land sufficient to maintain peasant households and contribute to the economic and labour needs of their lords and the state. The nadel was an entitlement symbolic of the old regime’s moral economy of serfdom and commitments to alternative conceptions of ownership and the common good. It was an entitlement that the state struggled to deliver.1 The nadel imposed strict limits on agrarian change. At the same time, it was the foundation of any policy attempting to create change. The nadel trapped officials into ways of seeing and shaping the peasant economy that they themselves recognized but proved unable to escape even into Soviet times. This book examines the history of the nadel to understand why this old-regime category, a legacy of serfdom, persisted, as well as the consequences of its persistence. The story of the nadel and its increasing definition by measurable norms demonstrates how modernity reinforces past institutions as much as it changes them, particularly in the context of developing societies. This reveals another aspect of the dilemma of what Alexander Gerschenkron termed “relative backwardness” – the advantages and drawbacks of a developing society’s rapid adoption of modern practices (as opposed to their more organic development over time) and their impact on society.2 In essence, as Alfred Reiber argued for Russia, modern social transformations often create a complex “sedimentary”

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Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms

world, wherein “each transformation” creates “new social conditions” but at the same time does not “doom or obliterate the social conditions it was designed to replace.”3 Rather than disappearing, the categories and the institutions of the earlier regime persist long after society has set a more modern course; indeed, they become revitalized and stronger in new forms.4 In the nineteenth century Russia experienced a “rise of statistical thinking” characteristic of modernity.5 Russian statisticians and statesmen focused on Russian problems, but did so immersed in the European conversation about numbers. Statistics strengthened rather than weakened the nadel as a category of economic measurement. Government officials, and statisticians in the academy and other organizations, as well as the peasantry’s urban advocates, counted what they could as a means of assessing peasant well-being, formulating policy, assigning tax burdens, and gauging the empire’s economic development. Lacking more sophisticated measures, they counted inputs such as number of horses, number of male workers, or number of cattle. The most important item enumerated, however, was land expressed as nadel size per male worker. The key concern was whether this nadel was sufficient to provide for the household’s consumption needs and enable it to meet its payment obligations. Over time, nadel sufficiency came to be expressed in terms of allotment norms. These numbers and the way they were used to shape policy form the basis for this study. State programs to modernize economic or other institutions – often pitched as “reform” – depend heavily on the categories and conceptions of reality bequeathed by the past, the lenses of past experience through which elites filter, label, and comprehend their objects of reform. Old institutional assumptions and categories provide the building blocks for new epistemological and administrative structures that are, in turn, imbued with the authority of modern rational objectivity when measured and expressed as numbers. In this way, the quest to remove the shackles of backwardness strengthens or reinvents traditional forms, combining in one institution the traditional moral authority of custom with the new moral authority of the modern. By this means, one of the chief legacies of empire in Russia, a land allotment that objectified a perceived moral economy, with origins in the servile past and a character reimagined through the modern discourse of statistics, solidified conceptions of peasants as inherently agricultural creatures, contributed to perceptions that they were backward, perpetually poverty-ridden, and in need of tutelage (opeka), and

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Introduction 5

coloured the process of agrarian reform throughout the empire’s final years and into the brave new Soviet world. Historians have viewed the Russian Empire’s inability to overcome the legacy of serfdom by implementing meaningful agrarian reform as a key contributor to its demise in the maelstrom of the Great War and the 1917 Revolution. The significance of the agrarian question (agrarnyi vopros) as a factor contributing to the end of autocracy emerges not only from the empire’s overwhelmingly rural and peasant composition but also from the important position it occupies in both systemic explanations of the empire’s demise and explanations centred more on immediate events. The Russian state always had an ambiguous relationship with its peasantry, who were the source of its sustenance and fears, its human potential and human insufficiencies.6 This ambiguity only increased after the serfs were emancipated in 1861. Between 1861 and 1905, no fewer than three major state commissions and a host of statutes sought to reorder peasant society and to improve its ability to sustain itself (and by extension, the state). These efforts culminated in the reforms enacted under the Russian prime minister, Peter Stolypin, after the 1905 Revolution. Yet, despite these efforts the empire’s conversation about land reform remained to the end dominated by such terms as the “insufficient allotment” (nedostatochnyi nadel) and “land hunger” (malozemel’e). In 1917, slogans demanding land flourished alongside those demanding bread and peace. Access to land was perhaps the fundamental moral question of the Revolution, a major yardstick by which social justice was measured, an obstacle that the imperial state and society had failed to overcome. Thus, to understand the empire’s demise, we must ask two questions. First, why did meaningful agrarian reform continue to elude the Russian state? And second (and more importantly), why did the issue of “how much land is enough” (the input side of production) become and remain normative, persisting at the centre of reform debates and embedded in public assessments of the autocracy’s legitimacy even for policy-makers and observers who realized that “hope for the future lay not alone in providing the stronger peasants with more land, but in altering the relationship of the peasants with the land that they already had”?7

R e f o r m in g R u r al Russi a The historiography of agrarian reform in Russia focuses on policy debates and shifts in administrative structures that in many ways

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6

Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms

mirrored the reform debates themselves in their emphasis on administrative changes, as well as on the nature and fate of the Great Russian repartitional land commune (mir or obshchina). We have equated agrarian reform with elite attempts to “improve” or modernize agriculture (introduce intensive cultivation), the condition of those engaged in it, their institutions (broadly defined), and their legal position in society. This has placed the history of agrarian reform in the modern era on a teleological trajectory (albeit one with periods of backtracking) of incremental policies devised by educated elites to promote a shift in the agrarian economy away from the mutual dependencies and subsistence rights of a “moral economy” embodied in the commune, and towards private property, contracts, and the rule of market forces.8 Thus we have studies of proposals to abolish serfdom and to encourage better estate management in the reign of Catherine II;9 a literature on reforms to state peasant administration and the creation of the Ministry of State Domains under the auspices of Count P.D. Kiselev;10 interpretations of the origins of the emancipation statutes that abolished serfdom (yet little on their actual implementation);11 investigations of the “agrarian crisis” the emancipation purportedly engendered;12 multiple attempts to redefine the relationship between the state and the peasantry in the wake of the Emancipation;13 accounts of the Empire’s final stab at modernizing the peasant economy by chipping away at the commune – the so-called Stolypin Reforms;14 and further accounts of the relationships between the peasantry, agrarian professionals, and reform.15 These latter works in particular form a line of historiography that seeks an understanding of state policies by considering the “mechanisms of representation” through which officials and society perceived peasants.16 The book falls within this line of scholarship. In the end, we have attributed the inadequacy or failure of these “improvement” initiatives – these attempts to modernize Russian agriculture (and hence the answer to our first question) – to a variety of factors, including these: chronic “under-government,” lack of any unified bureaucratic vision and coordination, bureaucratic overambition, the inadequacies of the serf emancipation, the benightedness of the peasantry itself, and a profound resistance to change rooted in a peasant subsistence mentality that we might term the “moral economy” paradigm. The moral economy paradigm posits a peasant sense of justice embodied in a series of reciprocal relationships with the outside world and within its own ranks that uphold the right to

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Introduction 7

subsist as a moral absolute. Rational choice from the peasantry’s perspective was thus guided not by a drive to maximize return on investment but by a grimmer realization of its position on the edge of subsistence. For a half century this “moral economy” paradigm has been a key foundation for interpreting the history of peasants’ lives and understanding the Russian state’s attempts to ameliorate them. Ever since it was coined by E.P. Thompson in reference to motivations in eighteenth-century English food riots and applied to peasant societies in the throes of marketization by James C. Scott, this moral economy paradigm has had a number of critics, particularly in reference to Russia.17 It can be a problematic theoretical lens. The question remains, however – can we use some sort of “moral economy” conception of state and economy (particularly in the Russian Empire, where an activist state always considered itself an economic actor) to explain the Russian state’s inability to save itself on the agrarian front even if it fails as an explanation of peasants as economic and political actors? Can it explain why the question of “how much land is enough” persisted as the main object of discussion and centre of moral assessments of the autocracy’s legitimacy? I believe that the answer to this question is “yes,” if we approach the “moral economy” not as a model for understanding peasant behaviour but as an invented tradition that, over the course of the nineteenth century, took on the moral force of custom and became manifest in a public perception that the state was required to meet peasant land needs.18 From this perspective, the basic unit of the moral economy and “custom” was not the repartitional land commune (as the current historiography would have it), but the nadel – the parcel of land allotted to peasants for their sustenance by the lord and, especially after 1861, by the state. Conceptualizing “moral economy” as a perceived state obligation to allot land (rather than in its usual historiographic sense of communally oriented and riskaverse peasant behaviour) can tell us a lot about the connection between agrarian reform and imperial demise. Recent critiques of the “moral economy” paradigm revolve around the issue of how objectively “real” it was as a shaper of the peasantry’s world view and behaviour. This may be helpful for understanding peasants’ daily lives, but it misses the mark when it comes to understanding how a “moral economy”– based nadel discourse powerfully shaped elite debates and reform initiatives as officials sought to transform the peasant economy. We may have ample cause to question the

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Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms

“moral economy” as an explanation of peasants as economic actors. As seen from “above” by those outside the village, however, the possibility of, and need for, a “moral economy” as embodied in an increasingly quantified nadel was all too real, especially given evolving views of the connections between property, public commitments, and social responsibilities.19 Why did agrarian reformers remain committed to the nadel? That is, why did they continue to rely on extensification as agrarian reform? And how did the nadel become normative? These questions remain largely unaddressed. I argue that agrarian reform, which was crucial to the Russian Empire’s fate in so many ways, remained difficult, ambiguous, and largely unsuccessful because of a constructed set of intellectual constraints and assumptions from which reformers could not escape. Statistics as a mode of comprehending the population – inventing it for state and other purposes – was something Russia shared with the rest of the world, as were its attempts to manage the socio-economic consequences of modernity. Russia developed parallel with the West in its application of statistics, but the categories and conceptions of the peasantry that counting concretized prevented it from achieving the reform it needed to survive. Numbers and categories are socially constructed. Context matters.20 In assuming a right to subsistence that could be managed through numbers and norms (albeit for its own state purposes), Russia was in many ways advanced. Applying this technocratic development to managing peasants, however, had important consequences. As this book demonstrates, it locked the intelligentsia and officialdom into a view of peasant poverty that had much to do with how they “saw” the peasant economy and with expectations created by the state itself. Based on input measures, it seemed that peasants were perpetually poor (whether they were actually starving or not), and there was no other means of assessing peasant well-being. This view was not simply political agitation from the left – it was rooted in ways of seeing the peasant economy found in salons, coffee houses, and chancery halls alike. The empire was thus not the victim of “fake news” foisted on the public by revolutionaries of various stripes. Rather, Russians generally viewed and thought about the peasant economy as a remnant of serfdom, and this was conditioned by a modern faith in numbers and by deeply rooted ideas about the allotment of land and about peasants – ideas with origins in the autocracy itself.21

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Introduction 9

Parallel developments do not necessarily guarantee parallel results. On the one hand, statistical work that measured peasants in market terms made the peasant economy look worse than it probably was. On the other, instead of dispelling the regime’s old conceptions of peasant separateness, statistics reinforced many of the deeply rooted assumptions about peasants and their economic lives that prevented their full integration into society. Stolypin spoke of releasing peasants’ individual initiative by freeing them from the commune. But as this work shows, this was a measured, managed individualism in terms of peasants’ economic aspirations – an individualism of the norm, or the middle peasant. The official standpoint was that peasants should have neither too much nor too little land. Technocratic approaches to managing the population facilitated continued separation of the peasantry as a category, rather than integration through Western conceptions of property and individual peasant freedom. The peasantry remained an imperial development project, albeit one that never received the funding it required given the competing demand that Russia maintain its place as a great power. Although many rural professionals and officials came to appreciate how the peasantry could play a progressive role in the national economy, from the state’s perspective they remained “backward” objects in need of tutelage.22 Numbers reinforced this image. Thus, one of the same modern processes that Russia shared with the West, “the rise of statistical thinking,” reinforced rather than alleviated the systemic issues that beleaguered autocracy. The chasm separating elites from the peasantry remained, even if officials had gotten better at seeing them and were beginning to take peasants seriously. Although experts in and out of government realized that extensification – more land – was not a sustainable path to peasant prosperity, the idea that peasants were entitled to sufficient land, no more and no less, permeated the government’s final effort to introduce a new model of peasant prosperity (the Stolypin reforms). At the same time, and despite the apparent success of Stolypin’s project, even though many critics of that project eventually resigned themselves to the new order, and even though by 1917 elites and peasants alike had bought into the utility and fairness of allotment of land by norms, it was clear that peasants and their advocates would not be satisfied with the continued existence of noble landholding outside of nobles working land allotted by the same labour or consumption norms as were

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Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms

applied to peasant holdings. Thus a perceived right to sustenance, an entitlement to a sufficient nadel determined by technocratic means, rather than the goal of increased productivity, ultimately prevailed. Statistics reinforced rather than undermined deeply rooted assumptions about what constituted rural social justice as numbers defined and legitimated “internalized notions of fairness.”23

M a k in g t h e Case Thus, to understand the politics of agrarian reform, it is imperative to understand how those connected to agrarian policy perceived the peasantry, and why. In other words, historians must carefully consider the processes by which officials attempted to manage the empire’s land and labour resources by rendering them visible in numbers. This includes considering how the assumptions made by those charged with ordering (counting/measuring) rural society affected both the process of gathering necessary data and the ordering process itself. In the terms of Bernard Cohn and James Scott, we must examine the processes whereby state officials, local lords, and professionals acquired “colonial knowledge” in order to “see like a state.”24 This book, then, attempts to explain the failure of agrarian reform not as the result of a crisis of the “moral economy” in Scott’s sense, the ineptitude of tsarist policy-makers, the benightedness of peasants, or a clock that ran out of time, but as the result of the state’s inability to deliver what many believed it was obligated to provide (a sufficient nadel), a belief reinforced by “the rise of statistical thinking.” My intent is to offer an explanation of how the allotment discourse and the use of norms came to dominate reform discussions and why this aspect of the old regime (the sufficient nadel or “sufficiency”-­ extensification), so at odds with all conceptions of modern agrarian improvement (“efficiency”-intensification), persisted. I argue that the persistence of “sufficiency” over “efficiency” was the result of a deeply ingrained sense among elites that the state was obligated to provide peasants a “sufficient” land allotment and that this perception resulted from an “invented tradition” that was deeply rooted in the precedent of the state’s own activities and reinforced by a modern information revolution (statistics). Through this process of statistical representation the nadel of the past took on modern legitimacy as an objective factor in a perceived “moral” economy in which the state was obligated to ensure sufficient access to land.

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Introduction 11

In other words, the state itself (unintentionally and for its own selfish reasons) set a precedent for considering Russia’s rural economy from a moral perspective by developing and normalizing the idea of a “sufficient” land allotment as something to which peasants were entitled and as something that the modernizing state could measure, map, and manage for the “common good.”25 Components of the modern world, particularly statistics, helped convert an activity designed to meet state fiscal needs (the allotment of land) into a perceived “tradition” (complete with its own past) and objectified it in a normed nadel that carried the moral force of “custom” equated with the “common good.” This invented tradition and perceived “custom” played a determining role in the formulation and fate of agrarian reform in late-imperial Russia and into the immediate postRevolutionary period by creating a moral yardstick (land allotment norms) by which all agrarian reform policies were measured and assessed. The sufficient allotment became a measure that the imperial state could neither meet nor transcend. Thus, even if honoured as much in the breach as in its observance, by the mid-nineteenth century a large and vocal portion of educated society (in and out of government service) had come to believe in the rationally normatized land allotment as a state entitlement, such that by 1917 it was difficult to conceive of agrarian reform in any other way. The old regime’s land allotment, the product of servile life in a world of limited good, became not only an objectification of the state’s moral obligations to the peasantry (justice), but also – through the application of statistical study – an expression of rational resource management in the name of national economic prosperity and improvement. The “moral economy” or land allotment mentalité that drove reform, permeating conservative officials and liberal society alike, emerged from the process of inventing the land allotment tradition, and from the way that the modern (particularly the modern discourse of statistics) reinforced the traditional. Broadly speaking, I develop this argument by weaving together three main strands over the course of six chapters: the establishment of the precedent of land allotment as some sort of “norm” in Russia and its application to agrarian reform in a way that made it “moral”; the application of statistical measurement to the peasantry and the resulting socially constructed representation of the peasant economy; and an examination of late imperial and early Soviet agrarian reform that demonstrates how the nadel had become normative across the

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political spectrum even for those who sought to shift agriculture from “sufficiency” to “efficiency,” rendering reformers prisoners of the nadel (even as they sought to escape it). The work focuses on the European part of the empire largely because the peasant question and issues of allotment sufficiency were questions arising from, and centred on conditions in these core provinces, with peripheral areas viewed from the metropole as potential migratory space that might ease overcrowding and serve other imperial needs. In other words, although other parts of the empire became objects of imperial development through the application of statistical measurement and norms, the problem of agrarian reform and restructuring the peasant economy and the nadel itself emanated from conditions in European Russia, and it was the peasantry of these core provinces that state and experts attempted to understand and develop.26 Chapter 1, “Setting the Precedent: The State of Sufficiency,” examines the origins and management of the nadel in the coalescence of state military and fiscal needs; the state sought to ensure that first noble military servitors, and then peasants, would have sufficient means to maintain themselves and provide revenue and recruits to the state. These actions established the precedent of the Russian state (and its sovereign) as an allotter of land. This is similar to what historians of Central and Eastern Europe have termed Policey – “the manifold, often vain attempts by early modern authorities to impose discipline in the name of the common welfare.”27 The symbiotic economic relationships between peasant, state, and lord generated an interest in managing peasant access to inputs, particularly land, implying a moral economy that sought to ensure peasants access to land sufficient to provide subsistence, fulfill obligations, and occupy their labour. In one sense, Kotsonis’s “states of obligation,” necessitated some state commitment to state-sponsored access to sufficient resources.28 This positioning of the state as a provider and guarantor of access to sufficient land was the smidgeon of substance required to uphold this image of state obligations as an established tradition after 1861. The serf emancipation of 1861, the first of Emperor Alexander II’s Great Reforms, further ingrained the precedent of the state as an allotter of land – a guarantor of “sufficiency” – and imbued the allotment process and the nadel itself with a new and profoundly moral character. Chapter 2, “Serf Emancipation: Sanctifying the Normed Nadel, Measuring Its Sufficiency,” examines the emancipation as a

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Introduction 13

pivotal point in the state’s attempt to shape the rural economy and guarantee its own political and economic security by ensuring that emancipated peasants received a sufficient nadel through a system of norms. The normed nadel came to represent not only the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry but also peasant well-being. Emancipation coincided with “the rise of statistical thinking,” and numbers collected by the new Central Statistical Committee converted the nadel from an institution based on practice over time into a fixed land unit that could be rationally measured and assessed for “sufficiency.” In doing so, statistics legitimated this remnant of serfdom with the modern authority of “science.” Early assessments of the emancipation based on numbers indicated that the state had not only failed to provide former serfs with sufficient land, but overcharged them for it as well. Chapter 3, “Normalizing the Nadel and Peasant Economy: History and Zemstvo Statistics,” shows how the modern discourses of history and statistics normalized both the state’s obligation to allot land and the peasant’s natural economy. Historical works on the peasantry and its relationship with the state shaped conceptions of “tradition.” They normalized the state’s obligation to provide sufficient allotments by providing a comparative historical context for current policy and by conveying narratives of state activism that conditioned public expectations. Against this background, volumes of zemstvo statistical studies emerged with contemporary portraits of this same topic from a sociological perspective focused on the character of peasants as farmers. Zemstvo studies shifted attention away from the commune as the locus of economic life towards the household and positioned the peasant economy as a distinct type worthy of development. They shared key cadastral assumptions in their measurement of the peasant economy with the state, but they were also acutely conscious of the particularisms of place and population. This required “household inventories” (podvornye perepisi) – that is, the collection of data on all facets of peasant economic life that accounted for the social character of the producer. These surveys – adapted from the practice of serf–owner inventories designed to optimize exploitation of serf labour by measuring inputs (land, labour, and draft) – depicted economies beset by insufficiencies and confirmed negative assessments of the Emancipation. They also solidified the practice of measuring peasant economies in terms of inputs (as opposed to income), thus rendering peasants permanently impoverished and the state derelict.

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Chapter 4, “‘Normal’ Households: Economic Development and the Middle Peasant,” describes how analysts worked to discover a benchmark for the “typical” peasant economy in order to identify and address perceived deviations, such as class differentiation, and their causes. They did so in the context of a broader discussion of the general trajectory of the peasant economy and village economic relations. Put another way, this chapter examines how village social structure was placed on the normal curve and the inferences drawn from these analyses. Land allotment norms and average local allotment sizes, as well as the conceptualization of the peasant economy as something distinct from that of other producers, both implied and helped create a sense of what was “normal” in the peasant economy. With the exception of the most extreme Marxist observers, such as Lenin, statistical analyses and categorization combined with conceptions of peasant society to privilege as “normal” the average or “middle peasant” household (srednii krest’ianskii dvor). The middle peasant household became the benchmark by which others were measured and towards which reform efforts might aspire. The “average” or “middle” peasant (seredniak) emerged as a moral and economic ideal – the peasant that fit where he was supposed to fit. Chapter 5, “Stolypin’s Wager on the Middle: Land Norms and ‘Sufficiency,’” situates the Stolypin reforms on the continuum of agrarian policies aimed at ensuring sufficiency. Despite the rhetoric of individual private property, the focus of reform debates and significant pieces of legislation remained firmly rooted in the idea of “sufficiency” even though all debate participants were well aware that there was not enough arable land in the empire to bring households up to any sort of allotment norm. The sufficient allotment was more than a political slogan: it was a deeply ingrained aspect of the intellectual conceptualization of agrarian rationalization and justice that represented the power of the “moral economy” tradition established in the preceding half century. The reforms’ assault on the commune in the name of property was ultimately less important than the continuities seen through their application of norms. Land norms continued to represent the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry, a rational means for allocating land, and a concept of what a reformed peasant economy should look like. In the application of norms, Stolypin’s famous “wager on the strong” became a wager on the middle peasant. We can see this idealization of the middle peasant most clearly in an

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Introduction 15

arena where reformers had the greatest opportunity to implement their vision of the village future: the sale of land by the State Peasant Land Bank in partnership with local branches of the Main Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture. The bank and its norms pointed to a future peasant economy in which peasants would have access to a sufficient amount of land, but not too much, a world in which the peasant’s success would not lead to potential exploitation of his neighbours. Agrarian improvement as adding inputs triumphed again over agrarian improvement as intensification. The “moral economy” prevailed. Chapter 6, “Land Norms as Social Justice in Revolution, Civil War, and Beyond,” shows how deeply the idea of a sufficient nadel was embedded in society across the political spectrum from 1917 to 1921 by examining the place of land norms in the projected reforms of the autocracy’s successors and the peasantry’s own actions. The Revolution (under both the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik–Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition) sustained and enhanced the idea of allotment according to land norms, as it pushed aside opponents to any additional land allotment and empowered experts who were both forceful advocates of an additional allotment and strongly aware of such a policy’s problems. The concept of “sufficiency” and the “labouring household” prevailed on paper, even if implementation in the field was less dependent on mathematical or legal precision and more dependent on the amount of land available for redistribution or the number of workers alive to work it. During the Civil War, White forces defending the morality of private property sought accommodation with the moral economy of the sufficient nadel. In all cases, even if the guarantee of a sufficient nadel was honoured as much in its breach as in its observance, by 1917 both elites and peasants saw the normatized nadel as a state entitlement, such that it was difficult to conceive of a just agrarian reform in any other way. It was what peasants and their advocates expected and what defenders of property were willing to concede. In the end, the nadel, the product of servile life in a world of limited good, became not only an objectification of the post-autocratic state’s moral obligation to the peasantry (justice), but also a technocratic solution to the land question that met political and practical needs in a fragmented sociopolitical world in search of rural stability.

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“Land,” as Prime Minister Stolypin reminded the deputies of the State Duma in 1908, “is the key to our strength in the future. Land – this is Russia.” Stolypin spoke passionately about the need for the law to give the peasant property owner freedom to work the land and “enrich himself” free of the “yoke” of fellow commune members. A few lines later, however, he spoke of the state’s obligation to guarantee “a defined group of individuals who apply their labour to the land” (peasants) a “known area of land.” “In Russia,” he noted, “this area of land is allotment land.”29 To this end the law placed restrictions on allotment land in the interest of preserving it. That which the state allotted would not be taken away. Land defined peasant wealth and peasant well-being. Russia, to the end, remained a peasant tsardom. On a practical level, the idea of the “sufficient” land allotment survived because it proved adaptable to a number of political purposes. Over time, “sufficient” for fiscal and military purposes became “sufficient for purposes of political stability and/or justice.” Statistics – the ability to calculate and establish allotment norms and conceptualize normal households – held out the possibility that allotment norms could be rationally derived and land rationally and justly distributed. Numbers also contributed to a conception of the peasant economy as something that offered a viable path to economic development if provided with sufficient resources and proper guidance by state authorities and experts. At the same time, historical studies contextualized the practice of allotting land as a “normal” state activity. Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century the autocracy’s most radical attempt at crucial reform could not free itself from the institution that defined an old-regime moral economy at the most fundamental level: the nadel. In the end, the nadel became a means by which the Bolsheviks and Whites sought to manage the great “Black Repartition” (chernyi peredel) that flowed from the collapse of autocracy. Most importantly, the “sufficient” land allotment mentalité persisted because the state itself set a precedent for the public that equated its power to rule and tax with an obligation – at least in principle – to provide subjects with sufficient land to sustain life and meet their obligations. This precedent took on the moral character of tradition and custom in the nineteenth century, spurred by the Emancipation and by the ability of statistics to hold out the promise of rational certainty and to serve as a rational measure of the success of state policy. By the end of the nineteenth century this perceived tradition, rather than the actions of the commune, constituted the real “moral

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Introduction 17

economy” in the public mind. Statistical measurement highlighted the state’s failings in this area while at the same time holding out the possibility of allotting land with modern precision. The nadel had been transformed from a fiscal instrument into an instrument of justice. Like the official category soslovie, it had acquired a social life beyond the confines of state authority.30 This is the story revealed in the following pages.

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1 Setting the Precedent: The State of Sufficiency

The “sufficient” nadel came to objectify the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a product of the early modern state’s quest to meet its fiscal needs within the milieu of cameralist and other ideas characteristic of the Russian Enlightenment. Faced with a need to equip cavalry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the state devoted its attention to allotting land to its noble servitors and eventually fixing a supply of labour to these allotments. The gunpowder revolution of the seventeenth century and the challenges it posed for the Russian state shifted the state’s focus from allotting land to military servitors to raising the revenue and recruits required for a modern army. In the eighteenth century, cameralist conceptions of statecraft and economy designed to respond to the challenges of creating a modern army posited a symbiotic relationship between the good of the state and that of the commonweal and reinforced the autocracy’s view of itself as the ordering agent of agrarian life. State activity aimed at organizing land and population towards a common goal. All peasants, including serfs, were ultimately imperial subjects. The source of the state’s revenue and recruits lay in their robust reproduction, and this was guaranteed by moral guidance and access to sufficient land. State intervention in peasants’ economic lives promoted peasant access to land allotments sufficient for generating revenue and recruits – a populationism common to all cameralist states. This included the allotment of land to rural societies under its direct control and demands that lords provide sufficient allotments to their serfs as well. In addition to creating and reinforcing a precedent of state land allotment, state policies suggested that the relationship between access to land and obligations to state

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Setting the Precedent 19

and lord could be expressed best through the application of measurable minimums or land allotment norms. This was a moral economy of the state treasury and the estate steward – a state of sufficiency that attempted to maximize extraction without depreciating assets beyond an acceptable level and in which what was good for state and lord was, a priori, moral. Although historiography from the time of Semevskii’s Krest’ianskii vopros has portrayed this period as a preparation for the serfs’ emancipation, considering the period and state policy from the perspective of the land allotment suggests the resiliency of the nadel, and the path by which the normed land allotment became a reasonable category of peasant separateness and entitlement that hampered reform efforts.

T h e E a r ly M o d e r n S tate as an Allotter o f   L a n d : T h e P o m e s t’e Precedent In the pre-modern world of limited good, all levels of society adopted strategies designed to ensure survival and to maintain or enlarge their access to finite resources. The success of Muscovy depended on its ability to clear a path to state consolidation within these constraints during a time of dramatic changes in warfare and amidst powerful princely, boyar, and non-Russian rivalries. Ideology – an emerging view that Muscovy was the true heir to the lands of medieval Rus’ and vanishing Byzantium – legitimated the fruits of this negotiation, yielding a vibrant early modern state that saw itself as an agent of its own destiny through its control and allotment of the basic components of economic life in the early modern world: land and labour.1 As the Muscovite grand princes sought to expand their borders – to “gather the Russian lands” – conquest and consolidation presented new demands on the resources the state required to maintain itself. Military retainers’ loyalty had a price, not just in terms of compensation, but also in terms of supplying them with the means to service the defence, expansion, and consolidation of Muscovite authority. By the midsixteenth century the Muscovite tsar saw all the Russian lands gathered into his realm as his votchina, or patrimony – an inheritance of which he alone was entitled to dispose. Realizing this emerging vision, however, required that Muscovite grand princes replace the authority of local princes and boyars with that of servitors beholden to them. Conquest and confiscation provided the land needed to build such an army of servitors. Tsar Ivan III’s conquest of Novgorod (1471–78)

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facilitated what historian Richard Hellie called the “first service class revolution,” resulting in the creation of a “middle service-class cavalry” that provided the foundation of the Muscovite military structure for more than a century.2 Historian S.B. Veselovskii estimated that by 1500 Ivan III had obtained via confiscation around a million desiatinas3 of tillable land in Novgorod, the bulk of which he distributed to gentry servitors (deti boiarskie). Besides this, he settled the retainers of disgraced Moscow and Novgorodian boyars on Novgorod lands as his servitors. The exact number of gentry servitors settled in Novgorod is not known, but for the period between 1487 and 1500 the best estimate is that no fewer than 8,000 men received landholdings there. Veselovskii noted that surviving Novgorod cadastral records registered 2,000 landholdings for Muscovite settlers (boyars, deti boiarskie, and former boyar servitors), most of which ranged from 100 to 300 desiatinas per man.4 The majority of deported Novgorodians received landholdings in various parts of the original Grand Duchy of Moscow. Both the Muscovite and the Novgorodian settlers received their estates to support their duties as cavalrymen and on condition that such service was rendered. This was the pomest’e system. The receiver became known as a pomestnik or pomeshchik (plural, pomeshchiki) – that is, one who has been “placed.” The term appears in article 63 of the first Muscovite Law Code (Sudebnik) of 1497.5 There were about 17,500 such “placed” servitors by 1550. This pomest’e system was designed to provide the largest possible army with the least amount of court expense. The system’s great benefit stemmed from its elimination of the need for an expensive centralized system for collecting and distributing funds by stipulating that the inhabitants of each plot of land pay rent to a named cavalryman. The system gave cavalrymen a profound interest in keeping peasants tied to their service landholdings, especially as these land parcels were seldom consolidated estates but rather strips in open fields. This meant that every servitor’s land parcels existed in a sea of neighbouring parcels – some assigned to peers and some open – and that competition for labour was sharp and persistent. The Muscovite state struggled to provide adequate pomest’e allotments and a fixed labour supply to meet the needs of an expanding army.6 The service elite’s practice of partible inheritance served its interests, but also whet its appetite for securing pomest’e allotments.7 An interesting dichotomy developed between elites’ need for pomest’e to maintain their status and fulfill their obligations and the state’s own

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Setting the Precedent 21

interest in guaranteeing a supply of properly equipped cavalry; this gave the state an incentive to award pomest’e allotments in sufficient number to guarantee its own needs.8 To meet the growing demand for pomest’e allotments and address the tsar’s dissatisfaction with his servitors’ military preparedness, Ivan IV’s chancellors undertook a reform in the 1550s that established a more sophisticated system of pomest’e allotment.9 The new system also reflected the fact that allotments no longer went exclusively to persons with which the sovereign was personally familiar, but to a rapidly growing class of military servitors with no previous experience at court. All of these factors pointed towards creating a system with greater uniformity.10 To accomplish this, the government ordered a census of pomest’e lands in order to regularize pomest’e grants in accordance with the military services performed. The state repossessed lands in excess of a size defined by rank and obligations and redistributed them to other servitors possessing pomest’e allotments deemed insufficient to meet their obligations or to new servitors. A decree required each votchinnik (landowner) or pomeshchik to provide, in addition to his own person, one fully armed mounted soldier for every hundred chetverts of arable land held.11 Codified in the Statute on Service (Ulozhenie o sluzhbe) of 1556, the reform reassured servitors by providing a legal definition of their status, but it also limited their ability to hold land outside of service obligations.12 By the seventeenth century, the concept of allotting land according to military need and rank was so embedded in the service class that restoring these allotments to their required levels was one of the primary cleanup efforts connected to ending the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). The “state conditioned society,” and society, in turn, “conditioned the state.”13 The pomest’e system thus established a precedent that the tsar, as the votchinnik of the Russian Lands, allotted lands on the basis of service, and that his patrimony existed to serve state needs. Furthermore, it was in his best interest to use the state’s coercive power to provide adequate resources for military servitors, as maintaining his military capabilities (or even his throne) depended on being attentive to servitors’ resource needs. Norms proved useful for establishing uniformity in the allotment process. State attempts to match the population’s tax obligations to available resources mirrored the attachment of retainers’ service obligations to a particular quantity of land. A shifting tax structure accompanied the growth and maturation of the pomest’e system. The abundance of land relative to the labour supply made impractical any sort of tax

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levied exclusively on land. Muscovite grand princes thus levied taxes from the Mongol period forward based on an ability to pay that, in turn, came to be associated with a certain quantity of arable land in a given region. The tiaglo designated both the total amount of taxes levied on taxpayers and their ability to meet fiscal obligations – a union of labour, land, and other assets.14 The assessment unit went by various regional names (including the term sokha [“plough”] in the region of Moscow) but maintained its definition as labour applied to a farmstead or household, and represented the amount of land and inventory believed sufficient to maintain a peasant family. The state taxed its own peasants at a higher rate than those of its servitors, in an effort to extract maximum revenue without impinging on that of its servitors.15 By the mid-fifteenth century this tax was well-­ established throughout Novogorodian and central lands. As population density increased, the expanded Muscovite state attempted a system of cadastral registration in the 1550s to standardize assessment units. The new unit, the bol’shaia moskovskaia sokha, more explicitly incorporated qualitative assessments into the system. On pomest’ia and votchiny one new sokha equalled 800 good, 1,000 medium, 1,200 poor, or 1,300 very poor chetverti of arable land.16 Most holdings were smaller than these units and were thus assessed as a fraction of a sokha. Consideration of soil quality reflected awareness that some lands were more valuable than others, but the units themselves were not surveyed in a modern sense or demarcated in a formal way, and relied much on the testimony of local peasants.17 In an institutional sense, then, taxation linked land, inventory, and labour in a way that attempted to account for perceived ability to pay, by levying assessments on collective entities that then distributed the burden among households. The large number of abandoned fields that existed in the wake of the Time of Troubles increased pressure to link land and labour in assessment. The new tax census initiated by Tsar Mikhail in 1619–20 introduced a new unit of assessment in the 1620s: the zhivushchaia chetvert’ “or “living quarter,” an inhabited and taxable section of the agricultural community consisting of several peasant households that were taxed collectively based on their perceived prosperity.18 It was applied only to church, monastery, and pomest’e lands, representing a certain number of occupied peasant houses, depending on the community’s tax-paying ability (which was still reckoned from the sokha). Officials created this new unit to account for the fact that, even though

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Setting the Precedent 23

many land parcels were supposedly abandoned, they were still being worked. Throughout the seventeenth century, taxation continued to shift to taxable units based less on the land itself and more on the ability of peasants to pay (a combination of land and labour). This connection became tighter as tax census documents became legal bases for lords to reclaim wayward serfs prior to the peasantry’s official enserfment in 1649. The state undertook new tax enumerations in 1677–78 to simplify and expand the tax system by consolidating multiple taxes into two (the musketeer and post station taxes [streletskii oklad and iamskaia podat’]), and imposing them on as many taxable inhabitants as possible, culminating in fiscal reforms of 1679 and 1681. The new enumeration and system made it possible to shift the basis of taxation from the sokha and zhivushchaia chetvert’ to the household or dvor.19 What ultimately remained was a system more akin to the old sokha, for assessments rested more on applied labour – ability to pay – than on the land itself. In a tumultuous world of slash-and-burn farming beset by natural and human disruptions and non-standard property boundaries, ownership of labour (serfs) became the key indicator of wealth and peasant labour became a well-established legal precedent for lords’ title claims against peers, as did a record of paying taxes (both of these arguments persisted into the twentieth century).20 By the end of the seventeenth century, state and serf-owner alike possessed an acute interest in cementing the bonds of peasants to the land and ensuring peasants’ ability to pay. At the same time, court officials were aware of the extent to which this shared interest was also competitive, and that the interests of the treasury demanded state vigilance over the human assets that sustained both parties. Decrees attempted to forbid lords from moving serfs from their assigned plots, and both the throne and the church reminded lords of the need to guarantee that those in their charge received sufficient support and access to land.21 Thus, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the state developed its role as the grantor of land allotments, a strong precedent rooted in its patrimonial sense of self. That sense persisted long after the pomest’e system was no longer useful, until 1714, when a decree formally abolished the distinction between pomest’e and votchina lands. Furthermore, we find in this period the beginnings of a sense that such allotments could be regulated in such a way as to maximize their utility to the state. Serf-owners by then were beginning to

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experiment with their own regulation and management of serfs and land allotments.22 The environmental constraints of a world of limited goods where the most limited good was labour rather than land gave state and lord a kindred interest in ensuring that peasants had access to the resources required to meet their obligations. The state’s interest became institutionalized through a tax system that flowed more from ability to pay than from the value of assets. This concern with taxpayer sufficiency (in word if not in deed), the close bond that developed between land and labour within the institution of serfdom, and the practice of normatizing pomest’e allotments paved the way for thinking about peasant land allotments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

F rom P o m e s t ’ e to P o p u l ati on: Camerali st Manag e m e n t o f t h e “ A rteri es of S tate” Prior to around 1700, the Muscovite state’s concern as it played out its role as allotter of the Russian lands was to ensure that its noble servitors had access to quantities of land and labour sufficient for them to fulfill their military service obligations. To that end, the state standardized pomest’e allotments and in 1649 fixed peasant labour permanently to the land through the institution of serfdom. By Peter I’s reign (1682–1725), court officials were well aware that the state’s ability to extract revenue was directly related to the solvency of the population as a whole.23 Yet concern for the well-being of the peasants, whose labour sustained both these servitors and the treasury, remained limited to crude attempts to align taxes with the ability to pay and exhortations that lords should not impoverish the serfs who supplied their tables, filled state coffers, and provided recruits for the army. This, after all, was about all the early modern state could hope to achieve – even under an autocracy. Several developments, however, shifted state attention away from the pomest’e and towards more active concern for the well-being of the peasant population. First, early modern state-building in Europe, including Russia, included a spatial or territorial component wherein mapping and enumerating space and people came to define the state and its power. As they consolidated, states sought to define territory, populations, and resources in terms of standardized categories and demarcations. This process began under Peter I, was expanded and honed under Catherine II, and, as Steven Seegel notes, persisted

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Setting the Precedent 25

through to the Paris peace process in 1919.24 Space defined authority and identity. Thus, Peter’s “window on the west” required a capital on the western edge of the territory (St Petersburg, founded in 1703). Muscovy, a grand principality, became the Russian Empire, and the Grand Prince of Muscovy became first the Muscovite Tsar, and then the Russian emperor (Imperator) with all of the territorial implications of size and power implied by the title. From 1721 the emperor ruled over the Imperiia Vserossiiskaia (All-Russian Empire) – a designation signifying and institutionalizing rule over territory and population beyond the Russian core. The empresses Elizabeth I and especially Catherine II, as we shall see below, extended this spatial turn connecting state-building, territory, and population as they sought to survey, map, and demarcate space through their agendas, extending state spatial and territorial concerns beyond pomest’e awards.25 Second, by the dawn of the eighteenth century (if not sooner), available land in Muscovy’s central provinces from which to make pomest’e awards was in short supply. Peter I’s 1714 law mandating a system of primogeniture and merging the categories of pomest’e and patrimonial (votchina) estates reflected this fact. 26 From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, land grants from the sovereign were not pomest’e grants, but rather rewards to favourites, and their size increased substantially after the second half of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, especially after successful Turkish campaigns yielded a vast supply of real estate in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. The gunpowder revolution in Muscovy provided a second major cause for state concern about the peasantry’s well-being. Gunpowder rendered the cavalry provided by pomeshchiki increasingly obsolete – in Hellie’s words, it was a “death blow” to this caste of historical characters.27 Instead of mounted cavalry, modern military competition required revenue for gunpowder, artillery, muskets, and training men to use them, as well as recruits to wield the new weapons. Such interests required the state to pay more attention to preserving and developing its tax and recruit base in the peasantry so that peasants might generate these consistently and in larger amounts. This was closely tied to a third force shifting the state’s attention away from the pomest’e and towards its population: the ingestion of a cameralist world view by Peter I and his advisers as they turned to the West for solutions to Muscovy’s military and administrative growing pains. The impact of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought

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on Peter’s world view was overwhelmingly German and Dutch – Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Boerhaave, and Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632–1694) – as mediated through his adviser Bishop Feofan Prokopovich (1681–1736). Of these, Pufendorf seemed to be most important to Peter, as evidenced by his ordering a Russian translation of Pufendorf’s argument for absolutism (drawn from Hobbes and Grotius) just prior to his death. These influences included a large dose of Halle Pietism, which corresponded well with Peter’s preference for practicality and shrouded his autocratic bent with a conception of Christianity that was “austere, moralistic, Providential … [and] at once mystical, rational and socially responsible.”28 Such thinking invited the emergence of an absolutist state in which the distinction between the religious and secular was much blurred. It also encouraged the emergence of the state as a separate entity in its own right – as an institution that could be imagined as personified by the sovereign but also (at least rhetorically) as greater than the sovereign itself.29 Once put on a rational organizational footing, such a “wellordered police state” became an “improving” mechanism that stood as a guarantor of the “common good,” owing to Christian benevolence and altruism. The state, then, was an end in and of itself, and the sovereign was its life-giving and sustaining soul. Serving state interests (particularly the fiscal interests connected to ensuring its success and glory) and the common good were one and the same.30 Thus Peter replaced terms such as “the interest of His Majesty the Tsar” with “State interest” in draft legislation submitted by the Senate, and he easily justified decisions – including to disinherit his own son – in terms of the state’s well-being. Achieving the common good was a monumental task – nothing less than ensuring “sufficiency in all that is necessary to human life” – and required that the state and its sovereign transcend their roles as allotters of land to become improvers of society as a whole.31 This was a role to which Peter – a man who appreciated and indeed required a world in which things were measured and counted so as to ensure efficiency and reguliarnost’ – was well-suited.32 His ethos of state-driven improvement transcended his own life. Peter was thus the head of the Leviathan, a Christian emperor in the Orthodox (Justinian) tradition. The quest for a well-policed empire and this conceptualization of the sovereign persisted as the autocracy’s driving force and justification until its end. The good of the absolutist state thus served as a moral anchor for the economy.

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This sweeping agenda was one of many factors that turned the state’s gaze towards its population in new ways, which included more direct concern with its well-being and the sufficiency of its resources. Populationism was a key component of this cameralist thought that took root in the Russian empire and elsewhere in Europe.33 State policy increasingly concerned itself with managing the population – its categories, occupations, movement, and numbers. Although its origins lay in German rulers’ responses to the depopulation of the Thirty Years’ War, the basic cameralist premise that economic prosperity and military power depended on a robustly increasing population was well-suited to the Russian Empire, where labour shortage was a key issue for ruling elites.34 The same can be said of this concept’s extension: that a robust population was best secured by policies that ensured an abundant and cheap supply of food. Populationism provided an intellectual foundation and political rationalization for serfdom and for policies that exhorted lords and officials to provide as many peasant households as possible with sufficient resources to produce and reproduce a robust supply of future taxpayers, soldiers, artisans, and food growers.35 During Peter’s reign, a number of prominent authors proselytized this populationist belief that sufficient access to resources for peasants was the key to the empire’s success and tied it to the Muscovite and Petrine conceptions of the sovereign. Although published only in 1842, Ivan Pososhkov’s 1724 work, The Book on Poverty and Wealth (Kniga o skudnosti i bogatstve), was well-known in the eighteenth century. In it, Pososhkov emphasized the sovereign’s interest in the peasantry and its well-being. Lords, he noted, were only temporary owners of serfs, who in reality belonged to the sovereign. Given that they were temporary stewards, it was in the lords’ interest “not to ruin them [the peasants] but to take care of them in accordance with the Tsar’s commands, so that our peasants should be proper peasants and not paupers. For the wealth of the peasantry is the wealth of the realm.”36 In addition to state intervention, peasant well-being was best assured by keeping taxes proportional to land allotments and by a system of common responsibility (krugovaia poruka) for the obligations owed by each individual and each estate. Furthermore, this task could be regulated and measured; allotment sizes could be marked off at twelve desiatinas per tiaglo.37 Pososhkov’s admonitions encouraged a moral economy, cultivated and overseen by the sovereign, in order to prevent

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God’s creation from diminution through wanton waste or excess. All who lived according to God’s plan, fulfilling their appointed place in society, were entitled to equal protection from the sovereign.38 Pososhkov’s contemporary, Vasili N. Tatishchev, held a similar opinion. Tatishchev offered guidance for landowners seeking to improve the efficiency of their estates, arguing that increasing the wealth of the state’s servitors would strengthen the state. The key to success lay in increasing peasant prosperity within the framework of the existing socio-economic structure. Tatishchev advocated economics in the “Aristotelian sense of the word – the science of ‘household management,’ in this instance the large ‘family’ economics of the landowner and his serfs.” This conception of the serf estate stemmed from his mythologized conception of the foundation of serfdom as a contract between landowners and peasants in which the former provided safety and a guarantee of subsistence in exchange for peasant labour.39 Serf-owners, then, were guardians of the peasantry for the benefit of the state and were obligated to ensure that they remained productive contributors to the state’s prosperity. Despite Peter’s love of reguliarnost’ and quest for the improvement required of a well-policed state, his populationist policies were scattered and inconsistent. The recruiting and training of experts is the most widely known populationist action associated with his reforms.40 Populationist policies related to the majority of the empire’s inhabitants, the peasants, are less easily identified. Few contemporary observers found anything “good” or “improved” in peasant life (although there is ample reason to suspect that not all peasants lived in abject poverty all the time). Beyond his constant cataloguing of farming techniques he observed abroad, and decrees on scythes (1721) and Ukrainian sheep husbandry (1724), Peter had no agrarian policy. Yet he was well aware (as indicated by his comments on a translation of a seventeenth-century agricultural treatise) that peasants were “the arteries of the state” – the source of its sustenance and as such, in need of “protection from all attacks and ruin,” including that perpetrated by their lords.41 Peter’s most notable populationist “improvements” thus attempted to create structures that, as much as any early modern state could, guarded against deleterious influences on peasant livelihood. Such policies, he reasonably expected, offered a better chance of success than trying to change common farming techniques among backward and illiterate peasants (scythes and sheep excepted).

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In 1714 Peter issued a decree that aimed to substitute primogeniture for the nobility’s established practice of partible inheritance. On one level, this was a populationist policy aimed at preserving great noble houses, the fortunes of which were now to be directed toward staffing and policing the state and providing the empire with a court worthy of Russia’s greatness. Peter justified the law on single inheritance with the argument that constant estate division through partible inheritance ruined lords and peasants because it diminished access to resources and, it follows, made payments to lord and state more burdensome. He began the decree with a hypothetical tale of noble decline that accrued from two generations of partible inheritance, which if allowed to continue would soon make odnodvortsy (simple household farmers) of all the great houses. Peter was skeptical that the sons of such houses would live within their diminished means – he thought it more likely they would ruin themselves and their peasants by attempting to live a lifestyle commensurate with their father’s glory and family honour.42 Pososhkov also noted that lords exploited their serfs in inverse proportion to the size of their landholdings, and we can assume that others had made a similar observation. Chernikov has verified this empirically, and Voldarskii demonstrated that the quest for more land threatened state collections on another front as well, as landshort nobles illegally seized land from neighbours, including state peasants. By the end of the eighteenth century about one third of all noble land consisted of illegal seizures.43 In the instructions he issued to voevody (regional civil–military commanders) in 1719, Peter showed he was cognizant of the need to blunt serf-owners’ exploitation of peasants to the detriment of state coffers. He told the voevody to be on the lookout for vile persons who are themselves dissolute ravagers of their own villages, who, as a result of drunkenness or some other dissipated behaviour, do not provide for their estates or protect them, but instead destroy them, imposing upon the peasants intolerable burdens and also beating and torturing them, as a result of which ill-treatment the peasants abandon their tax obligations [tiaglo] and run away, which causes depopulation [pustota] and a growth in the shortfall of state revenues from taxes.44 Maintaining the state’s good arterial health required not only diligence on the part of state officials but also active attempts to

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reorganize available resources to improve peasant households’ ability to met their obligations by creating some semblance of “sufficiency” in the village. Thus Peter’s 1719 instructions to the Kamer-kollegiia (the office established in 1718 to manage state revenues) called for a guarantee “that between the high and the low, the poor and the rich, according to proportion, there is an appropriate likeness, and that no one is burdened, or alleviated more than another person.” Such a populationist approach was needed for the good of the state, for in the event of failure “the hard-pressed will leave their farms and cultivation and the state revenues will diminish greatly in time and the lamentations of the poor will bring God’s wrath upon the realm.”45 Revenue collection and social stability went hand in hand (along with avoiding condemnation by the Almighty) and were best achieved – indeed maximized within the early modern world of limited goods – by using the authority of the populationist-minded state to organize sufficient access to resources. To the extent that Peter put any teeth into his exhortations to serfowners, they were implied. The initial tax census decree of 22 January 1719 required lords to enumerate all their serfs, an order so little heeded it was repeated in a decree of 5 January 1720, as lords apparently did not list serfs employed outside of farming. Instructions to Major General Chernyshev of 1722 ordered him to “inform the gentry that they must pay a rate of 80 kopeks for each male soul” regardless of how the serf was employed on the estate.46 An unpublished manifesto by Catherine I of 9 January 1726 ordered lords to assume responsibility for their serfs’ taxes (implying that such responsibility was already established).47 Empress Anna Ioanovna affirmed this in 1731, ordering lords to collect poll taxes from all of their serfs and making them personally responsible for submitting them to the treasury (a quid pro quo for her abolition of primogeniture?).48 Lords now had an even greater interest – besides their income – in making sure that peasants had access to sufficient resources to pay their taxes. It is certainly appropriate to ask where the poll tax (podushnaia podat’) fits into such a populationist perspective. Historians have generally interpreted the impact of the introduction of the poll tax in a negative light – as an act that had only the state’s interests at heart. The new fixed tax rate took no account of the empire’s regional economic particularisms and was applied to males below and above the accepted working age. This, however, was no more burdensome than the hearth tax it replaced, which also ignored what individual

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households could actually pay in any detailed sense. The hearth tax system worked only because of the application of “collective responsibility” (krugovaia poruka), and the same held true for the poll tax.49 Some experienced a modest reduction in their tax burden, especially those who, like monastery and other peasant categories, had been subject to a much larger catalogue of taxes than serfs. In the final analysis, the benefits and increased burden of the poll tax varied from region to region and by category of peasant (serfs were hit harder). In general, by 1724 (by which time the state had completed its first registry of male “souls”) peasant taxes had increased 2.5 times since 1680.50 On the surface, it appears that the poll tax was the fiscal equivalent of applying leeches to the “arteries of the state.” Others concluded that the poll tax was not as burdensome. Boris Mironov argued that inflation nullified much of the increase in the tax burden, reducing it to a level comparable to that of 1700. Arcadius Kahan went further in a revisionist direction, claiming that the poll tax actually benefited peasants because it spread the tax burden more widely than the old hearth tax and that the resultant increased tax revenue came from adding payers to the lists more than from increasing the burden on individual tax units.51 Two things suggest that Kahan was right. First, even in the face of increasing assessments and climate fluctuation (and accounting for numbers gained through territorial acquisition), the population grew at a healthy rate. Although the immediate stimulus for creating the tax lay in the need to fund the quartering of troops as well as a review of Swedish taxation policy, the poll tax also reflected an admission that centrally administered assessment by cadastral means (Pososhkov’s preference) was not possible. At the same time, officials recognized that, although the new tax was assessed by head (thereby eliminating the ability to minimize taxation through household combination), lords and peasant communities ultimately divided the burden by household access to land.52 Thus it is possible that despite its regressive outward appearance, the poll tax did a better job at linking tax burden to income than previous systems. Furthermore, the poll tax greatly simplified and regularized the empire’s tax system, replacing a host of annual and extraordinary taxes.53 Simplifying the tax structure by fixing/regularizing the assessment made the poll tax an institution to which peasant communities could adapt.54 We cannot dismiss the value of “givens” in the risky world of early eighteenth-century peasant agriculture.

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Finally, it is important to keep in mind that for Peter and other cameralists, the good of the state was the common good – that meeting state needs was a moral obligation for all subjects, including the ­sovereign. Although there is always ample ground to be suspicious of the rationales provided in decrees, the emphasis on “sufficiency” – in Pososhkov’s words, “no more than is possible and no less than is proper” – is consistent with this morality, with cameralist populationism, and with Peter’s understanding of the relationship between the health of the peasantry and that of the state.55 Imperial benevolence was an outgrowth of fiscal prudence and concern for rural stability. In the end, as historian William Fuller noted, the common good created by the Petrine military economy was not that of “copious abundance but rather marginal sufficiency,” a guarantee of the subsistence niche required to ensure that the blood of revenue and recruits flowed through the arteries of state.56 Given the constraints of maintaining an absolutist state whose elites’ loyalty (let alone necessary administrative and military service) depended on serf labour, “sufficiency” (combined with industrial improvements) was the safest means of ensuring the common fiscal health of all, and Peter’s reforms marked a transition from the tradition of the state as merely an allotter of land to that of the state as land allotter and organizer of the population – a regulator of land use – that came to fruition under his successors.

P o p u l at io n is m as a M o ral I mperati ve Peter I directed the state towards mobilizing the population to serve its needs. Doing so made a virtue of state service that transcended individuals and estates. His successors, particularly Catherine II, took this further by attempting to organize labour and land for the common good – still defined as the meeting of the state’s cameralist needs, but now justified with the ethics and morality of Enlightenment thought, which (prior to the final quarter of the eighteenth century) placed a premium on enlightened absolutism as the key to cultural and economic progress.57 Power carried with it responsibility. Catherine’s aim was an empire of civic virtue in which the throne would use its authority to address the needs of the population (at least insofar as they could be addressed and served state interests). This was an empire of moral instruction aimed at securing the social control of a small cadre of elites over a dark peasant majority in order to mobilize the natural and human resources required for the

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advancement of imperial interests and the pursuit of the common good. Furthermore, as Wirtschafter notes in her exploration of the interplay between faith and reason during this period, civic and Christian virtue – united in the person of the sovereign – rendered the relationship between the monarch and subjects as “an explicitly moral relationship in which virtuous rulers deserved to be obeyed” as the state pursued an agenda of economic and moral improvement to promote the human flourishing advocated by philosophes and the Orthodox tradition of St Basil.58 Beginning under Catherine II, the Russian Empire set out to develop its own peasant population, pursuing this agenda with varying degrees of intensity until its end, seeking to create an economy that would provide wealth for the bearers of enlightenment and stability. Within this early modern empire of civic virtue, population growth fuelled the engine of imperial greatness and served as the metric of its success. The German cameralists who populated the Russian Academy of Sciences such as August Ludwig Schlözer, a growing cohort of native thinkers like Mikhail Lomonosov, and ultimately Elizabeth I and Catherine II, propagated at court a cocktail of German and French ideas that also came to accommodate English political arithmetic – measurement and enumeration – as a means of conceptualizing the state, gauging success, and creating measured norms for the advancement of society.59 Lomonosov’s library held a 1752 copy of Pososhkov’s manuscript. He, in particular, encouraged the throne to connect state policy to pursuing a common good as measured by robust population growth. Like Pososhkov’s treatise, Lomonosov’s 1761 work, “On the Propagation and Maintenance of the Russian People” (O razmnozhenii i sokhranenii Rossiiskago naroda), was also not published until the nineteenth century but came to be known in court circles (and ultimately to Catherine II). Lomonosov presented his treatise as a letter to his patron, I.I. Shuvalov, and historians speculate that he hoped Shuvalov would pass that letter on to the Empress Elizabeth and that its contents would make a timely addition to discussion of the recently decreed Third Revision (poll tax census).60 The letter’s intent was to underscore the important role of a large and healthy population for the empire’s economic and military success. The treatise offered thirteen suggestions for increasing the population, including the regulation of marriage to maximize unions at peak male and female fertility, taking steps to reduce infant mortality, increasing the amount of protein (meat) in diets, discouraging population flight

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by moderating taxes and recruit levies, and encouraging the settlement of foreign colonists. Ultimately, such policies would “increase the increment of population growth above that of a previous year by a half-million souls, and from revision to revision, in 20 years, by up to ten million.”61 In such a way the state could create progress toward human flourishing with measurable results. The nobility’s increasing control over serfs throughout the eighteenth century concerned the cameralist state insofar as it threatened peasants’ ability to pay and serve.62 Such state interest was also a prudent means of ensuring the social stability needed to strengthen the state and secure its international prestige. There were fiscal as well as moral reasons for the sovereign to concern herself with the peasantry’s condition. As noted by the physiocratic ideas emanating from France that Catherine admired, even commerce depended ultimately on the products of the land.63 The empire’s wealth depended on the peasantry’s production of both food and children, which made the production of both a topic of considerable royal interest, and Catherine embraced the organization of land and people as a means to achieve it. As she noted in her Nakaz (Instruction) to the Legislative Commission of 1767, the empire’s economy was a single unit comprised of mutually interdependent branches that had as their main purpose to “establish, strengthen, and perpetuate for ever, the Safety of the State, the Prosperity of the people, and the Glory of the Sovereign.” This ultimately meant that the state would “receive more benefit from several Thousands of subjects who enjoy a moderate Competency, than from a few Hundreds who are immensely rich.”64 She was a critic of serf-owners’ growing propensity to shift peasants from barshchina to obrok.65 Obrok, she believed, diminished both the population and agriculture, thus threatening the empire’s economic prosperity and social stability.66 As she noted in an article later excised from the Nakaz, the state was obligated to enact laws to ensure that peasants had sufficient food and clothing and thereby to ensure “‘the preservation of their lives.’”67 The moral improvement of the population and the mobilization of the empire’s resources began with a commitment (at least on paper) to its basic needs. Catherine thus saw herself as a steward in the Petrine tradition, enacting policies designed to expand, improve, and monitor the condition of the economy and its foundation, the peasantry. To that end she sought to manage the population as well as the imperial space by organizing her empire into legal social estate categories and provinces

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that could be more easily managed. The landed nobility benefited from this vision the most, for they ultimately won the confirmation of their privileges. Peasants benefited less, especially those categories of peasants slowly subsumed into larger servile categories. Thus, the monastery peasants subsumed into the category of state peasants generally experienced an improvement in their lot (their allotments grew and their labour dues were converted to obrok), whereas single homesteaders (odnodvortsy) and similar categories fell victim to state-sanctioned predation by neighbouring lords.68 Overall, though, it can be said that despite their many shortcomings, her policies pursued populationist goals.

P o p u l at io n is m a n d Moral Economy i n P r ac t ic e : L a n d N o r m s and Guardi ans hi p Catherine implemented a number of populationist measures aimed at improving the common good; for example, she established foundling homes and instituted public health programs.69 She opened granaries in order to reduce and stabilize grain prices; for the same reason, she was reluctant to allow food exports. She also instituted the practice of compiling birth, death, and marriage statistics from parish registers, and she took a number of measures to align peasant allotments with taxes and other dues and to increase peasants’ access to sufficient land. With regard to the latter, Catherine and the Senate issued a series of decrees and instructions intended to ensure that state peasants would be able to meet their soul tax obligations; these measures included redistributing land among villages. Most noteworthy was a Senate decree of 1784, titled “On instilling in state peasants that arguments over land initiated with other state peasants are useless because of the Government’s proposed equalization of the lands of all villages of the state administration.” That document laid out a plan for transferring lands deemed surplus in one village to land-deprived villages for redistribution.70 In the late eighteenth century, statedirected colonization of the steppe was an important component of this process, sending nearly half a million people to the newly acquired steppe regions in the name of political stability and economic improvement.71 Colonization or resettlement (pereselenie) served as a means to assert control over recently acquired territories by populating them; these tactics also ensured that vacant tracts of fertile steppe land would be put to productive use by settling foreign and domestic

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colonists there. Colonization was also viewed as a way to address the problem of tesnota (population congestion) in the interior provinces, where it was realized that state peasants had insufficient land to conduct a successful household economy. The drive to populate these newly acquired areas with a productive workforce made German immigrants attractive; however, resettling Russians was cheaper, besides being a means to address what in the nineteenth century would be referred to as land hunger (malozemel’e). Settling the “empty lands” would serve the Crown, pomeshchik, and peasant alike – and even, it was argued, the indigenous population (who would soon be squeezed by settlers).72 Through these initiatives and many others, Catherine and her successors aimed to organize land and people so as to harness the empire’s resources and direct them to state needs. Increasingly, these actions pointed towards a reorganization of the peasants and the land. The former were to be provided with proper guardianship (popechitel’stvo) as well as sufficient allotments, which would be measured against a norm. Thus a 1764 report by the Senate on measuring out land for foreign colonists stressed the importance of ensuring that each family would have access, based on the amount typical for a homestead consisting of four male souls, to thirty desiatinas of land, half of it ploughland and the rest pasture, meadow, or some other type of arable land. Allotting equal portions by family as opposed to number of persons was essential in order to prevent arguments. The report also noted the importance of measuring out for each settlement additional land to accommodate future population growth.73 In cases where existing settlements already had claimed lands that threatened the achievement of these stipulations, Count G.G. Orlov, Catherine’s favourite, who was charged with the settlement project, proposed reclaiming additional lands for the colonists by measuring out to the existing population fifteen desiatinas per soul for the landless and five desiatinas per soul for current inhabitants that already had land. Also, a decree limited the amount of land that anyone could purchase in New Russia (Novorossia – the southern steppe conquered from the Ottomans).74 The previously established fifteen-desiatina allotment – five desiatinas of ploughland in each field – became a land allotment norm for relocated Russian peasants as well, a measure deemed sufficient to assure a peasant household’s ability to meet its needs and those of the state.75 This ideal was applied both in quantitative terms and in a qualitative sense in measures that attempted to align the

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obrok payments of state and Crown peasants with the productive quality of the land they tilled. We encounter the best example of the populationist drive towards ensuring peasants access to sufficient allotments in the trajectory of the land allotment norm under the General Land Survey, enacted by Catherine II in 1765.76 When Peter I abolished the distinction between pomest’e and votchina lands in 1714, this had (among other things) severely disrupted the previous system of property registration; this led over time to nobles squatting on state and private neighbouring lands, as well as to serious (and at times violent) disputes between noble landowners themselves. Furthermore, advances in surveying, and the populationist goal of shifting taxes from persons to land (which would be more progressive), encouraged cadastral work in Russia and other European states. Especially noteworthy in this regard were the Habsburg surveys and laws of this period; the Urbarium of Maria Therese, enacted in the wake of peasant uprisings in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1765–66; and various acts of Joseph II. Between 1766 and 1775, Maria Therese enacted, in conjunction with tax reforms, statutes aimed at ensuring the clear demarcation of peasant and manorial lands and at adjusting taxes and dues to income through cadastral work. Maria Therese’s plan also intervened in relations between lords and peasants.77 Measurement was a means to ensure that peasants had sufficient resources. This would increase and regularize revenues while also encouraging social and political stability. The Russian state began trying to sort out jumbled property boundaries in the reign of Anna. Elizabeth I attempted to institute a broad surveying project in 1754, including stipulations aimed at equalizing peasant landholdings and facilitating resettlement.78 Limited success in this endeavour was achieved only after Catherine II’s General Land Survey manifesto of 1765 and her instructions of 1766. Property lines were intended to do more than make good neighbours by creating solid legal fences. The state’s populationist perspective and its reliance on the poll tax had obligated the state “to give the tax-payers adequate resources from which to meet their tax obligations.” To this end, surveyors and their retinues were charged not only with survey work in a geodetic sense, but also with collecting a variety of economic information, recorded as “economic notes” (ekonomicheskie primechaniia); these included information about soil quality, population size, and access to land.79 With the introduction of the poll tax, the “direct ‘service’ burden with regard to land thus passed from the pomeshchik

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to those who supported him.” So aside from a crude attempt to tidy up property boundaries, a key feature of eighteenth-century land survey laws “was their attempt to prescribe land norms for the various categories of state peasant, and to protect their holdings from any diminution.”80 The state’s need to determine taxpayers’ access to the assets they needed for subsistence extended to a special emphasis on surveyors determining how much new steppe land was available for relocating peasants from the crowded interior. These personnel and local officials were assigned the task of collecting the information the state required in order to, in James Scott’s sense, “see” how much land was available for redistribution. Given the extent to which properties of multiple sorts – treasury, Crown, and pomeshchik – were intermingled in open fields (the massive extent of so-called cherezpolositsa), the state could not sort out competing property claims in any detail. So it settled for surveys that would make such work simpler in the future and that would address its own interest in rural stability.81 Elizabeth’s survey instructions noted that it would be desirable to equalize peasant landholdings – if necessary by resettling homesteaders (odnodvortsy) with insufficient land – in order to improve the economic condition of the village as a whole.82 But what constituted “insufficient”? The 1754 statute attempted to confront this concern by ensuring that undisputed state lands were sold according to a “norm” guaranteeing peasants adequate land. Serf-owners could purchase undisputed lands for ten kopeks per desiatina. In other words, pomeshchiki were allowed to buy the lands on which they had encroached at fire sale prices. They could not, however, buy all the land. According to the instructions, such lands were to be sold to interested pomeshchiki, “not in their entirety, but in a defined proportion,” which was not to exceed five chetverty of ploughland or a total of nine desiatinas of ploughland and hayfield per revisional soul.83 Along similar lines, instructions to surveyors regarding the “measuring out” or delineation (razmezhevanie) of lands for odnodvortsy in Voronezh and Belgorod provinces not only specified norms for land distribution (ten chetverti in each field, i.e., a total of fifteen desiatinas per four-revisional-soul household) but also stipulated that odnodvortsy be ordered “not to sell and not to place under a lien, or rent out,” their land. In cases where some villages were short of land based on this norm and others had a surplus, lands were to be transferred from the latter to the former.84 The point of the instructions was to ensure that surveyors used their extensive latitude to

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ensure populationist goals, namely that state peasants had adequate resources to meet their obligations and reproduce themselves without recourse to crime or migrant labour. Land norms served this purpose as well as the state’s interest in facilitating a productive population and rural stability. As a program for resolving land disputes among individual noble landholders and between noble landowners and the state, the Elizabethan land survey failed. This was due, in part, to the arbitrariness of surveyors and in part to the enormity of the task, for surveyors had been asked to sort out not only boundaries between settlements but also ownership within them. This latter charge was especially difficult given the complexity of eighteenth-century open fields. Catherine’s 1765 legislation was more successful, largely because she settled for less, both in terms of what the survey was to achieve and in terms of how much state land she wished to reclaim. Catherine’s legislation abjured most attempts to sort out and survey boundaries between individual landowners, leaving this task to be resolved by the Estates College. Regarding encroachment on state lands, Catherine’s legislation made nobles an offer they could refuse only at great risk. If they accepted the boundaries set by surveyors, pomeshchiki could walk away with most of the land they had absorbed over the preceding decades. When there was a disputed boundary, however, claimants seeking redress were required to provide full documentation for their claims. When a claim failed, the “lion’s share of any territory that was adjudged to belong to the state was confiscated. Those who persisted in contending over boundaries could thus forfeit as much as 90% of their lands.” Under these terms the state parted with the estimated 50 million desiatinas of land that nobles had encroached upon over the course of the eighteenth century.85 When claimants unsuccessfully pushed disputes with the state to the point of confiscation of contested lands (or, depending on one’s point of view, reclamation), the confiscation process took into account circumstances beyond the claim itself, including whether or not one or more of the parties was deemed to possess insufficient or excess land based on the number of souls in its possession. In other words, the state “also sought to equalize the distribution of land that was disputed by transferring it from larger to smaller landlords.”86 Furthermore, the rules issued in 1766 required surveyors to note in their survey books whether or not peasants in a given village had sufficient land; and where land allotments were

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insufficient, the provincial governor was to find places for peasant resettlement.87 Thus, even the process of settling disputed claims was used to advance Catherine’s populationist conviction that the state ultimately received “more benefit from several Thousands of subjects who enjoy a moderate Competency, than from a few Hundreds who are immensely rich.”88

M a n ag in g L a n d a nd Peasants: A l l o t m e n t b y N o r m as I nventi ng L a n d H u nger Legislation creating the Udel Department to manage the lands and peasants assigned to maintain the imperial family was part of Paul I’s “Organic Statute,” promulgated on 5 April 1797.89 It followed populationist policies similar to his mother’s and for similar managerial and intellectual reasons. The emperor and state officials were frustrated that “Crown [dvortsovyia] properties” intended for the maintenance of the imperial household “brought excessively insignificant income in relation to the huge area of land they comprised.”90 Officials believed that the great variation in peasant access to land among Crown properties was a root cause of these revenue shortfalls. Regularization would increase income by ensuring more peasants access to adequate land; also, putting payments on a cadastral foundation would increase revenue by more equitably distributing peasant burdens.91 To achieve the desired regularization and income increase and simultaneously foster rural stability (a large number of serf disturbances accompanied Paul’s coronation), the Organic Statute proposed reorganizing the newly constituted udel lands so that “the udel administration would be able to allot to the peasants subordinated to it an amount of land that would provide for them” (i.e., maintain them and enable them to meet payment obligations).92 To this end, the statute required that “all udel lands be brought into such a condition that each worker-inhabitant would obtain per tiaglo, excepting garden plots and hayfields, three desiatinas in each of three fields.” Ploughland beyond this norm was to be rented at the prevailing price.93 In villages where available land “according to the mandated proportion per tiaglo” was “insufficient,” officials were not to take additional ploughland from meadow, but instead were “to attempt to add to [the available land fund] by purchase from the treasury” or by

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voluntary exchanges with neighbouring landowners. If these approaches still came up short, officials were to transfer several families from land-short villages to villages with a surplus.94 The same statute mandated switching the basis of payments from a uniform per capita obrok (like that traditionally paid by state peasants95) to a more cadastral “land fee” (zemel’nyi sbor) based on the land’s productivity, and it set procedures for determining the land’s income and the amount of payments to be levied upon it. As the centennial history of the Udel Department noted, securing sufficient allotments for the peasants under its charge was a monumental task. After the first few years, the department found that allotting peasants the “legal proportion of land (including in this sum the forests belonging to the Udel estates)” revealed a shortage of over two million desiatinas, and that even after subtracting land surpluses in other areas from this figure a shortage of more than a million and a half desiatinas remained. The department asserted its authority to buy private land to make up the shortfall, purchasing nearly 80,000 desiatinas between 1897 and 1807, but this did little to solve the shortage.96 The inadequate supply of ploughland, the complexities of datagathering, and the slow pace of surveying meant that the Udel Department made little headway in normalizing udel peasant allotments or shifting payments from persons to land. Indeed, only in those areas where the land allotment criteria could be met easily were payments put on a cadastral basis (shifted from persons to land) between 1797 and the beginning of 1830. Most peasants continued to pay the same obrok as state peasants in their province, and this figure increased due to the state’s growing need during the Napoleonic Wars and the depreciating value of assignat rubles. The same can be said of the many attempts to put peasant payments on a cadastral basis.97 In the end, the udel administration created an area for fiscal and agrarian experimentation that, while falling short of its goal of providing “sufficient” allotments, did better at relating many peasants’ tax burdens to their ability to pay. Historians also acknowledge the benefits peasants obtained from a giant land swap between the Treasury and Udel Department in the 1830s. The reform was “primarily a fiscal measure and, in fact, produced very significant additional revenues.”98 At the same time, however, the 1797 statute and subsequent administrative measures connected to its fulfillment contributed to a broad sense that, whatever the peasantry’s moral failings,

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its main economic problem was insufficient access to land – land hunger (malozemel’e) – and that the solution was for the state to fulfill its obligation to provide sufficient allotments that could be surveyed and assessed based on ability to pay by reorganizing the peasant economy and basing payments on rationally collected cadastral data. Besides the udel, after Catherine’s reign the state’s “main concern … was the allotment of state peasants with land.” In this matter, the Senate entrusted the finance ministry (according to its chronicler) as the patriarchal “master” (khoziain), in the sovereign’s name, and charged it with enacting laws for the benefit of land-hungry state peasants, as well as those with payment obligations that exceeded the income of their allotments.99 Legislative action had moved in the direction of applying norms to state peasant allotments under Paul I, and this trend continued under his sons. Standardizing or rationalizing peasant life (and the state income derived from it), rather than emancipation, stood at the centre of governmental thinking on the “peasant question” (krest’ianskii vopros) throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.100 Facilitating peasant access to a sufficient allotment and equating payments with the income from that allotment was the principal tool for achieving this goal. This included increased state willingness to intervene not only in the lives of state and udel peasants, but even in the lives of serfs in the name of sufficiency where possible. Growing noble indebtedness provided a point of entry, as lords increasingly turned to land mortgages and sales to members of the commercial class, who by law were not allowed to own serfs. Concerned that such transactions threatened to leave serfs without means of sustenance, a decree of 27 November 1814 stipulated that, in such cases where the transaction left serfs without 4.5 desiatinas of ploughland per soul, the owner had one year to either move them to another property where their land needs could be met, or to sell them to another lord. Failing to do so would result in the confiscation of said serfs and their resettlement on state lands by local officials. The Senate confirmed the decree in an 1827 case, noting that without such protection peasants would be left “completely without land and, it follows, deprived of the means of feeding themselves.”101 Even serfs were entitled to a state guarantee of a sufficient allotment. Concern for feeding the population grew alongside the rationalization of revenue as a motive for reorganizing peasants under state

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control, especially after a series of crop failures in the early 1830s.102 Sufficient allotments would provide sufficient sustenance and sufficient rural calm. In addition, the apparent (though limited) fiscal success of L.A. Perovskii’s attempts to reform the udel economy caught the emperor’s attention, as did revenue shortfalls from state peasants in the wake of the 1830 Polish revolt. Both contributed to Nicholas I’s growing insistence in the 1830s that a similar program be implemented for the state peasantry. In 1835 Nicholas established a new secret committee, the “Committee for Finding of Means for the Improvement of the Condition of Peasants of Various Categories,” which produced a statement of long-term goals and little else.103 Its reports, however, were enough to convince the tsar that something needed to be done to move things along. His solution was to remove responsibility for the state peasantry from the finance ministry and assign it to P.D. Kiselev on a trial basis under the newly created Fifth Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery. The secret committee of 1835 was folded in May 1836, but Kiselev was asked to continue reporting on certain topics of interest. A list of problems to consider, prepared by Kiselev and M. Speranskii, focused mainly on administrative measures to create a more equitable system of taxation based on ensuring peasants’ access to sufficient economic resources that, in turn, would translate into a stronger and more reliable revenue stream. Kiselev engaged in no remarkable innovations on his own estates and was not entirely convinced that state peasants’ accumulated payment arrears were the result of poor land distribution or a discrepancy between land income and payments. Indeed, he was more inclined (especially after an inspection tour in the summer of 1836) to believe that what the state peasantry needed as much as anything else (and before any economic reforms) was “guardianship” (popechitel’stvo).104 At the same time, from a state perspective steeped in conceptions of rational administration, moves to ensure sufficient allotments that might guarantee increased and more reliable revenues without destabilizing villages could not be dismissed lightly. Kiselev ultimately concluded that “for strengthening the economic life of villagers and multiplying the benefits accruing to the treasury it was necessary to allot them [peasants] a sufficient amount of land and through this bring their productive forces in line with their access to land.”105 The Ministry of State Domains, established under Kiselev’s leadership at the end of 1837, created an administrative platform for both

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“guardianship” and rational economic intervention. According to the statute, the new ministry existed “for the administration of state domains, for the guardianship of the free rural residents, and for the management of agriculture.” Rather than focusing on “maximizing immediate fiscal gains with minimal administrative effort” (the finance ministry’s approach), the goal was to create “an effective bureaucratic apparatus that would enable the ministry to introduce changes in old administrative practices and move into new areas of agricultural improvement.”106 The new ministry was charged with applying the ordering power of the state to the administration of the largest category of peasants in the empire. This reinforced the idea that the state was an agent of agrarian reform as well as the precedent that state intervention – particularly measurement by state organs – could and should be used to ensure peasant economic well-being. Kiselev faced a number of constraints. The amount of land available for redistribution was limited, and the need to maintain revenue levels meant that reducing one village’s payment burden necessitated raising that of another. He had two big things, besides the support of the sovereign, working in his favour. First, the new ministry’s portfolio included not only lands and peasants in the congested centre but also a host of non-Russians (“aliens,” or inorodtsy) classified as state peasants who inhabited wide swaths of fertile steppe lands.107 This made resettlement from the congested centre to the open steppe an easier strategy to pursue, at least in a bureaucratic sense. Second, Kiselev was able to staff the new ministry with a host of W. Bruce Lincoln’s “enlightened bureaucrats,” that is, educated professionals dedicated to rational administration who were ready and able to create and carry out programs of information gathering.108 The first step in the process would involve a massive program of surveying and data collection. The government had a fairly accurate notion of how many state peasants there were, but it had a very limited sense of how much land state peasants were living on and little idea of the nature or quality of the land (whether it was forest, arable field, pasture, or swamp). Surveys would be required to develop this information and plot it on a map, thereby fixing boundaries in such a way that officials could determine which peasants needed more land, and how much. Also, surveys would be useful in a world where open fields of intermingled strips of land had long provided local private landowners an easy opportunity to encroach on state properties. In all of this, guardianship (popechitel’stvo) and land settlement (pozemel’noe

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ustroistvo) were part of the same process. The purpose of surveying and mapping the land and collecting economic data was to ensure sufficiency – “to clarify not only the condition of unoccupied state lands, but also the extent of the actual land hunger [malozemel’e] of those rural societies in need of land.”109 Local officials were issued detailed instructions on how to order the countryside by determining whether or not each revisional soul had a “normal allotment,” defined as fifteen desiatinas per male soul in land-rich provinces and (by necessity) eight desiatinas per male soul in those predominantly central provinces where land was in short supply.110 The goal was uniformity – an equalization of land allotments. Indeed, based on his own inspection of lands available for resettlement in Orenburg province, Kiselev even ordered that the lands of old-time settlers (starozhiltsy) be reduced to fifteen desiatinas per soul so as to ensure that greater land resources would be available for the resettlement of peasants from congested central provinces.111 At the same time, local officials were increasingly encouraged to discard the eighteenth-century fifteen desiatinas per soul norm for a local norm calculated on the basis of better information about soil quality and husbandry needs. Local officials were to determine “what part of the gross income of each village went to meet the needs of two peasant souls [man and wife].”112 This determination was to be based on family maintenance data called for in the instructions, as well as the costs of the soul tax and for maintaining a grain reserve. This figure was then expressed in terms of the value of the main cereal of the locale. To ascertain the amount of income available for sustenance, officials were to subtract production costs and taxes from the gross income of each desiatina of each soil category.113 The ministry’s Third Department would then use this information, including whether or not there was a “normal allotment” (in areas where agricultural income exceeded manufacturing income) to assess obrok payments. Needless to say, this was a complex system, and the instructions were revised continuously. In essence, what the ministry set out to construct was not a cadastre in a western European sense (where properties were thoroughly surveyed and there was a direct correlation between individual land tenure and specific payment obligations), but an assessment of the value and income of lands farmed by rural societies as a whole. Rural societies divided the assessment among inhabitants based on the number of shares each household held.114

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The original goal of equalizing obrok rates between provinces was not achieved.115 In spite of difficulties, however, between 1842 and Kiselev’s retirement in 1856 the ministry completed assessments for twenty-five provinces and introduced new assessments in nineteen of them. This affected 3,843,285 adult male souls on 15,984,378 desiatinas of land. The six provinces where assessment work was completed but new taxes not yet introduced accounted for 1,179,440 male souls and 8,726,228 desiatinas. This represented real progress. Total revenues from state lands between 1840 and 1856 ranged from 30 to 34 million silver rubles per year, while direct expenditures (specially designated “guardianship” accounts and other administrative costs) ranged from 4.5 to 5.5 million silver rubles per year, signifying a return of roughly six times the state’s investment.116 But in the minds of those who compiled its fiftieth-anniversary history, this limited success in terms of improving revenue was not the ministry’s main achievement. Noting that the initial inspections of 1837 had found more than 600,000 land-hungry and destitute peasants “deprived of the means of existence,” the ministry “did not take as its primary task the collection of the greatest possible income from these lands”; rather, it set as its main goal the “organization of the life of the state peasants.” Given the relationship between peasant well-being and the state’s own finances, it recognized “the necessity of the correct allotment of state peasants with a sufficient amount of land.”117 The most important impact of the Kiselev reforms and other pre-emancipation statutes had to do with the precedent they perpetuated or established for the emancipation process and beyond, namely: “land hunger” was established as a category demanding state action. Furthermore, it was recognized that the state had an obligation to provide a “sufficient” or “normal” allotment; that such norms should be connected in some way to the income produced; and that these measurements were determined best by the collection of statistical data. This was the matrix of economic measurement bequeathed to the Emancipation’s framers.

Se r f E s tat e M a n ag e m ent and Norms The eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth were a golden age for the Russian serf-owning nobility. Confirmed in their privileged place in society, they benefited greatly from their ability to control the local conduct of the General Land Survey, which

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largely sanctioned the land grabs they had made at the expense of the state and freeholders of various sorts. At the same time, Catherine’s Nakaz made them agents in the peasantry’s moral improvement and cautioned them against over-exploiting their serfs. The greater good demanded that the state “prescribe Laws, to oblige these Landlords to levy their Taxes with greater Discretion; and to exact such Taxes only which least remove the Peasant from his House and Family, whereby Population will increase, and Agriculture become flourishing.” Such policies would prevent peasants from “seeking their livelihood in Cities remote from their home and strolling almost all over the Empire.”118 Limitations on the lords’ exactions would meet the twin goals of increasing national wealth and maintaining social stability. Literary works by Nikolai Novikov reinforced Catherine’s injunctions highlighting the value and good fortune of the benevolent landowner who served as a father figure to his peasants, thus embracing the mission of moral improvement and economic development crucial to the state’s well-being. In his “Fragment of a Journey to *** by I*** T***,” Novikov forecast the fate of lords who acted otherwise and thus became the lords of the village of “Razorennaia” (“Ruined”) when their tyrannical behaviour drove their serfs into poverty and a cycle of poor harvests.119 At least some of the nobility, particularly the great magnates with a presence at court and diversified landholdings that offered a less precarious existence, took these injunctions seriously. Court favourite M.M. Shcherbatov was a defender of serfdom, reminding his son Dmitri that “the servant must be obligated to his lord because the lord nourishes and defends him; on this basis alone can the lord expect labor from him.”120 Each member of society had a place and a role to fulfill. The role of the nobility was especially important, for unlike merchants, the nobility had corporate responsibilities to ensure that its estates and serf populations were successfully maintained. Given the connection between an increasing population and the increasing fortunes of the state, it was the serfowner’s obligation to maintain peasants in their role as tillers of the soil. Non-agricultural pursuits were harmful for peasants, who were defined as inherently agricultural creatures.121 Such pursuits removed peasants from their rightful place in society, and furthermore, by withdrawing labour from the production of grain, they drove up grain prices and heightened the risk of famine. High grain prices and famine were drags on population growth and thus reduced the wealth of the

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state (although it should be noted that Shcherbatov did not necessarily practise what he preached).122 The reasoning behind populationism thus meshed well with existing conceptions of noblesse oblige and of the peasantry’s place in society. They were viewed as requiring guardianship (popechitel’stvo) as well as sufficient access to land to be able to carry out their function as tillers of the soil. This went hand in hand with the “‘statization’ of personal power” symbolized by the culture of petitions and patronage linking peasant to lord and lord to sovereign – itself a key aspect of a moral economy.123 If “the wealth of the state” was “proportionate to the number of its subjects,” then it was up to the state’s rural representatives to ensure that its subjects had the means to be properly and productively employed.124 Prevailing intellectual trends posited a vision of the serf estate based on mutual obligations, the fulfillment of which ultimately served state needs. Paternalism aside, lords had a more utilitarian interest in their serfs’ livelihood. They relied on serfs’ labour and inventory and were ultimately responsible for the payment of their soul taxes, so when their serfs prospered, so did they. After 1765, by actively promoting agricultural improvements within the halls of the Free Economic Society, Catherine encouraged the nobility to recognize a mutual interest in growing the population and creating wealth. The same atmosphere that led to the rise of “improving landlords” in the rest of Europe (and in the Americas) took hold in Russia as well. As Michael Confino has demonstrated, however, Russian “improving landlords” were drawn largely to the administrative aspects of agricultural improvement, especially to the issuance of detailed regular instructions to bailiffs and to attempts to achieve order, rationality, and revenue through the collection of statistical information.125 Their attraction to improvement via administration rather than improvement via innovation can be explained by a number of things. First, the state had provided them with the model of economic development by administrative fiat going back to the days when Peter I began reshaping the empire. Many serf-owners maintained the same populationist perspective as the state and drew parallels between state policies that encouraged population growth as a key to wealth and the pursuit of similar policies on their estates. Second, administrative improvement was the model of agricultural efficiency with which they were most familiar, given that their long tradition of absentee ownership and administration had bequeathed a sense that better management was the key to higher income.126

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Most importantly, the attraction of the administrative path to improvement stemmed from the fact that, given a shortage of liquid capital (a problem for agriculture everywhere and for Russia in particular), serf-owners’ own livelihoods depended on the successful maintenance of their fixed capital: serfs. Serf-owners, as Confino has shown, were just as much inhabitants of the world of limited goods as their serfs. They might pay lip service to making improvements, but most lords thought no more in terms of the modern conception of profit than their serfs did; instead they were largely content (and often relieved) when their estate(s) yielded a sufficient income to maintain fixed capital (serfs), meet obligations, and keep up urban standards of living. Serf-owners’ household economies mirrored those of their serfs in that they produced most of what they needed and consumed most of what they produced. Lords bent to methods of peasant husbandry no matter how much “improvement” they sought, in part because the lack of liquid capital encouraged “autarky and self-sufficiency on serf estates” as a means of preserving what little capital existed.127 Strapped for cash, serf-owners, like their serfs, were forced to market grain at the least favourable times. Most pomeshchiki, like their serfs, lived up to their necks in water – on the edge of ruin – and thus shared their serfs’ aversion to risk. Indeed, so great was their risk aversion that serf-owners who found themselves with an influx of capital generally did not use the funds to improve existing estates, but rather to purchase additional land or invest elsewhere (e.g., engage in moneylending), thereby expanding the existing system of production and maintaining a known equilibrium in their own lives and those of their serfs. Most serf-owners were short on liquid capital and dependent on serf labour, tools, and husbandry for an income, so for most of them, the best means of increasing income was through improved management of existing fixed capital or by extending the existing system to additional lands.128 Their mentality encouraged a continued emphasis on extensive rather than intensive husbandry, and this put a premium on the amount of land even in the process of improvement. Thus lords and their stewards developed a household inventory (podvornaia perepis’) whose purpose was not to measure productivity in the modern sense, but rather, through measurement, to create favourable conditions for generating a stable gross income by ascertaining whether the estate had sufficient resources to produce successfully within the current system of husbandry. The purpose of the household inventory, then, was to gauge not the serf household’s

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standard of living but rather its ability to produce for the larger household of the estate itself. To this end, Transactions of the Free Economic Society published numerous recipes for the proper collection of data, all of which represented in a microcosm the state’s own populationist concerns, namely the need to identify new labour teams (tiagla) as soon as possible and ensure they had sufficient access to land. Because the serf household itself provided necessary fixed capital (tools and livestock), serf-owners instructed bailiffs to enumerate these items as well.129 Andrei Bolotov’s instructions for estate bailiffs, published by the Free Economic Society in 1770, called for enumerating the number of males and females as well as their ages and condition; it also required the bailiff to categorize them as workers, half workers, minors, or decrepit and to note each individual’s character and qualities as well. Bailiffs, he added, should also make note of any crafts or trades, make brief comments on each household’s condition, and inventory each household’s livestock, beginning with the number of horses. In the final rubrics, the bailiff recorded the number of tiaglos (husband–wife labour teams) in the household, the total number of workers, the number of peasant land allotments held for the household’s use, the amount of land tilled for the lord, the household’s soul tax burden, and its dues. The same issue of Transactions contained a similar plan by Peter Richkov, with specific guidance on how to adjust land allotments on the basis of available labour teams and draft animals to ensure each team access to a sufficient allotment and the maximum application of available labour power.130 Based on household inventories, the “improving landlord” followed the same path traversed by the state in its repartition of state lands according to “norms” by adjusting land allotments in such a way as to ensure that households applied as much of their labour power as possible. “High revenues,” as one historian has noted, “rested on the ability of estate managers to make each serf tiaglo equally capable of cultivating the land without exhausting the peasants or their draft animals.”131 Managers well knew the allotment size necessary, under given environmental conditions, to maintain the estate’s servile assets and produce revenue. The adjustment of land allotments generally occurred on a macro-scale, with serf estate bailiffs (like government officials on state and udel lands) altering either the total amount of land available for peasant use or the size of the payments levied.132 In other words, even though the system based its decisions on data from individual households, it was usually little concerned with how

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communal leaders adjusted individual household allotments. There was no consideration of the individual household outside the parameters of the estate economy as a whole, and thus there was no consideration of whether or not what appeared to be a “sufficient” allotment or number of draft animals actually served an individual household’s best interests. As historian Peter Czap has noted, “the commune and/or estate administration achieved a high degree of success in controlling [the distribution of horses and land] and in this way enforced their own criteria for a minimum standard of living among all the households on the estate.”133 This was “sufficiency” in the eighteenth-century sense of the term – justified in imperial and economic terms, as well as in terms of old-regime morality. This traditional concept of “sufficiency” reflected a “moral economy” in which masters gauged the health of their assets (and the extent to which they could exploit them) not in terms of land productivity but in terms of each household’s ability to apply its labour to its fullest extent and the inputs available to it.134 This was the matrix of economic measurement bequeathed to post-emancipation statisticians and rural economists – a notion that sufficient allotments served the interests of all parties involved.

C o n c l u s io n : T h e S tate of Suffi ci ency By the end of the eighteenth century the state and the Crown “owned” over 40 percent of the peasantry. State policies, particularly attempts to ensure sufficiency through the application of norms, were not experiments on a minority of the peasantry. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the state and lords alike had developed a similar managerial perspective towards the peasantry. The military, political, and fiscal needs of the state were shaped by the populationist drive of cameralism and the paternalistic bent of Enlightened absolutism to create a moral basis for state policies aimed at promoting the maintenance and increase of the population as a state resource. Combined with proper guardianship, land norms and adjusting payments to what the land could produce ensured that the peasantry – the blood that coursed through the arteries of state and fed its organs – had sufficient resources to serve this purpose. This was a patriarchal commonwealth in which the livelihoods of the state and the landed nobility relied on the maintenance and development of their human capital. Key to success was the ability to provide peasants with access

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to a sufficient allotment of land or other incomes to maximize the exploitation of the peasant household’s labour supply for the benefit of all parties involved. Given the predisposition for seeing peasants as best occupied by farming, this meant providing them with more land – either by adjusting their current holdings or (increasingly) relocating them to open areas elsewhere. By the end of the eighteenth century, access to a sufficient allotment was a given. The nadel and the need for its sufficiency as determined by norms were the established precedents that filled the toolbox of those charged with developing a plan for the serf emancipation of 1861. This way of looking at and “improving” the peasant economy – essentially increasing productivity through extensification, or adding more land to production – was not the only conception of agrarian improvement and reform to be found in the growing number of printed reports and treatises on the topic. For example, examining a copy of Journal of the Ministry of State Domains (Zhurnal Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv) – published for the purpose of advancing agriculture in the empire – one finds articles detailing the great benefits to be had from improved crop rotation, the introduction of clover, more concentrated manuring of plots, and better estate management. Thus an issue from 1843 included an interview with a peasant who had himself introduced improved rotation, an article on better record-keeping practices, and another on the need to occupy surplus peasant labour by providing access to crafts and trades.135 The same issue opened, however, with an article “On supplementary rules for the relocation of land hungry state peasants to places with surplus land.” The purpose of the supplementary rules was to ensure that “rural societies in need of land are provided, upon the exit of the migrants, the requisite amount [of land] for the remaining souls,” and that “surplus hands in some places be directed to others toward the cultivation of spaces laying vacant.”136 From this juxtaposition we can see another bequest to future agrarian reformers: the extent to which the “sufficient allotment” approach to increasing agricultural production and maintaining the arteries of state and noble manor alike created not only the key to success (“sufficiency,” rural stability), but also the flip side of this agrarian coin, the category of land hunger and the land hungry peasant (poverty, rural instability). The persistence of this “sufficient/land hungry” dichotomy, including the tension between its rationality and the rationality of intensive cultivation, haunted agrarian reformers through the end of the old regime and

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into the new one. Attempts to implement modern husbandry as a key to rural prosperity constantly butted up against the deeply ingrained habit of ensuring peasants access to sufficient land, especially after the sanctification of the land allotment in the public mind after the Emancipation of 1861 and the advent of technocratic means to statistically measure the efficacy of policies. By 1861, the sufficient nadel, which existed with no fixed legal (surveyed) boundaries on the ground, was permanently fixed as the category through which educated elites and policy-makers conceived of peasant agriculture. This was the state of sufficiency.

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2 Serf Emancipation: Sanctifying the Normed Nadel, Measuring Its Sufficiency Prior to 1861, the application of land norms was patchy, aspirational, and based on lore more than on concrete information, besides being mostly limited to those categories of peasants within direct state authority. A host of social and political factors, as well as weak administrative structures, constrained state attempts to apply norms for the more than 22 million peasants who were serfs – the chattel property of the landed nobility. Prior to the Emancipation, state intervention in the serf economy was limited to exhortations that lords not impoverish their serfs, to holding lords accountable for their serfs’ soul taxes, and to publishing materials preaching better management and farming techniques in the hope that this would keep lords cognizant that the ties between their economic lives and those of their serfs required that they ensure serfs’ access to sufficient land and other inputs (or other sources of income). Defeat in the Crimean War indicated that to maintain its great power status, the empire would have to retool the autocracy, which included, ultimately, bringing an end to serfdom. The Emancipation of 1861 confirmed the state’s position as an allotter of land and solidified land allotment as a fundamental basis by which autocratic authority would ensure that the needs of the commonweal preceded those of individuals and classes.1 Emperor Alexander II’s commitment to emancipating serfs with land, seen from the perspective of the nadel, extended the existing model for managing the peasant economy (allotment norms) to liberated serfs. This universalization of the nadel made it more possible to conceptualize the peasantry as a coherent whole. The Emancipation left intact and sanctified the implied (though

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not necessarily manifest) moral economy of serfdom, transferring the lords’ obligations to the state. It objectified the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry in the nadel, converting the sufficient allotment from merely a good management practice into a legally sanctioned entitlement and form of property for the peasant estate (soslovie). Furthermore, the statute established allotment norms, a measurement of peasants’ legal entitlement to land. Finally, the normed emancipation nadel was sanctified by state action and by the person of the emperor, whose rescripts directed officials to guarantee freed serfs sufficient land and a perceived improvement in their lives. Allotment land became an exclusive and permanent land reserve for meeting peasant land needs – a distinction preserved until the end of the old regime. The nadel itself – its sufficiency or lack thereof – became a measure of the state’s moral commitment to a peasantry. The Emancipation required for the first time that officials consider (amidst a multitude of competing agendas) how to allot land more precisely than the fifteen-desiatina rule of thumb and, since serfs would be redeeming the land and lords receiving compensation for it, how much it was worth. This exercise laid bare the state’s own ignorance about the serf economy beyond numbers that the reform’s authors deemed dubious. The Russian Empire had no cadastral tables – no data related to the value and income of surveyed parcels of land – and little precise information as to how much land freed serfs needed. In step with the spirit of reform that characterized the early years of Alexander II’s reign and also with the “rise of statistical thinking” that blossomed throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the state spent the remainder of its existence attempting to address this informational void about peasant land (as well as other such voids connected to peasant life in general) through the more regular and systematic collection, evaluation, and application of statistical information.2 In doing so, it concretized its own assumptions about peasant economic life in numbers, including the idea that peasant well-being could be evaluated in cadastral terms. Statistics would eventually provide a means for evaluating how well the Emancipation delivered on its promise. By the end of Alexander’s reign, however, the steady accumulation and interpretation of numbers appeared to indicate that the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry, as represented by the nadel, had failed. Emancipation land allotments were “insufficient” and overpriced.

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N ade l as R e p r e s e n tat io n of the State’s Moral C o m m it m e n t to t h e Peasantry By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of Russia’s educated elites viewed serfdom as an embarrassment, and even many serfowners regretted the system. Even as serfdom and lords’ authority expanded under Catherine II, projects to end the institution emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century in her court. Serfdom’s deleterious effects on peasant lives were well-known at home and abroad through publications such as Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, and works by the marquis de Custine and August von Haxthausen.3 Britain had abolished the slave trade in its colonies in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, and by 1861 most other colonial powers had followed suit. The United States was close behind them. Closer to home, Prussia abolished what remained of serfdom in 1807 (to take effect in 1810), and Austria-Hungary launched a serf emancipation in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. Add to this the numerous “secret committees” convened in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I to discuss the “peasant question” and the future of serfdom (two of them chaired by the future Alexander II) and, in hindsight, it does not appear surprising that serfdom’s days were numbered.4 Yet most of his subjects were surprised by the attention Alexander II devoted to the issue, and that the censors approved discussion of it in print. Although there was a long-standing consensus among the myriad Nikolaevan “secret committees” that serfdom was immoral, most likely unprofitable, and a barrier to systematizing imperial administration, the emperor’s initial public commitments to emancipation could hardly have made most nobles fear for their livelihoods and ways of life. The 1856 manifesto announcing the end of the Crimean War spoke of “equal justice and equal protection” for all subjects, and this led to rumours of emancipation. Yet when the Governor General of Moscow asked for clarification, even the emperor’s response – the well-known statement that it was better to begin abolishing serfdom from above rather than risking its abolition from below – was still vague and gave little cause for concern. The 1857 rescript to the governor general of the northwestern provinces, V.I. Nazimov, granted permission to establish local committees of serfowners to draft proposals for emancipation, but also indicated that changes would be piecemeal and centred on the lords’ interests;

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essentially, the rats would be trusted to oversee the distribution of the cheese. Alexander’s selection of stalwart defenders of noble interests as ministers, and the appointment of reform-minded P.D. Kiselev as Ambassador to Paris, seemed to consign Alexander’s interest in emancipation to the same bureaucratic black hole as that of his father. Yet the trajectory of action was different. Contemporaries noted how Alexander cultivated the image of father figure to his people. At the same time, he emulated his western European counterparts in his attempts to earn the love of his people by working for their benefit. More and more as his reign continued, Alexander viewed the power of autocracy as including personal responsibility for the welfare of all. His coronation procession to the Kremlin was the first to include peasants.5 Also, he increasingly associated his person with the emancipation project and intervened to move it forward, making it a key component of his “scenario of power.” The autocracy had established serfdom, and it was up to the autocracy to end it.6 He ordered publication of the Nazimov Rescript over the objections of his ministers. He made a provincial tour in 1858 to nudge recalcitrant serf-owners to approach the task of drawing up emancipation proposals with positive hearts. When the lords still came up short, he appointed strong advocates of a landed emancipation to the Editing Commissions charged with reviewing and collating past laws and the proposals of local committees into a coherent legislative proposal. Finally, when the old guard populating the Main Committee (formerly the Secret Committee of 1856) and State Council balked at the Editing Commissions’ legislative proposals in 1860, Alexander pushed forward with a landed emancipation anyway.7 Within four years the emperor had moved from ambivalence to advocacy, embracing emancipation as a moral obligation to the Russian people and as the moral legacy of his reign. Yet, the emperor’s direct involvement in drafting the emancipation statutes themselves is less important to us than the connection between the statutes, the state, and the sovereign that cast the Emancipation and its land allotments in moral terms. Beginning with the tone and purported intent of Alexander’s rescripts, the emperor portrayed the Emancipation as an act of sacrifice for the common good made by emperor and noble servitors alike. A patina of the emperor’s personal moral commitment to the peasantry based on the precedent of his ancestors’ use of state power coated the Emancipation, uniting its moral character with past imperial intervention on behalf of the

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peasantry and creating a sense of tradition and custom, as well as the “belief that Alexander was beloved by the people.” This belief, Wortman noted, “remained an article of faith and sustained his and many other officials’ and writers’ vision of reform as a display of altruism and generosity.”8 Over the remainder of his reign, the Emancipation came to express a bond between the tsar and his people that formed the crux of his “scenario of power.”9 The nadel objectified this as a physical token of the emperor’s moral commitment to his peasant subjects. From the public’s perspective, this was a moral commitment blessed by none other than the progressive intelligentsia’s moral compass, Alexander Herzen. Writing from London in The Bell (Kolokol) in February 1858 – long before emancipation (let alone a landed one) was a sure thing, but encouraged by the Nazimov Rescript – Herzen proclaimed that “the name of Alexander II already belongs to history” and that the beginnings of the Emancipation he initiated would “not be forgotten by future generations.” A few paragraphs later he noted that “we are convinced that Alexander II is not indifferent to welcome people who strongly love Russia – but who also strongly love freedom,” and that to such people “the opinion of the liberator of peasants has become important.” Henceforth, Alexander II would be the TsarLiberator (Tsar’-Osvoboditel’) – a title that cloaked his person and reign in the moral act of emancipation and that cast its success as a measure of the moral commitment of the state and emperor to the people.10 For the peasant turned publisher, Ivan Sytin, this moral commitment was imbued with religious meaning.11 Metropolitan Filaret, an opponent of emancipation, penned the Emancipation Manifesto of 19 February 1861 and in it cast serfdom in the most generous light. Nonetheless, the manifesto cemented the emperor’s moniker as Tsar-Liberator and contextualized it within his moral obligations as sovereign. Proclaimed from the pulpit in the hope that this would encourage rural calm, the manifesto placed emancipation in the context of the emperor’s coronation vow before God “to embrace with Our royal love and care” all of his subjects, “from he who performs the highest state service to he who turns a furrow in the field with plow of wood or metal.” Serfs, “we observed” had hitherto been neglected from a legal perspective, their “obligations, rights and privileges” (unlike those of other estates) undefined by law. This was not a problem in simpler times, when decent paternalistic relations existed, but “with the decline of the simplicity of

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customs” and “the decrease in the direct, paternal relations of landowners with peasants,” or even worse, “sometimes with the falling of landowners’ rights into the hands of people who sought only their personal gain,” peaceful and mutually beneficial relations weakened, paving the way for “arbitrariness … burdensome to the peasants and unfavorable to their welfare,” which only encouraged the peasants themselves to be ambivalent “towards the improvement of their own lives.” Where the morality of noblesse oblige had failed, the sovereign emperor was now stepping in to ensure the moral and economic welfare of the peasantry. This state act was thus a moral act that would include “a quantity of field land and other types of property in order to ensure their [peasants’] livelihood and the fulfillment of their obligations to the Government.”12 In essence, the state was taking upon itself the moral economy obligation once owed by lords. This obligation, embodied in the sufficient nadel, quickly eclipsed the fact that the Emancipation had freed serfs from bondage in the public mind, becoming a measure of the Emancipation’s success. To understand how this happened requires a look at the constraints under which reformers drafted the emancipation statutes. The risk in all of this consisted in the fact that the emperor and society had set the bar for achieving the Emancipation’s goals higher than the state could, given its financial and informational resources, hope to achieve.

Dra f t in g t h e E m a n c ipati on: Emanci pati on L an d N o r m s a n d t h e Q ues t for S uffi ci ency Once they accepted the inevitability of emancipation, lords and their ministerial supporters shifted their political energies towards preserving all or some of their land and receiving compensation for their losses. Even as Alexander II became convinced that he had a moral obligation as sovereign to end serfdom and that the empire’s rural stability required an emancipation with land, he was aware that rural and political stability also required that the process respect lords as property owners. Thus, his initial parameters for the Emancipation were ambiguous. His instructions or “Imperial Rescripts” stipulated a landed emancipation but gave no direction as to the composition or permanency of peasant allotments.13 The reformers who dominated the Main Committee and the Editing Commission established to draft the reform statute took the emperor’s rescripts as requiring that peasants perceive an improvement in their lives and that they receive

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allotments sufficient to maintain themselves and fulfill their obligations (thus fulfilling state’s needs for reliable revenue and rural stability).14 At the same time, as the Editing Commission noted in its first meeting, while its task was to draft legislation ensuring that a freed serf “felt immediately that his way of life had improved,” it was also to ensure that a lord felt “reassured that his interests had been protected.”15 These seemingly contradictory aims were the main parameters the emperor set for the legislation. The appointment of Ia.I. Rostovtsev as head of the Editing Commission charged with drafting the emancipation statutes ensured that the rescripts’ “great principles” remained at the centre of discussions. For Rostovtsev, these principles meant that the peasants needed to be guaranteed enough ploughland and other resources (pasture, forest, hayfields, etc.) to meet their households’ subsistence requirements and state obligations. Otherwise, the emancipated serfs’ personal liberty could not be meaningful and the state’s interest in revenue and tranquility would be undermined.16 As it turned out, overcoming the resistance of recalcitrant serf-owners and their ministerial supporters was in many ways simpler than drafting statutes that would please lord and peasant alike, given other constraints that seemed exterior to the question of emancipation itself. Steven L. Hoch wrote in great detail about these constraints and the way they shaped the Emancipation.17 Reformers were wellacquainted with the means by which their Prussian and Austrian neighbours had ended serfdom. However, because of a banking crisis and the evaporation of foreign credit, those who sat down to collate the submissions of the local committees and other information into a set of emancipation terms and implementation instructions were forced to find a revenue-neutral means of allotting serfs land and compensating their lords. Serfs would have to pay for their allotments through a redemption system over forty-nine years, with the state playing the role of banker.18 The second great constraint Hoch noted (echoing George Yaney and others) was the great information vacuum in which the reformers operated. The “enlightened bureaucrats” who dominated the Editing Commission, such as N.A. Miliutin, A.P. ZablotskiiDesiatovskii, and P.P. Semenov(-Tian-Shanskii), had the combined resources of the state and the Imperial Russian Geographic Society at their fingertips, but they were forced to admit that they knew very little about the serf economy (how much land they tilled and what dues they paid), let alone how much that land might be worth for redemption purposes. There was no cadaster of the Russian Empire

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– that is, no list of surveyed parcels of land by type of arable as assigned to individual owners with an accompanying assessment of the value of those parcels based on the capitalization of income. The large survey parcels of the General Land Survey and state peasant data collected over the course of the Kiselev reforms was something to start with, but these did not provide a basis for placing the state at financial risk as it embarked on its role as banker for the redemption system. Furthermore, what data that did exist on the serf household economy was suspect, for that information came from serf-owners, who were hardly disinterested parties. The lack of adequate information contributed to the complexity of the emancipation statutes and would leave them open to multiple interpretations. Besides all this, there was tension between a conception of peasants as inherently agricultural creatures (Romantic tillers of the soil and personifications of the Russian soul) and the reality that in large parts of the empire, peasant livelihood depended on distinctly non-agricultural pursuits.19 As Hoch noted, this informational void was a classic example of “under-government.”20 To be fair, cadasters in other states were hardly perfect and covered much smaller and less varied territories with less at stake. Furthermore, as much as serf-owners might have hoped for a delay, the emperor wanted the Emancipation to proceed quickly. Reformers did not have the luxury of the twenty-five years it had taken to complete the cadaster used in the Austrian emancipation process. On top of this, reformers were also limited by the rescripts’ demands that all sides be happy with the results and that peasants receive allotments sufficient to sustain themselves. To overcome these constraints, they operated the way that most undergoverned states did, by “institutionalizing administrative practices that were obsolete elsewhere.”21 They used easily counted input measures that were ready to hand. Based as they were on previous administrative experience aimed at “sufficiency,” land allotment norms provided a ready tool for ensuring that peasants had sufficient land to both make their payments and see improvements in their lives, while at the same time protecting the state’s interests as it walked the high wire of reform without benefit of an informational net. In the absence of reliable information, reformers decided to define emancipation allotments on the basis of the serfs’ existing allotments. Noble landowners on the provincial committees, concerned about the pace at which their assets appeared to be melting before their eyes, countered that the use of existing allotments would benefit those

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who had granted miserly allotments, penalize those who had been generous, and strip serf-owners of all their land in northern and steppe areas, where serfs typically had access to the entire demesne and paid obrok.22 Lords argued that only allotments based on “artificial norms [i.e., not existing allotments], and besides this [ones of] the smallest possible size,” could “lead to the swift and natural substitution of compulsory labor by free labor in rural life.” This call for what was essentially a cadaster would have delayed emancipation for another generation. To sweeten this selfish proposition, they pointed out that artificial norms would create uniformity conducive to tax assessment. Finally, in response to accusations that artificial norms were arbitrary, lords noted that existing allotments, “established exclusively under the influence of serfdom,” were no less arbitrary.23 Rostovtsev and the Economic Section recognized the challenge they faced regarding the northern and steppe obrok estates; even so, they rejected these arguments. In Rostovtsev’s view, any “cut-offs” (otrezki) necessary to remedy the varied conditions of serf allotments could not be allowed to deprive peasants of “their current means of existence.”24 The Economic Section noted that reducing allotments would contradict state goals. Assuming (perhaps optimistically) that most serf-owners managed their estates with at least some sense of rationality, the Economic Section also disagreed that existing allotments were arbitrary, noting that “with few exceptions” they rested on “the strength of the centuries-old relations and mutual benefits of one and another soslovie [social estate] placed upon the pomeshchik, and the moral and material necessity of maintaining at sufficient levels the life of his peasant.”25 That the institution of serfdom both damned and supported the use of existing allotments tells us much about the ambiguity of the final statute. Other considerations also favoured relying on current allotments as a measure of sufficiency in the emancipation process. The task of devising an “artificial” allotment norm was prohibitively complex. It would require the state to “define with desired accuracy the very needs of the peasant in each locale,” including “the actual productivity of the land allotment” and “the degree of benefit each peasant obtained from primary, and in particular, auxiliary, trades” that served as supplementary income. The state barely had means to survey existing allotments, let alone new ones. The Economic Section also argued that artificial norms ultimately would undermine both peasants and nobles because the resultant peasant dissatisfaction might exceed the state’s ability to maintain order.26

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Owing to imperfect data, and to avoid penalizing serf-owners who previously had granted their serfs large allotments, the Economic Section defined “existing allotments” not as they actually were, but as a range of sizes deemed average for a given locale (i.e., it set a minimum and maximum size or normal range). Maximum allotments ranged from 5 to 15 percent greater than the local average; these were set above the average purposefully so that those subject to a reduction of their allotment would still hold more land that the local average allotment (and hence still hold sufficient land). This minimum or “mean” approach ensured that peasants would have sufficient access to land, while the maximum protected lords’ interests in the north and on the steppe. Peasants with current allotments outside of this range received either additional land or a reduction. Peasants eligible for additional land (i.e., those whose current allotment size fell below the minimum for the area) received a larger allotment only upon agreeing to assume the additional obligations attached to it (many peasant communities would later try to avoid taking the larger allotments so as to avoid the accompanying payment increases27), and only if supplementing peasant allotments did not shrink the lord’s demesne to less than one-third of its current size.28 The Economic Section also tried to ensure peasant access rights to sufficient pasture and forest by invoking existing customs.29 The emancipation statute took into account the great variation of soil and other environmental factors by dividing the parts of the empire under consideration (all of the empire as it stood in 1860 with the exception of Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, and the Baltic provinces where landless emancipations took place under Alexander I) into regions, zones, and locales, ultimately setting minimum and maximum allotments for over fifty areas in order to allot land to the serfs of the empire’s 130,000 serf estates.30 Reformers freely admitted that they were wielding a blunt instrument, but given the great environmental variation, even within single districts, and variations in the institution of serfdom itself, they hoped that the averages for determining the minimum and maximum norms would reduce the possibility of error. In practice this meant enacting separate statutes with specific norms for different parts of the empire. For example, one statute divided twenty-nine Great Russian provinces, three provinces of New Russia, the province of Mogilev, and part of Vitebsk into three soil type zones and twenty-nine separate localities. Another statute divided the Ukrainian provinces of Chernigov, Poltava, and part of Kharkov into nine localities. A third split Kiev, Podolia, and

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Volyinia into nine localities. In these provinces, inventories implemented by statutes of 1847 and 1848 determined the amount of land peasants held, and those statutes allotted all of these lands to the 12 percent of the empire’s serf population that lived there. Similar partial inventories were used in Grodno, Vil’na, Minsk, and parts of Vitebsk. Yet another law divided the remainder of Vil’na, Grodno, Minsk, and parts of Vitebsk into two zones based on soil fertility, with four Vitebsk districts subdivided into nine additional categories based on population density. Bessarabia, the Siberian provinces, and the Don Host all got their own special rules and norms, for an overall total of fifty separate localities and sets of norms.31 Except in areas subject to earlier inventories, peasants in each of these localities holding allotments between the minimum and the maximum kept their current land allotments, while those with allotments below the minimum saw them increased, and those above the maximum saw them reduced. The Editing Commission set the minimum and maximum norms after poring over reams of data submitted by local committees and other institutions; most of this data it considered suspect, which strengthened its confidence in the use of a minimum and maximum. The maximums were objects of extensive calculation; teams of Editing Commission members experimented with different maximums, essentially to ascertain how little they could be reduced so as to ensure that lords – particularly those with northern estates and estates with less than one hundred serfs (for which data was scant) – would retain the minimum required demesne after the Emancipation. The Editing Commission was confident that reductions would be an exception, and in the end, as Hoch notes, even though those with the most land per capita suffered a reduction, “after the reform they still had more land than many of their neighbours.”32 Making use of average pre-reform allotment sizes combined with establishing norms as a series of ranges reduced the impact of imperfect information and had the best chance of accounting for statistical outliers. “From a statistical point of view,” Hoch notes, “all this was an eminently reasonable policy given the intent of the commission and the absence of more reliable data.”33 The minimum goal was sufficiency; the maximum goal was to ensure that the majority of the emancipated serfs would perceive their lives as improved as a result of the reform. The commitment to sufficiency as defined by land norms is perhaps best demonstrated by the following: even in areas where proximity

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to Black Sea ports had already created a vibrant economy of commercial cereal production for export, the statutes broke up these highly successful (compared to much of the empire) commercial properties in order to allot peasants land. In addition, based on the rescripts’ guiding principles and the constraints it faced, the Editing Commission’s Economic Section allowed peasants to reject allotments only if other means existed to guarantee their livelihood.34 The draft statute did not include the option for peasants to exit quickly from serfdom without further obligations by taking a “gift” or “quarter” allotment (darstvennyi or chetvertyi nadel – those who did so became known as darstvenniki or chetverniki) until about a week before the law was issued. Even here, as Wildman showed, officials often forced peasants to take a full allotment.35 As we shall see in Chapter 5, state officials apparently allowed peasants to forgo a full allotment (either as darstvenniki or by registering with the meshchane social estate) rather easily only in areas where state land was so abundant that there was a high likelihood that they would be able to rent the additional land needed to maintain themselves. Besides codifying sufficiency by means of allotment norms, the final text of the statutes situated the state even more firmly as the allotter of land. Freed serfs (not as individuals, but in a collective sense as members of rural societies) held this land not by the grace of their labour but on the basis of the state’s allotment of land to them. As noted in the fifth article of the statute pertaining to the majority of serfs (those living in Great Russian, New Russian, and parts of Belorussian provinces), to secure peasants’ livelihood and enable them to fulfill their obligations to the state and to their former lords as “temporarily obligated” peasants (until the emancipation process was completed), peasants were to be allotted “a quantity of land appropriate to local conditions … granted in permanent usufruct to each village community.”36 The number of peasants registered to the rural community in the tenth revision of 1859 (i.e., excluding those who had been manumitted or who lived in the community but were registered in another) served as the basis for applying the norm (specified in the appendix to article 15) and allotting land. The law made no provision for population growth. Wastelands, roads and cow paths, pastures, hayfields, and forests were excluded except in special circumstances (of which there were many). The statute also specified exceptions for those areas where the provincial bureau of peasant affairs documented that the soil was exceptionally saline (art. 28 – three desiatinas of

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saline soil was to count as one desiatina of good land) and listed a host of other exceptions, adding to the complexity of the emancipation process.37 Setting aside the complexity of the statutes and their multitude of caveats and exceptions, the laws codified the nadel as a new category of landed property bestowed on the peasant soslovie by the state for its maintenance, and also codified the idea that the nadel should be sufficient. Furthermore, though it rejected the use of “artificial norms,” the statute codified and cemented the idea that the state could best fulfill its managerial and paternalistic role as the allotter of land through the derivation, tabulation, and application of norms that (on paper at least) guaranteed peasants subsistence. The norms listed in the appendix to article 15 in the statute covering the Great Russian provinces had a long life, continuing as an administrative precedent into other areas of agrarian policy in the empire’s central provinces and expanding into new territories as the empire grew in size and launched colonization efforts in Central Asia and Siberia.38 The emancipation norms remained a reference point for all discussions of agrarian reform until the end of the old regime, a point of comparison even if only mentioned to proclaim those norms’ declining applicability. The statute also codified the precedent that, with due attention to the local variations that popped up in any discussion of rural Russia, land norms provided an objective means of ensuring peasant well-being that could be applied easily by multiplying the norm by the number of souls in each rural society. As the note to Article 17 explained, “The maximum size allotment for a whole rural society” could be calculated by multiplying the number of souls who belong to the rural society (based on articles 6, 7, and 8) by the figure of the maximum soul allotment for that area or part of the district … Thus, for example, if a rural society consisting of 150 souls is located in the Podolsk district of Moscow province, where according to the appendix to art. 15 the figure for the maximum soul allotment is fixed at 3 desiatinas, 600 square sazhens, then the maximum allotment size for the entire community equals 150 multiplied by 3 desiatinas, 600 square sazhens, i.e., 487 ­desiatinas, 1200 square sazhens … And a third of that quantity … will comprise the minimum size of allotment for the whole community.39

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This was an administrators’ dream – the cameralist Polizeistaat writ large in service to cameralist goals and rural stability. The Emancipation also solidified the administrative precedent that the state was responsible for peasant well-being by expanding its managerial and paternalistic intervention to include former serfs. For former serfs, the state of sufficiency would stand now (ideally) at the centre of their economic lives, just as it did for state and udel peasants, with two differences. First, the emancipation norms, although derived from incomplete or suspect information, were based more on data than on the tradition of the fifteen-desiatina norm, extending a trend that had developed during the Kiselev reforms. The second difference was that these normed land allotments were connected to a monetized value that, given the financial constraints surrounding emancipation, assumed an importance beyond the normed allotment’s ability to provide an adequate income for state and peasant alike. Besides using allotment norms to manage sufficient peasant access to land, the reformers attempted to manage peasant payments, using average local quitrents (obrok) and monetized corvée (barshchina) to strictly regulate the dues that peasants owed their former masters during the transitional stage of the emancipation process, during which they had the status of “temporarily obligated.” Again, peasants were supposed to perceive an immediate improvement in their lives, so if the average calculated obrok was higher than what they had paid as serfs, peasants paid the lower figure.40 Besides the payments assigned during the period of temporary obligation – during which time the state hoped that peasants and lords, with the help of local officials and “peace arbitrators” (mirovye posredniki),41 would reach voluntary agreement on the land to be turned over to peasants and its price – reformers grappled with how much peasants would pay for the allotments they received. The state’s commitment to compensating nobles at some level (thus providing capital to intensify cultivation); the inability to do so from state coffers because of a banking crisis; and the subsequent need to determine how much peasants would have to pay to redeem their allotments (redemption payments – vykupnye platezhi) raised the issue of the actual value of peasant allotments. The state’s self-assigned role as banker for the redemption system gave it a vital interest in determining the actual value of the lands, for which it would soon hold forty-nine year mortgages. Land value was another area in which the state operated under conditions

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of informational blindness, holding only numbers that were incomplete and highly suspect. Again, reformers balanced the lack of reliable information with the state goal of improving peasant life by using current obligations as a basis for calculating not only post-­ emancipation payments but also redemption payments.42 This solution satisfied few completely, and several provincial committees and Editing Commission members recommended a periodic re-evaluation of peasant obligations in light of current average grain prices or, ideally, a program of cadastral work. As P.P. Semenov argued, however, even where cadasters existed, they were instruments designed to equalize the distribution of land taxes, and as such, they did not provide the actual value of the land, but only its value for tax purposes. This made such a method unsuitable for determining redemption payments (and pomeshchik compensation) because cadastral assessments would either result in land values that were too low (to the disadvantage of the lord) “or so high that paying would be disastrous for peasants.”43 The “shock” to the value of estates would be especially great in non–black soil regions, and the increase in peasant payment burdens would be onerous in areas better suited to cereal cultivation. So when it came to calculating what peasants would pay (and lords would receive), cadastral information could not advance the Emancipation’s twin goals of guaranteeing peasant livelihoods and establishing nobles as capitalist farmers. The “existing fact” of current payments, however, could do so.44 The commission thus calculated land values by capitalizing average local obrok payments at 5 percent.45 This resulted in redemption payments that bound land and labour (peasant and allotment) nearly as permanently as under serfdom and said more about the ability of peasants to pay than about allotments’ actual value. By 1878, 7,747,265 “revisional souls” were redeeming 27,630,467 desiatinas of land with redemption payments totalling 43,741,493 rubles.46 Though redemption payments were based on existing obligations, other aspects of the emancipation process pointed to something more than maintaining the status quo. The rescripts, the redemption system, and the abolition of serf status together implied that land allotments should guarantee peasant subsistence needs and yield income sufficient for meeting payment obligations – including redemption payments. Capitalizing obrok – the peasant’s ability to pay – represented a continuation of the serf economy, whereby sufficiency meant guaranteeing the existence of human assets as a means of guaranteeing income.

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Measuring sufficiency meant, in this case, a consideration of peasant household income from all sources – total income. Yet at the same time, the redemption operation inserted something quite different into this equation: the concept that land had a value in and of itself. This was a somewhat novel idea in a country where, historically, ploughland had been valued with its attached labour supply. In addition, the redemption system heightened the moral tenor of the Emancipation by adding to it the morality of contract. Many officials and interested urban elites believed that as better agricultural data became available, it would be possible to measure whether the Emancipation had fulfilled its moral obligations. That is, it would be possible to measure the morality of the state’s allotment and redemption process by calculating allotment values and comparing them to redemption payments. More than anything else, established patterns of agrarian reform and the specifics of the Emancipation converted land allotment norms from a purely fiscal measure for allotting land to various categories of peasants into a very public political and moral act.

S tat is t ic s a n d t h e “I ns uffi ci ent” L a n d A l l otment Filling the Information Void: The Central Statistical Committee’s Rural Economy The government’s commitment to ensuring rural stability and revenue by attempting to allot peasants sufficient land required more and better information. When faced with a major state initiative requiring economic information, officials found that they lacked the most basic information about the rural economy they were seeking to change and manage – a grid and accompanying tables that might have made rural Russia at least seem legible. The emancipation process exposed the magnitude of this illegibility. Ultimately, what the emperor and his officials knew with any degree of reliability seldom extended beyond the confines of court, council, or capital, or the latest inspection tour, and even this information was often irregular, non-standard, and suspect. Reformers were, in essence, blind, unable to “see like a state.”47 Numbers sent to St Petersburg were as likely to be what local officials believed central administrators wanted to hear as they were to be real, and the stakes of the Emancipation only made this worse. The “enlightened bureaucrats” of the Nikolaevan era – the field

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operatives and directors of research for both the Kiselev reforms and the emancipation statutes – found this condition patently vexing. These leaders of the Alexandrian era of “Great Reforms” sought a new type of rational, data-driven administration, one that was more aggressive – proactive instead of reactive – and one that was guided by reliable numbers collected according the latest precepts of statistical science that emanated from both the academy and the International Statistical Congress. Statistics were assumed to be objective, and reformers in Russia and elsewhere gave little thought to the fact that such information was ultimately shaped by state needs (and thus, state categories or “ways of seeing”). The corrective for illegibility took the form of reorganizing the centralized collection of statistics in a Central Statistical Committee within the Interior Ministry. Enumeration with adequate, accurate, and timely data would allow state officials to break down the complexities of territory and population – to capture and neutralize the empire’s diversity in numbers that could be categorized, placed in tabular grids, and manipulated to suit imperial needs. The categories of measurement would provide a universalizing tool enabling officials and the public to comprehend, order, and develop the empire’s diverse populations and their activities, including the peasant economy. Data on property ownership, sowings, harvests, population growth, horse inventories, and so on, averaged for large administrative units, would swallow messy local distinctions and make it possible to imagine and control the empire from Saint Petersburg’s chancery halls. In this way, statistics could serve as corrective lenses that brought the empire into focus for those charged with tapping its resources, developing its population, and (as we shall see) evaluating the efficacy and legacy of the Emancipation. From its creation in 1863 to the fall of the Provisional Government in 1917, the Central Statistical Committee served as the empire’s primary agency responsible for gathering a variety of statistics, and in many ways it remained little changed during the first decade of Soviet power. A juncture developed between reformers’ commitment to administration informed by statistics and conceptions of the rural economy as officials attempted to use statistics to make legible the empire’s greatest resource (land) and to chart the future development of its agrarian economy. Rational administration demanded cadastral information – a register of landed properties, their productive capabilities, and, at some future point, their assessed values (based on

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average production costs and commodity prices for a given area). Concomitantly, by the mid-nineteenth century a force beyond the traditional statecraft/statistics link drove and influenced this bureaucratic quest for data, challenging and reinforcing statist conceptions of what statistics could and should do. Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet’s “social physics,” based on an “average man,” meshed well with the state’s need for numbers that simplified and homogenized diverse territories and populations; it promised to reveal not only the number of draftable and taxable male subjects but also statistical “laws” governing subjects’ actions.48 Such laws might undercut the concept of the all-powerful autocrat; even so, they represented a useful tool for an increasingly technocratic bureaucracy. A.A. Kaufman, a Russian Jew who managed to achieve great professional success as a statistician, bureaucratic expert, and academic in an era hungry for technical expertise, noted that there were strong ties between the structure of the Central Statistical Committee and the precepts of Quetelet and the International Statistical Congress. The Central Statistical Committee institutionalized prevailing mid-century conceptions of statistics.49 This “mean” view of both space and inhabitants assumed a homogeneity of human behaviour. In economic terms, this view rested on the assumption that all humans were essentially economic beings who acted on similar principles – a homogeneous Homo oeconomicus. It also assumed certain things about rural economies, namely that all farmers derived their income primarily from agriculture and aimed to maximize the benefits they received from the market. This implied a universalistic model of economic activity within a single rural economy. To the extent that one could separate the peasant economy from that of former serf-owners, the difference resided in legal categories and peasant “backwardness.” Elites were well aware that peasant husbandry was less productive; even so, the main variable in economic calculations was the land itself, not the labourer who tilled it. Put another way, the legal status or character of the labourer was given no place in assessments of the land and its income potential. From the state’s perspective, “legibility” required that an economy be categorized and measured according to things easily quantified (amount of land held and sown, number of horses and other livestock, number of household workers, harvest yield, and wages) and that these measures be applied to established legal categories of the population. Once this was done, universalizing “norms” could be applied as tools

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for both understanding and shaping the countryside – norms rooted in precedent but now burnished by modern science. Such were the guiding “best practices” that hovered in the background as one of the empire’s pre-eminent servitors, and geographers and founding director of the Central Statistical Committee, P.P. Semenov (later Semenov-Tian-Shanskii in honor of his achievements in exploration), set out to fill the state’s informational void. Semenov hoped to rectify this situation both to meet the needs of rational administration and in the interest of statistical science as represented by the International Statistical Congress.50 Intensely aware of the territorial diversity of the empire, he set in motion an ambitious plan of property registration.51 Indeed, other than seeing Russia conduct a one-day census of the whole empire, there was probably no other goal that occupied as much of his attention as the collection of land statistics. In the introduction to the first volume of the Central Statistical Committee’s new serial, Statistical Digest of the Russian Empire, he wrote that “statistics of state territory [have] an importance of the first degree, especially in a state as vast and primarily agricultural as Russia.” Yet hardly any of these data had been collected, nor had there been a proper registration of landed property. “Until this useful, extensive and highly complex affair is carried out for the whole of Russia,” he noted, “land statistics will for a long time remain in a highly unsatisfactory state, such that even information about the space of our administrative territorial units will not be strictly accurate.”52 Having failed in his initial attempt to incorporate the collection of land tenure data into a general one-day census of the empire, Semenov set out in 1877 to “make an investigation of the properties themselves in order to find a means of controlling data on habitations and to obtain a basis for the statistics of landed property.” Landowners, or in the case of peasants, township (volost’) officials, were to complete a series of forms distributed by the local police. First, each province carried out the survey on a single district and sent the results to Saint Petersburg so that Semenov could make procedural adjustments and order the collection of additional information.53 After assembling the data, Semenov set about organizing them in usable form. In principle, the district (uezd) served as the primary unit of compilation; however, Semenov divided each province into groups of districts with similar natural or economic conditions. These precepts of cadastral registration nicely paralleled Semenov’s own desire to measure a given area’s development potential and observe the tenets of geographical and

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statistical study learned from his German mentor, Carl Ritter (a founder of the modern discipline of geography), and from K.I. Arsen’ev.54 Meaningful study and statistical comparison was possible only by compiling data for like geographical areas. Aggregate data compiled purely by administrative unit had a certain administrative value, but from a scientific, Queteletian perspective, such aggregation was akin to comparing apples and oranges and therefore did little to make the imperial canvas legible.55 The result of Semenov’s labours, The Statistics of Landed Property and Inhabited Places of European Russia, set a precedent for the compilation of agricultural statistics. This work presented data for peasant and non-peasant lands, further cementing the separate legal nature of allotment land created by the Emancipation. This division did not stem from perceived differences between peasant and nonpeasant production; rather, it reflected the legal particularisms of the Russian state, where peasants and their landholdings still remained separate legal categories. Numbers would provide bureaucrats possessing an ethos of state-sponsored reform with the data necessary to act. One justification for enumerating lands according to legal criteria was that it would enable officials to gauge the economic condition of former serfs and their masters by enumerating inputs such as arable land held by each group and then use the information to intervene where needed.56 Semenov laid out the legalistic criteria for categorizing lands as peasant or non-peasant in the introduction to the first volume of results. The main distinction rested on who was listed on a deed as owner and, to a lesser degree, on how the land was used. Lands owned by more than one person or by relatives but farmed as one unit were treated as a single farm, as were lands purchased by groups of individuals. The lands of peasant householders who had redeemed their allotments independently of other commune members remained categorized as peasant allotment lands since in most cases these parcels were not delineated from communal fields; thus they were included in the census lists in the general amount of land registered according to the official deed (ustavnyi gramot) in the property holding or use of one or another commune. These lands might be technically private, but there was no way to count them as such. If, however, a parcel had passed into the hands of individuals of another social estate (soslovie) or of peasants from another rural society (all transfers that produced at least a rudimentary survey and official evidence of ownership),

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these lands would then be counted as the personal property of the new owner – either an individual or a peasant commune – as long as the new owner had complete rights over the piece of property. Lands held by peasants in peasant communities other than those dominated by the repartitional land commune were also considered peasant (as opposed to private) lands because “a certain portion of rights over these lands belonged to the rural society,” members of which were still subject to collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) for the soul tax, redemption payments, and other obligations. Legal concerns such as these formed the basis on which lands were counted as peasant (allotment) or private.57 The legal criteria and the reasons of state behind them can also be seen in the analysis of peasant property values that Semenov provided later in the work. The “division of the surveyed region into four geographic areas” – the elimination of land as a variable – allowed the researcher “to define for each of them with sufficient (though approximate) accuracy the value of all landed properties.” The homogeneity of the land itself made aggregation meaningful. The value of peasant allotment land could thus be calculated by making use of average market prices in the region. In other words, the value of peasant land was something independent of various social factors peculiar to peasant agriculture, such as communal land tenure.58 Land distribution, harvest, and other data thus continued to be reported in Central Statistical Committee publications as either allotment or private land for three reasons: the desire of a paternalistic state (especially one increasingly devoted to a policy of “official populism”) to evaluate the effects of the Emancipation with an eye to managing and improving peasant lives; particularistic concerns that dictated an observance of legal categories (except where a lack of data made this impossible); and the commonsense belief that, when measuring a rural economy, the primary variable was the land itself – that human economic activity was sufficiently homogeneous that average market figures and average harvest data were sufficient measures of the state of economic activity for a given soil type.59 Indeed, works produced after Semenov’s tenure as Central Statistical Committee director would repeat the discussion of legal classification he laid out in Volume I of Statistics of Landed Property and follow the basic assumption that the primary variable was the land itself. To the extent that variation existed within a given region (e.g., in harvest figures for a particular cereal), the assumptions behind the cadastral

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idea (which converted human activity to a constant) meant that such deviation could be dismissed as “error” and neutralized by averaging data from a sufficiently large sample.60 As we shall see, this cadastral, “mean,” or state approach to making the agrarian economy legible and measuring its activity had a profound impact on how the peasant economy appeared on the “grid” that state officials were using in their efforts to generate a manageable portrait of the countryside, especially when they applied cadastral assumptions to the peasant’s natural economy61 without having actually created a cadastral survey, and especially when they and others used agricultural data to assess the reforming state’s greatest project: the Emancipation. Applying cadastral assumptions created as many difficulties for the autocratic state as it may have solved, given that the state’s own data indicated that the Emancipation had failed to secure former serfs a “sufficient” means of survival. The “insufficiency” of emancipation allotments would become a matter of public debate that cast doubt on the state’s greatest moral achievement.

E va l uat in g t h e E manci pati on The Emancipation had shifted direct responsibility for more than twenty-two million serfs to the state. The state’s role as banker in the redemption system heightened its sense of obligation as well as its concerns about the well-being of former serfs. The great question here was whether the Emancipation, as it stood, had achieved its aims. Ministerial departments conducted numerous studies, and in 1872 the emperor sanctioned the creation of an inter-ministerial commission headed by interior minister P.A. Valuev to investigate the condition of the rural economy and of former serfs.62 The commission’s conclusions were cautious. Its members agreed that the rural economy was in the midst of a transition and would remain so until payment of the final redemption payments completed the Emancipation. Until that time “the entire peasant soslovie will not be in a condition that might be recognized as normal relative to the degree of taxation.”63 Commission members had a different view of the redemption system than the official line of the reformers. They contended that redemption payments were not a straight replacement of the dues under serfdom (and a better deal at that); rather, they were an additional burden. In addition, the commission lamented the deleterious effects of the Emancipation on the economy of former lords and serfs alike.

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The Emancipation had disrupted the ability of peasants to exist within their essential role as tillers of the soil subsisting on their nadel, and it was forcing more and more of them to either rent land at prices beyond the value of what they could produce or to seek additional income outside of their allotments, worst of all by resorting to wage labour in the cities.64 Even in areas with large land allotments, the shortage of access to forests, hayfields, and pastureland as a result of the Emancipation meant that productivity had declined and more peasants were migrating to seek urban employment.65 Emancipation allotments were not living up to their intent. Indeed, peasant allotments appeared to the commission to be insufficient, a situation attributed to the fact that “very many former serfs received minimum allotments” and that “a significant number took the ¼ allotment for free.”66 The commission did not stop to consider either the means by which peasants received their allotments or the actual numbers of households that chose the darstvenniki route. The fact that former serfs’ allotments were smaller than those of neighbouring state and udel peasants was measure enough, and this made emancipation allotments seem even more inequitable. Furthermore, in at least sixteen provinces the redemption payments were out of line with the actual value of the allotments being redeemed based on the capitalization of yields at market prices. As such, in several locales “redemption payments do not correspond to peasants’ payment capabilities and become burdensome for them, especially given the insignificant size of their allotment.”67 Even in the empire’s fertile black-soil region “the sum of all [peasant] payments exceeds the income of the [allotment] land by five times,” pushing peasants to seek wage labour (i.e., to exist by means other than exercising their essential “peasantness”).68 The government itself thus tentatively concluded that the Emancipation had left former serfs with insufficient and overpriced land allotments. This conclusion might have remained samovar talk in chancery halls had it not been for the surge in printed material that accompanied the Great Reforms and the growing interest in statistical studies as a means of understanding contemporary life that permeated educated publics around the world, Russia included.69 Saint Petersburg University statistics professor Iu.E. Ianson authored one of the most prominent of such studies of peasant land allotments and payments based on Valuev Commission materials: Essay of Statistical Research on Peasant Allotments and Payments. Using official categories and official data (the commission’s published work), this study

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consolidated and focused the discussion of peasant well-being on land hunger to offer the reading public proof in numbers that emancipation allotments were insufficient and that redemption payments were too high. The first edition appeared in 1877. Feeling compelled to respond to critics – most notably Dmitrii F. Samarin, a Slavophile landowner who accused Ianson of inventing a theory of insufficient allotments – Ianson issued a second edition of his work in 1881.70 Besides denying that he had invented any “theory of insufficient allotments,” Ianson argued that his book was an important guide to economic policy, especially in Russia. Statistical study was crucial to the state’s paternalistic duty to foster economic development, for the state possessed a “leading significance in the attainment of public welfare,” given that it stood “at the helm of economic success and progress.” Under such conditions, Ianson noted, the study of economic life was a necessary prerequisite to correct state action.71 Ianson’s presentation fixed the insufficient nadel as the chief focus of reform discussions for the remainder of the imperial period. Ianson had presented a cautious study. By necessity, his work used average figures that could not be applied to specific peasant allotments. This bothered him for methodological reasons. He also regretted the work’s limited source base, and he refused to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence related to peasant land rental and purchase because he saw “no significant strength of proof in such non-statistical data.”72 Even so, he stood by his book’s conclusion that a primary cause “of the unfavorable economic condition of a significant number of former serfs,” despite the state’s best intentions, was that the Emancipation had left peasants without sufficient means to feed themselves and meet their payment obligations.73 Most significantly, he highlighted the fact that income derived from peasant allotments did not correspond to the redemption payments levied against them. Ianson’s work, which carried the scientific prestige of his university chair, thus converted the cadastral measurement that Semenov and other Editing Commission members had warned against into a new measure of household sufficiency. It suggested that the Emancipation had fallen short of its noble goals, that it had violated the state’s moral compact with the peasantry, and that the state’s paternalistic duty required new legislation that considered actual calculated land values rather than total household income. Beginning with an examination of land allotments and payments in non–black soil provinces, Ianson acknowledged that the allotments in these provinces could not themselves be sufficient to provide all

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peasant needs.74 While noting that peasants in non–black soil provinces had a long history of supplementing their income with nonagricultural pursuits, his analysis of consumption needs, production costs, and harvests also pointed out that these allotments were insufficient even for feeding peasant families, let alone covering other needs. “Given the insufficiency of allotments,” he noted, “it is understandable that not only all taxes, but even redemption payments cannot be paid from the land’s income.” Furthermore, redemption payments stood at two to three times the obrok payments charged neighbouring state peasants farming similar land. Finally, Ianson lamented, local wages were so low that even households with the ability to turn to the labour market could not cover the deficits stemming from the incongruity between allotment income and redemption payments. Data collected for zemstvo tax assessments, which calculated average income for an extended period of time, confirmed this.75 The insufficiency of the land allotment itself, then, stood as the ultimate source of economic crisis in these areas. Improvement in peasant living standards was possible only by adjusting peasant payments, especially the size of redemption payments. His analysis of black-soil (chernozem) provinces revealed that even in this fertile region considered profitable for farming, the nadel did not fulfill the Emancipation’s goal of providing peasants with sustenance and the ability to meet their payment obligations.76 The implication to be drawn by readers (although not stated explicitly by Ianson) was that the Emancipation had unjustly overcharged peasants for insufficient allotments. Using data from official publications, Ianson posited a series of average peasant families and, again, calculated net allotment income by assigning a market value to the harvest and then subtracting consumption needs and production costs measured in market prices. The end result was virtually the same as that in non–black soil areas. On paper, peasants from chernozem areas could generally feed themselves from their allotments; however, their allotments did not generate a surplus for redemption and other payments.77 In part, this was because even though redemption payments in nine black-soil provinces were from 14 (Orel) to 48 (Riazan’) percent less than pre-emancipation quitrents, post-emancipation allotments were smaller in all provinces but three. In addition, he pointed out, “cut-offs” – deprivation of free access to pasture and firewood – negated much of the benefit of lower payments. Access to these items now had to be purchased from the local lord, and this constituted a further strain on peasant budgets.78

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Thus, in many cases peasant economic conditions were “worse than under serfdom.” Current land allotments, “without other guarantees of their welfare,” not only failed to protect peasants “from poverty and proletarianization, but sometimes even deprived them of their daily bread.” Calculated in market terms, peasant income was “fictional.”79 By 1895, Ianson’s argument – which confirmed the suspicions of the populist intelligentsia – had been immortalized in late imperial Russia’s most authoritative reference work, Brokgauz and Efron’s Encyclopedia, according to which Ianson’s work “had established beyond a doubt the inadequacy of peasant land allotments and their excessively high assessments.” The entry on Ianson in the Imperial Historical Society’s Russian Biographical Dictionary concurred with that judgment.80 A decade later, Ianson’s conclusions still reigned in public debate on agrarian reform, which by then was inflamed by defeat, revolution, political change, and the promise of real reform within the parameters of the State Duma. The Emancipation had failed to live up to its promise; the state, despite public concern for its peasant subjects as articulated in Alexander II’s Imperial Rescripts, had failed to provide sufficient resources for its most vulnerable taxpaying subjects. Ianson’s work did not escape criticism. Dmitrii Samarin argued that the state never intended redemption payments to correspond to actual land values. They therefore could in no way be connected to the size or actual value of peasant allotments. In his view, redemption payments were simply another tax – a personal obligation to the state.81 Other research, however, appeared to confirm Ianson’s findings. On the eve of Ianson’s publication, I.I. Vil’son, a respected representative of Russian statistics within the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, concluded in his study of the redemption system that the main cause of redemption payment arrears (outside of fires, crop failures, and other “temporary” setbacks) was the fact that many regions’ soil quality and other geographic factors precluded any correspondence between redemption payments and peasant allotment income.82 The liberal political economist L.V. Khodskii, arguing against Samarin, confirmed both Vilson’s and Ianson’s findings. According to Khodskii’s calculations the biggest discrepancy was in Perm’ province, where redemption payments exceeded “bank value” by more than 70 percent. Peasants received the best deal in Astrakhan province; there the land’s bank value exceeded redemption payments by nearly 178 percent. Furthermore, provincial figures sometimes obscured regional variations in soil quality. Thus even though bank value exceeded redemption

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payments by around 20 and 90 percent for Chernigov and Kursk provinces respectively, closer examination revealed that this good fortune was not shared by all peasants in these provinces.83 Thus, even though redemption payments were based (out of necessity) on peasants’ ability to pay, by the end of the 1870s statistical studies had focused their attention (and that of the public) instead on allotment value itself – a cadastral measurement of peasant well-being and allotment sufficiency – rather than on total peasant household income. Furthermore, cadastral measurement provided officials with a new tool for examining what some now saw as a key symptom of a developing rural crisis (and cause for alarm within the finance ministry): an apparent increase in redemption payment arrears.84 Realizing, however, that arrears could be the result of periodic disasters (drought, fire, pestilence, an early frost, etc.) rather than systemic problems, officials could now turn to statistical studies as a means to assess the fundamental health of the local economy. By employing cadastral measurement, these studies turned agrarian crisis into an established fact. Rural poverty now had a “scientifically” determined cause, and blame rested on the Emancipation itself. Literary descriptions of the countryside as cesspools of poverty and despair put a human face on these cold numerical facts.85 Most importantly, unlike the Valuev Commission’s report, which attempted to shift much of the blame for rural economic disorder to such traditional excuses as peasant character deficiencies, family divisions, and the alien and/or disruptive influence of Jews and drink, Ianson’s work presented its case with the objective authority of scientific inquiry. Instead of anecdotal evidence provided by lords and urban agrarian experts, Ianson offered impersonal – and therefore presumably unbiased – statistical data analyzed from a readily accepted cadastral perspective. As the government undertook a review of the Emancipation and its redemption system, the results and process of the review reinforced the idea that insufficient allotments were at the heart of rural economic ills and that proper study and analysis would provide useful guidance for officials as they tried to redress the deficiencies of the Emancipation and rectify the state’s moral failing. Although it did so reluctantly, even the state bought into the idea of an insufficient emancipation allotment and tried to fix it.

R e d e m p t io n P ay m e n t Reducti ons In this atmosphere, government officials began the task of reviewing the redemption operation. Given the emancipation authors’

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uncertainty about the reliability of their data and the voluntary nature of the allotment process, the emancipation statute required the state to either force redemption or reassess the obrok payments of “temporarily obligated” peasants after twenty years. This term expired in 1881. The redemption operation’s profitability convinced some officials that the government had a moral obligation to reconsider redemption amounts as well. Furthermore, a commission reviewing taxation policy believed that tax reform made sense only after a review of other obligations.86 In spite of their own recognition of the limitations of cadastral measurement in the redemption process, state officials essentially applied it to the redemption payment reduction. Thus the process of reducing redemption payments reveals the increasing application of cadastral principles to the peasant economy without actually conducting a cadaster. This process reinforced the idea that the emancipation statutes, rather than providing a paternalistic guarantee of sufficiency and an improvement in peasant life – an expression of “social monarchy” in the Bismarckian tradition – had overcharged peasants for their land and plunged peasant agriculture into crisis. A finance ministry commission reviewed the redemption operation and reached a similar conclusion. Data from several sources indicated that although random catastrophes (fires, epidemics, crop failures) had initiated the cycle of decline, the lack of congruence between redemption payments and allotment income guaranteed the perpetual impoverishment of many villages. A vicious cycle ensued: arrears for redemption payments and various taxes led to a depletion of assets (e.g., the sale of livestock and hence loss of fertilizer), which led to more arrears. Non­–black soil regions, which required regular and substantial amounts of manure, suffered most acutely. The commission’s own comparison of redemption values and current land prices revealed gaping discrepancies. For example, land in Smolensk province valued at 27.33 rubles per desiatina for redemption purposes had a current market value of only 15.80 rubles per desiatina. The Editing Commission had assumed that all land yielded an income of at least 5 percent on capital. In the case of Smolensk province this meant that redemption payments of 1.64 rubles per desiatina should in reality be only 0.79 rubles per desiatina – a 52.1 percent reduction. These figures, as well as those for twenty-two other provinces, indicated that redemption payments could be aligned with actual land values only by reducing them to 41.5 percent of the current annual assessment (i.e., by reducing total collections from 20,045,450 to 8,327,268 rubles).87 The commission also concluded that “cut-offs” exacerbated

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rural conditions by depriving peasants of the variety of the resources (woodland, pasture, etc.) they needed to make payments of the previous size.88 The idea that redemption payments exceeded actual allotment values became axiomatic as discussion passed through yet another commission to the stage of policy formation. The new commission included a number of peasant affairs “experts” from Russia’s zemstvos including, most notably, Prince A.I. Vasil’chikov and Dmitrii F. Samarin.89 Their opinions provided a basis for the reduction statutes enacted in December 1881. The commission’s majority took what it believed to be a strict constructionist approach to the redemption issue. It argued that it was “impossible” to consider former serf obrok payments as anything like rent, and it quoted the Editing Commission’s work to the effect that there was little correlation between allotment size and the size of obligations. Furthermore, although the majority (led by Samarin and Prince A.A. Shcherbatov) agreed that the peasant economy was suffering, it also believed that as the emancipation statutes concerned the empire as a whole, morally the state could adjust the Emancipation’s terms only in such a way that all peasants were treated equally. Linking payments to allotment income would be merely an economic move. The “personal element” comprising the main basis of the redemption system demanded that the state ensure that obligations did not exceed the “paying powers of the peasant” from all sources of peasant income. The majority included in its argument a call for tax reform (especially the abolition of the poll tax) and for taxes to be equallized among all categories of peasants.90 The majority opinion reflected the traditional paternalistic approach to the peasantry long maintained by government and serf-owner alike – the idea of sufficiency as total household income rather than actual allotment value. The commission minority agreed with the majority’s interpretation of the emancipation statutes but argued that the majority’s case ignored other aspects of the redemption process and presented a static view of the issue. According to the minority report, although the original spirit and method of calculating redemption payments pointed towards defining them as personal obligations, other aspects of the redemption program, including the actual redemption process, pointed to a different conclusion. “Obrok,” noted the minority report, represents a permanent payment … that can be raised or lowered over a defined time period according to lord or peasant demands

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… Redemption payments are limited payments, restricted to a set number of years and including a component absent in obrok, namely a percent of remittance. This radical difference between the two types of payments directly demonstrates that it is impossible to attach the same meaning to redemption payments as to obrok.91 The minority report also argued that peasants recognized “very clearly and forcefully … the difference existing between redemption payments and other collections levied upon them”; they knew well how many payments remained until the land was fully redeemed. As such, the redemption operation was, unlike taxation, a credit system, and redemption payments were payments on a loan. Any decision to lower payments should thus be based on financial criteria related to the actual redemption process.92 In other words, although “ability to pay,” “the improvement of peasant life,” and an acknowledged lack of cadastral information had guided the Editing Commission as it developed the redemption process, its work resulted in a system based on substantially different criteria, namely land values and credit. The minority proposed that redemption payments be brought in line with allotment income on a province-by-province basis. New data could provide information for this purpose. Areas deemed especially needy deserved priority when reductions were made. The minority recommended a general 10 percent reduction only after redemption payments were adjusted to correspond with assessed value.93 By applying the cadastral conception of sufficiency, the minority thus kept alive the main idea behind the growing societal perception that the Emancipation had failed in its task of allotting sufficient land and that there should be a closer correlation between the size of redemption payments and the value of peasant allotments. This idea appeared in the final text of the reduction statute. That law incorporated the majority’s view that the reduction should be empire-wide, including most of European Russia and western Siberia; it also increased the initial reduction sum to 12 million rubles. At this point, the influence of the minority report came into play. The law earmarked part of the 12 million rubles for a general reduction of redemption payments. Part of this sum, however, was set aside for a supplemental reduction (dobavka) for villages with economies in “disorder” (razstroistvo). The most important indicator of disorder (and hence of eligibility for a supplemental reduction) was a

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discrepancy between redemption payments and allotment values.94 This aspect of the program coloured the entire process, especially as – ­by involving all of Russia’s zemstvo institutions – implementing the supplementary reductions became a very public affair. In addition, supplementary reductions rested on a much tighter correlation between redemption payments and allotment income than the majority’s conception of redemption payments allowed. Implementing the supplemental reduction highlighted the tension between “sufficiency” in a traditional sense and sufficiency as measured in cadastral terms; it also embedded more deeply the notion of peasant economic crisis and the Emancipation’s moral failure. The government assigned zemstvos the task of considering how best to allocate the funds for supplemental redemption payment reductions. Because the majority considered the reduction a process of correcting tax inequalities, it recommended that in considering which peasants should receive a supplementary reduction, peasants’ ability to pay be gauged by multiple economic indicators, including these: the percentage change in population; average allotment size and value; soil quality; the availability of non-agricultural employment opportunities; and total redemption payment arrears. The majority acknowledged that this list precluded the “mathematical accuracy” of calculating allotment income but also noted that “such accuracy is often misleading.” Equating payments with total ability to pay dictated that supplementary reductions be assigned only after a broad spectrum of economic data was collected and considered.95 Since the minority advocated reductions based solely on discrepancies between redemption payments and allotment value (for it viewed the reduction system as a refinancing of debt based on new information, not as tax relief), it recommended indicators related to land values, particularly zemstvo tax assessment figures.96 In a special opinion, Prince A.I. Vasil’chikov, an expert on peasant agriculture, gave qualified support to the minority’s view. He noted that consideration of outside sources of income was superfluous to the business at hand and would be taken into account soon enough, during the projected tax reform process. The business at hand was not income per se, but the fairness of payments and whether the Emancipation allotments were sufficient to sustain peasant life (i.e., whether they corresponded with allotment value). Land value could be figured only imperfectly, but when combined with other (also imperfect) indicators such as livestock numbers, it was still the best available indicator of

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whether excessive redemption payments caused economic distress.97 Thus the initial tension between competing definitions of redemption payments manifested itself again when it came to recommending supplemental reduction criteria (measures of “sufficiency”). The general reduction reflected the position that redemption payments were more than mortgages, whereas the supplemental reductions emphasized the opposite idea: a close correlation between redemption payments and land values. These conflicting ideas served as the basis for the statute on the redemption payment reduction issued on 28 December 1881.98 With these recommendations in hand, the Central Statistical Committee began compiling data on three forms in the second half of 1881. Form 1 aimed at describing villages and communes in terms of land, labour, capital, and access to non-farm sources of income, including data on following: number of households; number of male souls who had received an allotment in each household; family members; and adult workers. It also contained rubrics related to the amount and type of land being redeemed by each household, soil type, and per capita allotment size. Additional questions pertained to land rental and non-agricultural sources of income (e.g., location, numbers employed, and wage rates). Form 2 contained information on redemption payment arrears as of 1 January 1881 and the obrok payments of temporarily obligated peasants.99 The Central Statistical Committee then asked that zemstvos use information from Forms 1 and 2 to complete Form 3. When completed, this form listed villages whose economic “disarray” required a supplementary reduction. In defining “disarray” the Central Statistical Committee asked that zemstvos consider a variety of factors indicative of the state of local peasant economies. Realizing that indicators such as redemption payment arrears could reflect simply “temporary” economic setbacks (fire, crop failure, livestock epidemics, etc.), it insisted that only measurable, systemic causes related to the quality of land allotments, such as soil quality, distance to field or market, or the fact that redemption payments exceeded actual income in normal years, be used to justify supplementary reductions. Redemption payment arrears added urgency to the state’s statutory consideration of redemption payment reductions, but were not by themselves grounds for inclusion on Form 3, since the state’s main concern in this process was that redemption payments be better aligned with peasant allotment income.100 Thus, although questions on Forms 1 and 2 pertained to collecting a broad

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base of information for determining the peasant’s ability to pay (in line with the majority), the minority’s emphasis on allotment value prevailed on Form 3. The Central Statistical Committee used information from all three forms to award supplementary reductions. The award process illustrates a general acceptance of the idea that peasant allotment land could be measured like any other and the pervasiveness of the view that peasant economic disarray stemmed from an imbalance between redemption payments and land values. Semenov and the Central Statistical Committee were well aware of the way that allotments and redemption payments had been cobbled together from scant and imperfect information, and were thus open to adjustments, itself a recognition that newly available information could now correct those cases where redemption payments exceeded land allotments’ ability to generate sufficient income (but only with the accuracy of a somewhat less blunt instrument). Adjusting allotment sizes was out of the question. “Land hunger” was not in itself a justification for a supplementary reduction. Adjusting payments – redefining allotment sufficiency in cadastral terms as opposed to ability to pay – was the state’s only option. The Central Statistical Committee’s criteria for evaluating property for supplemental reductions – managing allotment sufficiency through payments – thus centred on soil quality and other criteria reflecting allotment value in cadastral terms. Despite the exclusion of land hunger as a basis for the supplemental reduction, it remained a common justification for including villages and rural societies on Form 3. The Aleksandrinskii district zemstvo (Kherson province) noted that peasants in several villages had received “reduced allotments.” This situation was rendered worse by population growth that increased local rental prices and that cut off peasant access to needed land by that route, resulting in villages that were “significantly starved for land.”101 Even deputies in Central Statistical Committee director P.P. Semenov’s home province, Riazan’, were not immune from pointing to land hunger in violation of instructions. The issue erupted into open dispute in the Dankovsk district zemstvo. Two deputies demanded (as per instructions) that the governing board omit land hunger from the factors that qualified villages to be included on Form 3. Considering land shortage, they argued, implied that the Emancipation had cheated peasants. Another deputy disagreed, and his argument illustrates how the idea of “sufficiency,” in terms of both land shortage and excessive redemption payments,

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already permeated society. Pointing to Ianson’s work, N.I. Kotov argued that the question of insufficient peasant land allotments had already been demonstrated “in the sense that the size of allotments has been recognized as insufficient both for sustenance and for the fulfillment of tax obligations.” He also noted that the zemstvo itself had reached this conclusion ten years earlier while considering government tax reform proposals. The assembled deputies resolved to consider all of these factors.102 Compared to other Riazan’ districts, Dankovsk peasants enjoyed above-average economic conditions. Although the average number of cattle per household (0.8) indicated certain insufficiencies, the number of horses and adult male workers per household (1.5 and 1.7, respectively) and average per capita allotment size (2.2 desiatiny) were at or above provincial averages.103 Redemption payment arrears of only 16 percent of annual collections seemed to confirm this statistical portrait of an adequate standard of living (at least if measured only in terms of available inputs). Relying on the reports of its noble members, however, the zemstvo listed more than half (121) of the district’s 237 villages as being in a state of economic disorder. According to the zemstvo’s information, 24 of the 121 villages were on the list by virtue their allotments’ size or quality. The rest owed their place on the list to a variety of other causes. In many cases the zemstvo did not adhere to instructions closely. For the Central Statistical Committee, however, most of these other maladies did not address the point, which was allotment value as reflected in ability to produce an income. The Central Statistical Committee did not doubt that the zemstvo’s justifications raised a number of valid concerns. It noted, however, that problems such as land shortages, lack of employment opportunities, and unavailable credit were difficult to measure, characterized the whole district, and missed the central thrust of the supplemental reduction program.104 The zemstvo’s only credible case was what could be measured – the value of allotments when set against redemption payments (i.e., the allotments’ “sufficiency” in terms of its ability to generate an income). This indicator could rightly serve as a basis for a permanent reduction of redemption payments; the other causes could at best serve as bases for temporary relief provided by other processes. Thus, the Central Statistical Committee only awarded supplementary reductions to the twenty-four villages where the zemstvo demonstrated that allotment income fell short of the sum charged peasants for redeeming their

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plots.105 Land value compared to redemption payments became a measure of the economic condition of peasant villages. The report for Bezhets district (Tver’ province) also exemplified the emphasis on “sufficiency.” Based on its own statistical work and other data, the zemstvo concluded that it was “impossible not to recognize that existing redemption payments … in several townships do not correspond to the land’s productive capabilities.” This meant that any reduction in payments “should not in any way be equal for all locations, but should correspond to the quality and productive capabilities of the soil.” To remedy the situation, the zemstvo asked the Central Statistical Committee to accept the land values it derived through statistical investigation as part of its tax assessment work. These values, calculated by subtracting production costs from gross income, indicated that redemption payments for two groups of villages required reductions of 25 and 50 percent respectively in order to correspond to actual allotment value.106 The Central Statistical Committee concurred that poor soil quality had created a gaping disparity between income and payments. It split the difference between the zemstvo’s reduction requests, granting villages with the greatest discrepancy between payments and income a 30 percent supplementary reduction.107 Significantly, it did so even though the Editing Commission and other experts had long acknowledged that payments and land income would never align in this and other non–black soil areas. This was a key reason why redemption payments rested on an ability to pay rather than on land values. The Stavropol’ district zemstvo (Samara province) submitted a more sophisticated analysis that also presented a contradictory portrait of the local economy. As with the example above, the contradiction stemmed from the zemstvo deputies’ view of the peasant economy as little different from their own farming. It was not that they did not appreciate the peculiarities of peasant husbandry; rather, their means of measurement had no way to account for this, and for the most part these peculiarities prevailed on their own estates as well (given their continued reliance on peasant labour and inventory). After completing an inventory of the district’s 105 peasant communities, deputies calculated average figures for family composition, livestock inventory, land tilled, harvests, and expenses (including taxes). They used these figures to create a hypothetical average or typical peasant family budget. The compilers attempted to account for every possible income and expenditure, including redemption payment and tax arrears. The

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final figure in the expense column totalled nearly forty-two rubles more than the hypothetical average peasant family’s calculated income.108 There were no reports of starving villages. Indeed, the zemstvo conceded that none of the villages inhabited by their “average peasant” were in a state of “disorder.” The deputies argued, however, that “because of small allotments in Stavropol’ district, redemption payments seem higher, and thus seem to correspond less to the advantages extracted from the lands of the province as a whole.”109 Thus, they believed, the discrepancy between income and expenses should make at least four villages eligible for a supplemental reduction. The Central Statistical Committee conceded the detailed nature and proper statistical foundation of the zemstvo’s case but hesitated to grant a supplemental reduction because of the area’s exceptional soil quality. Semenov and his co-workers believed that, given the district’s high soil fertility, the 14 percent general reduction would be sufficient to align any discrepancy between allotment income and payments. However, the Central Statistical Committee – acknowledging that the relationship between payments and allotment income resulted from the quality of particular allotments – gave the Samara provincial zemstvo great latitude in distributing the province’s general reduction funds in accordance with local surveys. Stavropol’ ultimately received 3,281 of the province’s 12,660-ruble reduction funds. As with the cases in other districts, the fact that the lords who completed the forms calculated peasant income as if peasant economic behaviour differed little from their own led to an incongruity between the data and reality. The Central Statistical Committee and the provincial zemstvo ultimately supported these figures, bolstering the idea that allotments were insufficient.110 In the rare case where a zemstvo argued for a supplemental reduction on the basis of the peculiarities of peasant agriculture, the Central Statistical Committee ignored that evidence and emphasized a reduction based on soil quality and allotment value alone. The report for Saratov’s Kuznets district argued that, although local land values were high, this did not reflect the true value and income potential of peasant land. In other words, the zemstvo attempted an argument focused on the character of the tiller, not the quality of the land. The zemstvo asked for a blanket reduction of 25 percent for all of the villages listed on Form 3, noting that certain aspects of peasant agriculture, such as the “stretching” of allotments into elongated strips, hindered animal husbandry and required “a double or triple

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expenditure of labour for tillage.” This reduced the value of such land compared to non-peasant land of equal fertility. The zemstvo received its reduction, but not on the basis of this argument. The Central Statistical Committee justified granting the zemstvo’s request, once again, on the basis of soil quality and allotment value. Although wary of using arrears as an indicator of systemic economic problems, in this case the existence of high redemption payment arrears confirmed the Central Statistical Committee’s conclusion that the zemstvo’s other data were reliable and that there was a discrepancy between payments and the clay soil’s ability to produce an income.111 Sufficiency in terms of value prevailed. What is striking about the whole process of awarding supplemental reductions is the tenacity with which Semenov and the Central Statistical Committee rejected narrative evidence like that related to peasant cultivation practices in favour of cadastral measures. Unfortunately, the documents themselves provide no explicit explanation for this, so we are left to infer that the practice resulted from their attempt to apply “science” to the process of executing state policy. Part of the answer certainly stems from the fact that the government’s interests lay with purely systemic causes of peasant poverty related to the redemption system. Neither commentaries on the peculiarities of peasant agriculture nor discourses on drunkenness, family divisions, cattle plague, crop failure, or fires fit this definition. As noted above, because they could be the result of such chance catastrophes, even the redemption payment arrears that so alarmed state officials were used only to confirm conclusions based on cadastral principles. As it turned out, skepticism about arrears proved to be valid. By the time the redemption operation ended in 1906, ex-serfs had paid nearly 95 percent of the payments due (1.540 of the 1.623 billion rubles).112 It is also likely that Semenov’s own experience as a participant in the emancipation process, director of the Central Statistical Committee, and statistician imbued him with a preference for statistical data and guided the process of interpreting zemstvo reports, despite his own familiarity with the peculiarities of peasant husbandry. The absence of empirical data during the emancipation process was a constant frustration for him. At the same time, review of the provincial committees’ reports must have made him wary of anecdotal evidence submitted by nobles. Numbers, however, could be (and were) verified via inquiries to District Bureaux of Peasant Affairs (uezdnye po krest’ianskim delam prisutstviia) or other state institutions.113 Finally,

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it is highly likely that in the minds of Semenov and other “enlightened bureaucrats,” the link between colonial knowledge (statistics), rational administration, and imperial success privileged statistical data and a more easily measured conception of a single rural economy embedded in cadastral measurement. In any case, the Central Statistical Committee’s preference for cadastral measures of sufficiency ensured that the peasant household economy would perpetually appear as a money-losing proposition. Here again, as with earlier reform attempts, land reform was a state matter, requiring a state solution. A commitment – at least on paper – to the idea that allotments needed to provide “sufficient” income undergirded the process. In this case, despite the Editing Commissions’ adamant reliance on “ability to pay,” a more cadastral or market conception of the land allotment that homogenized the subject by converting the human factor into a constant came into play. The state could “see” better in 1881 than it could in 1861, but it still lacked the ability to measure wealth in a modern sense – individual peasant household income ­– rather than assessments of collective well-being based upon inputs.114 Meanwhile, outside the halls of Saint Petersburg chanceries, growing volumes of statistical work convinced educated society that peasants had been saddled with insufficient allotments for which they were paying too much.

C o n c l u s i on The symbolic elevation of the emperor’s status to that of “Tsar Liberator” imbued the emancipation allotments peasants received with a moral force absent from previous state land allotment practices. In extending the allotment of land by norms to former serfs in the emancipation process, the nadel objectified this moral commitment and reinforced the idea that the state had a moral obligation to allot peasants sufficient land. In this way the early modern state practice of allotting land in order to strengthen autocratic rule – now adapted in the process of emancipation – was surrounded by the moral halo of the Emancipation and Alexander II’s scenario of power. This “moral economy” precedent – a state obligation to allot land in sufficient quantities so as to sustain life – became the most sustained legacy (public interpretation) of the Emancipation, the basis for an invented tradition that grew stronger as both state and society subsequently sought to assess the efficacy of the Emancipation and the condition of the peasant economy. The Emancipation converted established

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patterns of agrarian reform such as land allotment norms from purely fiscal measures for allotting land into moral and political ones, benchmarks by which the efficacy and justice of the Emancipation would be judged. As with earlier reforms of state and udel peasants, rural societies of former serfs holding allotment land within the norm that earned sufficient income were deemed a success, while those whose holdings fell outside the norm or that did not yield sufficient income were deemed in need of (and entitled to) state assistance. The public knew little of the informational constraints under which reformers constructed the emancipation allotment norms, and they were soon forgotten by state officials as well, as various institutions and the reading public began a new quest to comprehend, assess, and improve the empire and its subjects through statistics. As the state set about assessing whether the Emancipation had delivered on its promises – in particular, whether it had ensured freed serfs access to a nadel sufficient for meeting their subsistence needs and payment obligations – it concretized allotment land as a fund of land exclusively designated for peasant subsistence, while at the same time measuring peasant agriculture in universalistic cadastral terms. Even though well aware of the weaknesses of peasant husbandry, statisticians operated as if the main category for the evaluation of the well-being of the peasant economy was the size and quality of their land allotments and whether or not the payments former serfs were making to redeem them corresponded to the income they generated. Statistics compiled by state institutions and outside of the government, most notably the work by the statistician Ianson, applied cadastral assumptions to the assessment of emancipation allotments and found them wanting. The state’s own information collection contributed to the public nature of these statistical and hence “scientific” or “objective” assessments of the sufficiency of the nadel (its size and cost), reinforcing the idea that the Emancipation had shortchanged and overcharged peasants. Hoch has demonstrated that, in the aggregate, the emancipation allotments were a good deal for the peasants.115 To contemporaries, however, the application of statistical measurement revealed a state of insufficiency, creating the perception that “land hunger,” arrears, and other rural maladies originated in the Emancipation itself. Given the diversity of the empire, the results of the process most likely varied enormously in ways that even increased information could not measure. As Prince A.I. Vasil’chikov noted, “on the strength of new data published by government institutions, the zemstvos and private persons,”

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he was now convinced that the argument against the need for sufficient land allotments was “mistaken” and that land-hungry peasants “could no longer be recognized as exceptions.” As many experts realized, with population growth, the number of households with insufficient allotments would only increase, and the “congestion” and “land hunger” in the empire’s core provinces, already manifest in the eighteenth century, would only get worse.116 Believing that the state had failed in its moral obligation to its peasant subjects, society’s educated advocates for the peasantry, armed with additional numbers and the authority of the past, demanded that the state, as steward of the countryside and its population, redeem itself. Even though the Emancipation was an undertaking of Petrine proportions, at the end of the day, what people thought the state could and should do (encouraged in many ways by the state’s own claims) proved more important than what it could actually accomplish.

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3 Normalizing the Nadel and Peasant Economy: History and Zemstvo Statistics The emancipation process pushed societal interest in the Russian peasant and his relationship to state and educated society deeper into a public arena that had been greatly expanded by the loosening of censorship in the era of the Great Reforms. Having released 22 million serfs from bondage, state and society set out to understand those seen by Slavophiles and others as “the real Russians,” the keepers of the Russian spirit who were not yet sullied by the deleterious influence of the West. Even those who doubted their spiritual purity saw in the peasantry an object for development and improvement. Together, educated society and state servitors set out to address their ignorance of peasant life through the two media of modernity that blossomed in the last half of the nineteenth century: history and statistics. Through these, society sought to understand peasant society (including its economy) in the past and present, with the aim of directing its future role in the Russian Empire. State attempts to address the deficiencies of the Emancipation through agrarian reform were carried out in this context. Through historical and statistical studies, educated society would determine the efficacy of the Emancipation and other state policies towards the peasantry. History as a discipline rooted in primary sources came into its own throughout the Western world in the nineteenth century. In Russia, as Michael Petrovich has noted, historical scholarship “did not develop in the untroubled atmosphere of the study but in a milieu in which the ‘peasant question’” was one of the most important issues in Russian society. Furthermore, historicist tendencies emanating from German scholars associated with the German Historical School (Verein für Socialpolitik) such as Gustav von Schmoller encouraged historical (and statistical) investigation of the economy.1 Historical studies of

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the peasantry established benchmarks – or conceptions of what was “normal” – by providing historical context for agrarian reform and demonstrating a precedent of past nadel sufficiency through state action. The present shaped presentations of the past, which were then used to assess the present. Serfdom and its nadel, for all its horrors, became the material standard used to judge the adequacy of the Emancipation, with the result that extensification (an additional allotment to bring households up to the established norm) was emphasized even more strongly as a primary strategy of agrarian reform. Furthermore, historical narratives of “the people” and its history presented a clear sense of who was responsible for fixing the problem. The state, autocratic or otherwise, because it imposed taxes and other obligations, had a moral obligation to ensure sufficient access to land. Among many elites, past practice normalized the sufficient nadel as an entitlement and made state action to grant sufficient allotments a “normal” expectation bearing the authority of tradition. At the same time, statistical studies by those outside of government, particularly statisticians in the academy and those employed by zemstvos (rural councils), continued to demonstrate that the emancipation allotment process had failed, as indicated by the insufficiency of peasant allotments. Statistical studies provided an arena for agrarian professionals to advocate for peasants and fundamentally challenged and altered prevailing conceptions of the peasant economy. Zemstvo statistical studies “normalized” the peasant economy in the sense of decoupling the peasant household economy from that of the commune and positioning it as a viable economic unit that, under the right conditions, could contribute to the development of the national economy. The “right conditions” included these: recognition of the distinct characteristics of the household economy in state policy; lower payment obligations (redemption payments and taxes); and policies to facilitate access to a sufficient amount of land and other inputs such as draft animals, seeds for planting, and tools. Input indicators (the economic measures of serfdom), as opposed to measures of income, thus persisted as the means for assessing peasant well-being and pointed the way towards the empire’s agrarian future.

F in d in g a M o ral Pas t: H is to r ie s o f S tat e and Peasantry Discussions of this historiography have centred on its handling of the “big questions” of the period, namely the origins of the repartitional

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land commune and serfdom.2 Yet we can also ask what conceptions of the peasant economy and proper agrarian policy these narratives normalized for educated society. Professional historians and other scholars published histories of the peasantry and state institutions in which the nadel and legal norms of its sufficiency figured prominently. These histories contextualized post-emancipation debates on land reform, particularly in terms of the state’s role in the agrarian economy and the adequacy of the Emancipation’s land allotments. Even those works attempting to offer a history of “the people” as opposed to “the state” did much to establish as time-tested tradition the idea that the state was obligated to provide sufficient allotments. Moreover, the ability to compare current allotment sizes with those of the past contributed to a sense that the Emancipation had failed to allot peasants parcels that were “sufficient” and hence “normal.” We have, then, a conjuncture between historical investigation and the political issues of the day. Three types of histories contributed to this process. One type consisted of what we might term “official histories” – commemorative works about key figures in agrarian reform such as Kiselev; key institutions such as the Ministry of State Domains; and key events like the Emancipation. The second type of history consisted of attempts to interpret the history of the peasantry itself. This interest first emerged in the historiography in works by regionalist historians like Mykola Kostomarov and A.P. Shchapov, who sought to develop a more complex portrait of Ukrainian and Siberian peasants derived from ethnographic and historical description as well as a narrative that countered that of the centralized Russian state.3 Their work paved the way for a line of inquiry that emerged most pointedly in Vasilii Semevskii’s 1881 manifesto, “Is it not time to write the history of peasants?”4 The struggles of Semevskii’s academic life, as well as his subject, politics, and intellectual circle, ensured that his examination of the relationship between state and peasantry over time – a history of “the peasant question” (krest’ianskii vopros) – provided a powerful historical perspective on the present condition of the peasantry and agrarian reform. The third historiographic trend has come down to us under the rubric “state school” (gosudarstvennaia shkola), reflecting the dominance of political history in mid-nineteenth-century Russian historiography.5 When we consider how this emphasis on political history shaped society’s perceptions of contemporary issues, the image of the activist

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state ordering the empire was obviously the dominant form, especially with regard to agrarian history, where works by a variety of scholars embedded a notion of the state as an institution that had long taken responsibility for ensuring adequate land allotments for peasants. Even Semevskii’s work, despite his admonition that a people’s history should be more than a history of decrees, depicted an activist state engaged in attempts to order the lives of peasant subjects. Together, all three historiographic types “normalized” the state’s obligation to provide sufficient allotments; they did so by providing a comparative historical context for current agricultural conditions and by conveying narratives of state activism that provided a foundation for considering state provision of sufficient allotments as a “tradition” of long enough standing to take on the moral trappings of “custom.”6

T h e S tat e as A g r a ri an Reformer As Hamburg argues, the origins of the concept of a “state school” or “juridical school” of Russian historiography (in P.N. Miliukov’s 1886 formulation, K.D. Kavelin, B.N. Chicherin, S.M. Solov’ev, and V.E. Sergeevich) emerged from the politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, it confuses more than clarifies the academic intent of the Russian Empire’s most notable historians.7 Hamburg proposes instead that we simply refer to the dominance of political history in mid-nineteenth-century Russian historiography or to a “liberal current” that reflected the intellectual values and research agendas articulated by the historians of the 1840s and 1850s. In spite of critics’ allegations, none of the members of the “state” or “juridical” school ever regarded the state as the sole creative force among a largely passive population. Yet if we remove the conversation from the realm of historiography and consider how such an emphasis on political history might have shaped society’s perceptions of contemporary issues, the image of the activist state ordering the empire was obviously the dominant form, especially in the area of agrarian history, where works by a variety of scholars embedded a notion of the state as an institution that had long taken responsibility for ensuring peasants an adequate nadel. The jurist from Mogilev, I.V. Turchinovich, was best known for work on the Belorussian nobility. Yet his 1854 work, The History of the Agrarian Economy, set the tone for other works on agrarian history, asserting that “the condition of the agrarian economy in every

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state depends in the largest part on the measures that the government has taken in the direction and perfection of this branch of industry.”8 In addition, in a section titled “Allotment as a Right of Landed Property” the author noted that, while the right to private property was something that until recently belonged only to the nobility, since Catherine’s time the state had recognized the importance of access by “the people” (narod) to “sustenance.” That is why Catherine’s “Instructions” for the General Land Survey included the stipulation that peasants should have access to fifteen or eight desiatinas of ploughland, depending on the locale.9 This emphasis on the state as the main driver of rural change was not out of the ordinary. As the historian Sergei M. Soloviev noted in his “Observations on the Historical Life of Peoples,” “a government, no matter what its form, represents its people; the people are personified in it, and thus it has been, is, and ever shall be of primary interest to the historian.” Peasants, furthermore, could only be represented in this way, as they remained a “non-historic” people.10 The spirit of Hegel was everywhere, including in the Russian Empire. The history of the peasantry could not be disaggregated from that of the state. This was especially so in the emerging debate over the origins of the land commune and its practice of repartitional tenure. According to Boris N. Chicherin the state was the “organizer of the economic and social life” of the empire and the land commune did not, therefore, develop in isolation. Repartition was not a practice that emerged from the primordial ooze of ancient Russian society; rather, it was a response to Peter I’s poll tax.11 The repartitional land commune, he noted, “sprang from estate [soslovnye] obligations placed upon the workers of the land from the end of the sixteenth century, and especially from the way in which they were more firmly attached to the places where they lived and from the extension of soul taxes [podatei na dushi].”12 The communal system, with its emphasis on providing households with sufficient means to survive and make their payments, evolved on serf estates as a response to the fixed rate of taxation and lords’ liability for peasant payments. Chicherin noted, however, that by the mid-eighteenth century the state had incorporated communal tenure into the structure of policy for state and other categories of peasants.13 In this way, the debate on the origins of the commune normalized the idea that the state, as chief architect of the economy, ensured peasants “sufficient” access to land to meet its own fiscal needs. As Peter I recognized, peasant well-being was good government.

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Chicherin’s opponents in this debate re-enforced the sufficiency idea even if they located the origins of repartition in something more noble, primordial, and indigenous than Petrine state policy. For the Slavophile professor Ivan D. Beliaev, repartition was an ancient Slavic practice linked to self-government. For Populist Alexandra Efimenko (as with Chicherin), the link to ancient Slavs did not exist, but repartition could still be connected to an indigenous system of land tenure – the dolevoi – that developed as a means of allocating village land resources to ensure mutual survival.14 Populist economist V.P. Vorontsov (“V.V.”), noting regional differences in the development of the commune, argued that government landownership tended to strengthen the commune.15 No matter what one thought about the origins of the commune, then, repartition to ensure “sufficiency” was “normal” in the sense of being well-established in past practice and encouraged by the state. Several key post-emancipation works on the history of the state peasantry also emphasized the state’s primacy as an organizer of the countryside with an interest in “sufficiency,” linking these activities directly to the size of land allotments and the obligations attached to them. These works did not hesitate to point out shortfalls but generally supported the thrust of the reforms, portraying them as a “golden age” of state activity. The first work of this kind was a biography of the first Minister of State Domains, P.D. Kiselev. Kiselev was the patron, supervisor, and friend of its author, A.P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii. Even more so, as the title, Count P.D. Kiselev and His Time: Materials for a History of Emperors Alexander I, Nicholas I and Alexander II, indicated, this was an attempt to chronicle the energetic actions of the state itself, as personified in its servitor and emperors. Based on government documents and personal papers, Zablotskii-Desiatovskii’s 1882 biography filled four dense volumes; most of its pages were devoted to demonstrating Kiselev’s opposition to serfdom and his quest to place the administration of the state peasantry on a rational footing based on zakonnost’. The work dutifully reproduced official publications’ calls for assessments to be shifted from persons to land via cadastral processes in order to increase revenues while at the same time easing peasant payments by linking them to land productivity.16 This biography remained the standard work about the state peasantry and Kiselev’s reforms and a primary source for subsequent histories of the reforms, including N.M. Druzhinin’s classic mid-twentiethcentury study.17

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The authors of the Ministry of State Domains’ fiftieth-anniversary history were equally enthusiastic fans of Kiselev’s reforms as examples of rational policy that improved subjects’ lives. Volume 2 drove home this point of view in multiple ways, from its chapter headings (“Making known state lands and their allocation to peasants,” “Means for providing state peasants with land”) to choice quotes from Kiselev himself (“the right of each peasant to a piece of land in his village is highly important in a political sense”).18 Of special interest here is the description of the ministry’s cadastral work, which noted that even if cadastral work in line with European models was not administratively possible, all was not lost. The “methods for the simplification of the main and most difficult activities of a cadastre are contained in the very peculiarities of the Russian peasants’ economy, in the communal structure of villages and many local circumstances.”19 In other words, peasant custom itself facilitated the collection of certain cadastral data connected to soil quality, greatly easing (so the authors argued) the classification of fields by quality. Furthermore, the established communal practice of dividing land into shares (pai) revealed the size of such shares and eliminated much surveying work. Russian exceptionalism (so it turned out) made possible “an actual improvement in the tax system” on the basis of a “people’s cadastre [narodnyi kadastr], just as useful as the cadastres in western states, but simpler and not demanding significant expenditures on survey work.” In addition, division of land into equal shares made it possible for much of the data collection work required for determining income to be done using sampling.20 In this way (at least in the minds of official chroniclers), the peasantry’s own subsistence strategies facilitated the state’s program of taxation, agrarian improvement, and efforts to ensure them access to sufficient resources for both. The most comprehensive examination of the Kiselev reforms was conducted by the liberal Saint Petersburg economist L.V. Khodskii.21 Although ultimately prohibited from teaching at Saint Petersburg University for the political content of his lectures, Khodskii retained the respect of colleagues in the Free Economnic Society and edited the economic journal Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, which focused its publishing activity on articles connected to questions of local and national economy. Khodskii took a long view of land relations, examining three periods in the land affairs of state peasants: pre-eighteenthcentury; from the eighteenth century until 1865, when state peasants were put on redemption; and the period from 1866 to the present.

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As with all the works being examined here, Khodskii made extensive use of relevant laws. He also made use of Zablotskii-Desiatovskii’s Kiselev biography. Returning to pre-Petrine times, Khodskii noted that state peasants held land “in a completely sufficient amount” in comparison to the population and paid no special fees for its use other than the taxes levied on all landholders, which had no particular connection to land use.22 What became the “obrok tax” (obrochnaia podat’) for access to state land initially came into being as a supplement to the soul tax levied on persons inhabiting state land under Peter I in 1723. Officials, however, increasingly associated it with land use, comparing it to the income lords received from their serfs. Subsequent legislation sought to justify and solidify the state’s right to collect the obrok tax. By the 1760s the state viewed it as a primary source of income.23 Khodskii noted that the relationship between the tax and land use remained ambiguous: statutes also indicated that the tax applied to “wages in general, not only from farming but from supplemental trades as well.” Legislation early in Paul’s reign underscored this ambiguity. A decree of 18 December 1797 called for the size of the obrok tax to be related to income generated by the land or the trades performed on it. Thus, Khodskii argued, the statute for the first time clearly expressed the direct connection between the obrok tax and the right to land use. “The amount and quality of land,” he continued, “assumed the primary place as the basis for defining the size of the tax; its former purely per capita character was converted to a cadastral one.” It followed from this that, from Paul’s reign onward, the state also concerned itself with ensuring that lands were assessed according to their value and that state peasants had allotments sufficient not just to guarantee their ability to make payments but also to realize their full economic potential as a source of state revenue.24 Thus in the early nineteenth century the finance ministry sought means to equate the obrok tax to ability to pay by grouping provinces into classes in a more sophisticated manner. The goal throughout, Khodskii argued, was to create a situation in which the obrok tax could truly be shifted away from a per capita basis towards land so as not to overburden peasants. This policy aimed at sufficiency, on which rested the well-being of both state and peasant. For Khodskii, the culmination of this process was the establishment of the Ministry of State Domains under Kiselev and its reforms. In his article the Kiselev period stands out as a “golden age” during

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which the state took its responsibilities towards the state peasantry seriously. According to Khodskii, the Kiselev period was distinct from previous periods and those that followed in that it assigned a lower priority to “purely fiscal interests” and the “elevation of the peasant’s well being” assumed an important place in state politics.25 He then quotes a “highly competent author” to the effect that the chief defect of the finance ministry’s administration of the state peasantry prior to the Ministry of State Domains’ creation had been its failure to gather adequate information on state peasant allotments and available state land. Because of this, it was “impossible to take steps toward the elimination of extreme land shortages.”26 Instead of seeking to provide sufficient allotments, local finance ministry organs focused on little except collecting taxes. In contrast, Khodskii argued, Count Kiselev “permanently concerned himself with state peasants’ sufficient security in land.”27 To this end, his ministry attempted to categorize provinces as “little-landed” or “much-landed,” and it worked towards securing respective “allotment norms” for every soul.28 In the final analysis, Khodskii noted, the main significance of the creation of the Ministry of State Domains was that it introduced “the principle of securing land for the peasantry, a principle that somewhat later existed as a basis for the emancipation reform of the 19th of February.”29 The state peasant reforms, as presented to the reading public, followed a precedent in their emphasis on the state as an organizational force in the agrarian economy: the state was obligated to provide an allotment sufficient to maintain the peasant and to enable him to maintain the state through payments associated with the actual value of the land. We might ask how the work of one of the empire’s most famous historians, V.O. Kliuchevskii, contributed to establishing the allotment precedent. Petrovich portrayed Kliuchevskii as someone who, inspired by the work of Kostomarov, Shchapov, and the Slavophile Iu.F. Samarin (the brother of Ianson critic D.F. Samarin), turned away from the idea of the state as primary causal agent in historical change, in favour of the economy as that agent.30 Kliuchevskii was particularly harsh on what we might call the “great man” theory of historical change, viewing reforms – such as the Emancipation – not as abrupt changes but as “the product of all the previous history of a people.”31 Kliuchevskii’s approach to the past was more nuanced than that of his predecessors – he took a more sociological (yet artistic) approach to understanding Russia’s past. That said, his work did much to centre

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in the public mind the idea of sufficiency and the role of state policy in shaping agrarian relations. For Kliuchevskii, the state was not the sole creator of rural relations; its fiscal agenda competed with that of noble landowners and that of the peasants themselves. Yet, as he noted in a response to Iu.F. Samarin’s objection to his review of the latter’s memoirs, policies such as the introduction of the soul tax had profoundly shaped the countryside. On the surface, that tax amounted to a new unit of taxation – a transfer of the tax burden from land or households to taxable souls. At the same time, “the personal attachment [of the tax burden] was accepted as a means for the fulfillment of the attachment of peasants to the land.” Lords became responsible for their serfs’ “well-being and tax fulfillment,” and the tax “was first and foremost fulfilled by land.”32 It followed that the peasants’ right to the land allotments they received as part of the Emancipation stemmed not from their actual use or tenure on the land (as D.F. Samarin argued in the redemption payment reduction discussion) or as payment for their centuries of enserfed labor (as Prince Cherkasskii argued in the same discussion), but from this attachment of taxes to land by “subsequent legislation and perverse pomeshchik practice.”33 The state’s interest in the sufficient nadel transcended any interest in serfdom as an institution and was rooted in its own fiscal needs.34 In the end, then, Kliuchevskii’s popular work reaffirmed the idea that the state was, at least in part, responsible for shaping the agrarian economy and that its needs implied an obligation to pursue “sufficient” allotments. Finally, historians published a rich array of primary source materials at the end of the nineteenth century that provided many opportunities for anyone inclined to explore land tenure relations on their own to interpret the state as the organizer of rural economic life. In addition to Mitrofan V. Dovnar-Zapolskii’s publications, compilations of materials related to Muscovite taxation by M.A. Diakonov and S.B. Veselovskii enhanced the idea of the state as the shaper of rural society.35 In sum, much of the standard historiography of the period – some of which was previously characterized under the heading “state” or “juridical” school and all of which had a distinct political focus – did much to create the impression that the state had an obligation to order the peasant economy in such a way as to ensure peasants sufficient access to land, if only to guarantee its own fiscal health. This trend contextualized developing debates on the adequacy of emancipation land allotments, especially as other scholars attempted

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to approach the history of the peasantry from outside chancery halls and compendiums of imperial law.

A “ P e o p l e ’ s ” Hi s tory: S i t uat in g t h e P o s t- E manci pati on Land A l l o t m e n t H is tori cally The perspective of high politics – the idea that the state shaped rural society – persisted in the historiography despite attempts by postemancipation Populists to write a history of “the people” before the Emancipation.36 Theirs were not social histories in the sense of Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out,” but rather histories in which the state continued to fill a large portion of the stage. The first attempt was a six-volume work by Nikolai A. Polevoi that appeared between 1830 and 1833. Polevoi meant his History of the Russian People to be an antidote to the dynastic/statist emphasis of Nicholas Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia of 1811.37 The Slavophiles too, found fault with the existing historiography’s neglect of the peasantry. Konstantin S. Aksakov’s critique of the seventh volume of S.M. Soloviev’s History of Russia from Earliest Times (1858) noted that, in devoting only six pages to the peasantry, Soloviev had essentially written the history of everything but the Russian people.38 There was a certain irony in Aksakov’s lament, as political historians such as K.D. Kavelin “considered the archetype of the Great Russian to be the landowning peasant of the past – the domovladyka – whose whole conception of governmental and social life was rooted in the village.”39 Yet for Slavophiles such as Soloviev’s contemporary Iurii Samarin, the focus on economic questions related to the peasantry still idealized the idea of “state-initiated reform on behalf of society as a whole.”40 Ordering the rural economy and its population was a matter of state. Vasilii I. Semevskii’s work is most pivotal for understanding the role that history played in shaping urban elites’ conceptions of the state’s role in the countryside, including with regard to normal land allotments. Semevskii’s work directly linked the history of the peasantry to the political issue of his time – the land settlement aspects of the Emancipation.41 Kliuchevskii in his review of Semevskii’s The Peasant Question in Russia considered that work a “valuable contribution” to the literature but also criticized it sharply for an “absence of historical perspective” (i.e., objectivity).42 Indeed,

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Semevskii’s academic career suffered from his populist politics. Forced to defend his 1881 master’s dissertation, “Peasants in the Reign of Catherine  II,” in Moscow because the history faculty at Saint Petersburg University refused to accept it, by 1886 he was prohibited from teaching at his alma mater because of his “dangerous tendencies.” He completed his doctoral dissertation on the peasant question in Moscow in 1889. Despite the fact that his work was awarded prizes from the Academy of Sciences and the Free Economic Society, he had to turn to journalism to make a living.43 By providing a historical context for the debate over the sufficiency of the Emancipation’s land allotments, Semevskii’s work established past allotments as precedents by which to judge the present. In 1881 Semevskii asked if it was not time to write a history of the peasantry and pointed to the shortcomings of history written only on the basis of decrees. Yet his own work depicted an activist state. Semevskii’s classic work on the peasantry in the reign of Catherine II broke new ground by tapping the unpublished papers of magnate families as well as peasant testimony before various investigative commissions, but the bulk of his work was still very much a narrative of state activity derived from such sources as the “economic notes” associated with the General Land Survey. Indeed, as he noted in 1881, the Russian peasantry deserved historical treatment not merely because of its role as the embodiment of Russianness and its size, but also because of the significance it had for the state.44 Semevskii’s doctoral dissertation, The Peasant Question in Russia in the Eighteenth and First Half of the Nineteenth Century, devoted much attention to the government programs that led to the Emancipation – an approach echoed in his later work and that dominates to this day the narrative of agrarian reform.45 As Kliuchevskii noted in his review, there is a teleology embedded in his narrative of the struggle between anti- and pro-emancipation officials that culminates in the Emancipation itself. The notion of access to sufficient allotments emerges throughout the narrative. The chapter on the reign of Paul I in his history of the peasant question focuses on Paul’s legislation concerning the sale of serfs without land, a limit of three on the number of days that lords could require serfs to perform barshchina, and a prohibition on Sunday barshchina.46 In Semevskii, Kiselev emerges as one of the “good guys” of the best sort – a pragmatic official with his heart in the right place. Thus, Semevskii noted that although “Kiselev did not strive toward the complete elimination of serfdom, but only toward the conversion

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of its regulated connection to land by means of specific points of law,” at the same time such ideas “served as a good counterweight to the contrary views of those individuals who advised the emancipation of peasants without land.”47 This was a story of how the state tried to get it right. Thus, in spite of our continued tendency to parse the historiography of the peasantry into “state” and “populist” schools, both narratives were guided by conceptions of the state – in particular by moral judgments about its role and obligations in rural society. Most importantly, Semevskii’s work exemplified historical analysis as sociopolitical criticism. As historian Karen Snow has argued, for Semevskii and others, history (like zemstvo employment) was a means of fulfilling a social obligation or even “going to the people.”48 Semevskii’s work linked the questions of the present to the past; in particular, they added historical context to the debate over the “insufficiency” of emancipation land allotments that had been ignited by the work of Ianson and others.49 The categories used to describe peasant life reflected their origins in the system of serf management itself (allotment size, payments, etc.) and were thus the same input categories that peppered the debate over insufficient allotments. In an article published as a historiographical introduction to his master’s thesis in Russkaia mysl’ a month before Alexander II’s assassination (which subsequently led to its rejection by the history faculty of Saint Petersburg University and gave his study of the peasantry in Catherine II’s reign a degree of infamy50), Semevskii compared emancipation allotments with those of the eighteenth century and suggested that officials’ ignorance of the empire’s agrarian history had led them to award insufficient allotments in the emancipation process.51 Comparison to the past now buttressed statistical descriptions of the present. Against the contemporary backdrop of an emancipation settlement that many in educated society found wanting and that Ianson’s analysis presented as “insufficient” to meet subsistence and payment needs, Semevskii’s popular work – first published in 1888 – painted a picture of serf life that revealed in figures what previously had been known largely only to officials and magnates. Semevskii showed how serfdom expanded and strengthened in Catherine II’s reign; he was the first to present to society figures on the number of serfs, their distribution among lords, the size of their allotments, and their cash and labour obligations. The reading public learned, for example, that in 1767, Count P.B. Sheremetev possessed nearly 45,000 souls and that this was but the apex of a hierarchical pyramid of human bondage that

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had at its base other magnates like the heirs of Prince B.A. Kurakin, who inherited 13,000 souls upon his death in 1765.52 Compared to such figures – attached to the names of families still prominent in ruling circles – the paragraph laying out the much less fantastic reality of serf ownership (83.8 percent of serf-owners possessed fewer than one hundred souls in 1777) – was easily overlooked.53 Estate papers were powerful sources in a scholarly and political sense. Furthermore, citing documents from a variety of sources, Semevskii’s history portrayed serfs’ access to land as superior to that of the recently emancipated peasants. On obrok estates “all lands were in peasant use,” and based on peasant labour employed, Semevskii calculated that on barshchina estates the ratio of peasant to demesne land was roughly two-to-one.54 His work also touched on another hot-button issue in the emancipation settlement: peasant access to forest and other essential resources besides arable. Setting aside the issue of allotment size, critics of the Emancipation complained that the settlement had left peasants without the resources needed for a complete economy and that securing such access now came at a cost. As Semevskii noted, although in the past some lords controlled forest access tightly, there were many estates where peasants were allowed to harvest wood not only for personal use but also for sale to third parties.55 There was little sympathy here with the political constraints facing the Editing Commissions. The terms of the Emancipation seemed rather stark in comparison with the past. Finally, in a section titled “Measures Against Land Shortage,” Semevskii delivered what appears from our perspective a rather subtle condemnation of the emancipation settlement but one that, in the opening rounds of the “insufficient allotment” debate, must certainly have been a powerful indictment. Citing an article by K.P. Pobedonostsev, he argued that until the publication of the first edition of the Digest of Laws (Svod Zakonov), there were no laws obligating pomeshchiki to give peasants a nadel sufficient for their sustenance.56 Even so, he noted, many serf-owners still attempted to solve land shortages on their estates in some way, either through land purchase or through forced migration or intensification (in the sense of adding labour by requiring households to employ children and the aged – those who were technically not “workers” in a legal sense). But most of the section (more limited in its evidentiary base than others) detailed the efforts of lords (to protect their own fiscal interests) to provide adequate land resources for their serfs. Thus we learn of the Moscow pomeshchik Lunin, who, seeking to increase his serfs’

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access to sufficient land, purchased 171 desiatinas of ploughland in 1796. After recouping the purchase price through the sale of grain over the next three years, he allotted the land to his serfs. Other lords arranged for and/or allowed their serfs to rent additional land. General Suvorov solved land hunger issues on his estates by arranging an exchange with neighbours and also by clearing forest. After expanding access to ploughland by clearing forest near two villages, Prince Kurakin allotted the new ploughland without making it liable to tiaglo obligations. Still other benevolent souls and wise economic managers, as reported by Andrei Bolotov, solved the resource problem by excusing a certain number of households from their payment obligations.57 Thus Semevskii delivered a double-edged message to his readers. Serf-owners had their own interests at heart and many had few qualms about wringing as much as possible from their serfs – even if it was for the good of the serfs themselves. At the same time, “land shortage” among Great Russian peasants was “fortunately, a very rare exception.” “On the contrary,” he continued, “serfs, in the majority of provinces during the 18th century had use of a substantial amount of land, which made it possible under Catherine II to more easily bear the pomeshchik’s yoke than in the 19th century.58 “Sufficiency” in terms of adequate access to land was rooted in the past, even during the intensification of serfdom under Catherine II. It was a normal expectation. Ianson and other statisticians used numbers to surround their conclusions with objectivity and authority. Semevskii achieved a similar effect with copious documentation from a vast array of sources. For many urban elites, the allotment norms employed in the emancipation process appeared even less normal (less sufficient) when contextualized by the past. Subsequent works reiterated the notion that the state had assumed an obligation to provide peasants with allotments sufficient to meet their needs and obligations by focusing, like Semevskii, on land allotments and payments. One such work was a history of the Udel Administration commemorating the hundredth anniversary of its founding; this remained the standard work on the topic into Soviet times.59 Semevskii noted that the project had almost failed owing to editorial differences. Two Russian history specialists quit the project after the Main Udel Administration refused to include pieces on udel peasant uprisings in the early nineteenth century.60 Nonetheless, the issue was not contentious enough to prevent

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participation by two well-known students of the peasant economy: Khodskii, and V.P. Vorontsov. Vorontsov’s participation is significant given his solid Populist credentials as an advocate for preserving communal agriculture, eliminating “land hunger,” and bringing redemption payments into line with allotment income. Vorontsov’s contribution to the project narrated the economic activities of the Udel Department. His interest in the peasant nadel coloured his treatment of the udel administration’s history. So it is proclaimed in the title of the opening pages of his main contribution (much of volume 2), “Measures for supplying peasants with land (up to the reform of 1863).” According to Vorontsov’s work, the history of the Udel Administration was, at its core, a history of state attempts to ensure peasants access to sufficient allotments. Using archival sources, Vorontsov traced legislation connected to “sufficiency,” demonstrating his conviction that peasants were entitled to receive a sufficient nadel from the state. He did not hesitate to point out the shortcomings of the legislation, especially in terms of implementation. He noted, for example, that meeting one goal (shifting payments from persons to land) often contradicted another (increasing peasant allotments to the legal norm). At the same time his choice and coverage of topics – especially legally mandated land norms and legislative intent to provide “sufficient” allotments – most likely reflected his political convictions more than implemented reality. This was truly past as present and does much to explain why professional historians like Kliuchevskii tended to ignore these aspects of the udel administration’s history.61 Finally, a glance at the multi-volume The Great Reform (Velikaia reforma), issued by the Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation, indicates the extent to which Semevskii’s casting of the past in terms of present debates had come to define both.62 Writing on the peasantry in the seventeenth century, Iurii Got’e demonstrated that extensification mattered as an indicator of peasant well-being, even if expressed in average figures. Of course, access to ploughland in any rural society was, and is, important, but his reference to “signs of the decline in peasant tenure” as symptomatic not only of the peasantry’s loss of autonomy, but also of its well-being, appeared as additional historical proof of the importance of the nadel in contemporary agrarian reform.63 M.M. Bogoslovskii’s contribution on the

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tax-paying state peasants (chernososhnye) of the Pomor’e region (the White Sea coast) in the seventeenth century noted the transition in the government’s view of these lands as it attempted to increase its sources of revenue – their conversion from the patrimony of the peasants themselves into “allotments of state land given out to peasants for the fulfillment of state taxes.”64 The right to tax imparted an expectation of sufficient means to meet tax obligations. Allotting land was a primary state function. Finally, and most importantly, Semevskii’s allotment and payment norms appeared as standard comparisons or benchmarks for gauging agricultural progress.65 Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing, indicative of the projection of the present onto the past and past onto the present, was the appearance of references to “norms” at all (as opposed to “average” or “typical” – terms not loaded with the meaning that “norms” had in the context of agrarian reform in the early twentieth century).66 There were of course more circumspect works. In his history of the serf economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Peter Struve confronted the extent to which present concerns had coloured treatments of the past, yielding an image of “popular production” (narodnoe proizvodstvo) that “was a rosy spot” amidst the dark mark of serfdom.67 Struve was interested in how serfdom had evolved from a structural standpoint – in the intersection between law and the economy – and the economic dynamics of serfdom itself. For Struve, serf labour in the eighteenth century corresponded to the “norm of rental payments” for the land they received, roughly equivalent to similar arrangements between former serfs and their masters in the 1870s (a point from the Valuev Commission’s work).68 For the Marxist Struve, the point was not how much land peasants had access to as serfs, but the relations of production and their gradual unwinding. For works outside of Struve, however, the present intruded on the past, focusing attention on issues of sufficient access to land. The publication of eighteenth-century treatises on the serf economy and state policy (including Pososhkov’s and Lomonosov’s works) reinforced this perspective as they portrayed a moral economy of mutual dependence.69 Past practice normalized allotment sizes and made such state actions a “normal” expectation bearing the weight of tradition and custom. Eighteenth-century lords’ asset management practices, in the hands of nineteenth-century reformers, became a framework for using statistics to advance the interests of the peasantry in the interest of the common good.

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Z e m s t vo S tati sti cs : N o r m a l iz in g t h e P e asant Economy A growing body of statistical work expanded public consideration of the nadel in the present as statistical thinking and research developed outside of state agencies. The new statistics provided a sociological approach to understanding the peasantry, making the population visible to itself as much as to its rulers. Like the state’s figures, these numbers pointed to shortcomings of the Emancipation. They also played a large role in shaping elite conceptions of the peasantry and the future of the peasant economy. Zemstvos generated most of this statistical information. The zemstvo reform of 1864 aimed at addressing the issue of local administration in the provinces that arose with the end of serfdom and the end of lords’ responsibility for several areas connected to the local economy and infrastructure. Zemstvos existed on the provincial and district levels, initially in the thirty-four core European provinces of the empire. Comprised of indirectly elected representatives, including peasants and urban property owners, most were dominated by the local nobility and charged with overseeing the needs of the local economy. Although the state envisioned a very limited scope for zemstvos’ activities, their authority over management of the local economy was so vaguely defined that they were soon engaged in a whole host of initiatives, primarily in the areas of education, health care, veterinary medicine, fire prevention, insurance, and agronomy.70 Zemstvos thus became major employers of a new group of rural professionals, the “third element,” and generated an influx of idealistic educated urbanites seeking contact with “the people.” To fund their activities, the statute gave zemstvos the authority to levy taxes on land and urban property based on “value and income,” but it did not specify how to calculate these figures.71 By the mid1880s, wrangling over tax assessments between districts had led most zemstvos to employ statisticians to create a cadastral basis for dividing the provincial zemstvo tax assessment between districts and, within districts, between local lords and peasant communes. Although reforms of the zemstvo statute in 1890 and 1893 were widely criticized by zemstvo delegates (and referred to as “counterreforms” in the historiography), they still required zemstvos to establish their tax assessments on a solid statistical basis, thus ensuring the continued generation of statistical information about the

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peasantry and its economy from outside the metropolitan beltway and local ministerial offices.72 A number of factors encouraged zemstvos to collect more detailed information about the local economy than was typically required for tax assessment. The state’s demand for specific economic information grew as it pursued its own rural development ambitions. All of its agrarian inquiries and projects, beginning with the Valuev Commission’s investigation of the peasantry’s condition and including other projects such as the redemption payment reduction, abolition of the poll tax, and the creation of the Peasant Land Bank, required a regular stream of data from zemstvos, even though local taxes were already paying for provincial statistical committees (local arms of the Central Statistical Committee) to serve this function. As other empire-builders throughout the world were discovering during this period, numbers were key to creating and implementing programs that would realize imperial dreams of developing subjects and their economic potential. Zemstvo statistical work provided needed information and formed a basis for collecting the requisite revenue to make such imperial dreams a reality. Ultimately, as Catherine Evtuhov and others have shown, zemstvo activities and information gathering also provided a basis for the discovery and development of local identities.73 The politics of dividing the tax burden between districts, however, was the main factor pointing tax assessment work in this direction of more detailed description (as opposed to more basic cadastral assessment). The provincial nobles who dominated zemstvo assemblies were anxious to ensure that tax assessments accounted for their own local particularisms, were as low as possible, and hit local urbanites, manufacturers, and peasants harder. Demands for more detailed assessments occurred most often in provinces where soil conditions varied from district to district, or where close proximity to transportation or to a large urban market (such as Moscow) made property of a given soil type more valuable in one district than in another of the same province. This made commissioning a statistical survey of the province an appealing prospect, for by placing taxation on a “scientific” footing, it ensured that such differences would be taken into account in the assessment process. As A.A. Bakunin, a deputy in the Tver’ provincial zemstvo, noted, “Only when we have at our disposal believable statistical data will we be able … to establish the division [of zemstvo taxes] on believable bases.”74 This issue served

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as the motivating force behind the creation of statistical bureaux in the zemstvos of Chernigov, Moscow, and a few other provinces in the 1870s. These bureaux, especially that of Moscow, set the developmental pattern of zemstvo statistics throughout the empire.75 In this way, nobles’ concerns about their own tax liability provided leeway for statisticians to collect a wide variety of information about local conditions and peasant agriculture. The zemstvos’ economic development agenda also ensured that collecting tax data was never a purely cadastral exercise, even after the state attempted to circumscribe tax assessment work in 1893 (and again in 1899). The need for equitable revenue collection existed in conjunction with the zemstvos’ growing need for the information required to meet local needs and realize its own plans for developing the countryside. For example, crop failure in Samara province in 1879–80 goaded the provincial zemstvo into establishing a statistical bureau in the hope that the information gathered could be used to prevent future harvest problems or ease the stress of them.76 Only “by means of detailed statistical research,” the Kherson zemstvo board argued, “can the zemstvo find solid ground for its activities.”77 Given that the statute provided few specifics as to what these basic economic needs might be, zemstvos included under this heading everything from establishing hospitals and schools to maintaining and distributing emergency grain and cash reserves. Zemstvo taxation provided the funding for these programs, including the salaries of those charged with implementing them. Besides addressing the informational demands of employers, zemstvo statistics and their subsequent impact on agrarian reform reflected the world view of those who were employed as statisticians. The field of statistics began its life by making the population visible to the early modern state. By the mid-nineteenth century, educated society throughout Europe had grasped that numbers served as a prism of power through which the modern population might view itself.78 Statistical measurement played an essential role in the construction of, and advocacy for, “the people” whom we associate with populist movements. The generation – mainly “people of various ranks” (raznochintsy) – born between the mid-1840s and the 1850s were keen to realize the power of numbers in support of the people. Such individuals were the first to answer zemstvos’ calls for statisticians to meet the local need for numbers. Even as younger individuals moved into these roles in later years, this generation continued to exert a dominant

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influence on the profession through continued zemstvo work, leadership in scientific organizations, and positions in the academy.79 The zemstvos’ need for numbers emerged in the midst of the intelligentsia’s consideration of a key institution of the Great Russian peasantry’s economic life, the repartitional land commune (obshchina or mir). Baron August von Haxthausen’s 1847 treatise, Studies on the Interior of Russia, initiated a debate over the commune’s origins, nature, and future that would persist long after the Emancipation.80 Whatever its faults, the commune (in theory) divided its lands among households to ensure that all adult males or married couples had access to land. Despite reservations about its impact on peasant agriculture, the Emancipation’s authors retained the commune as a state partner for ensuring rural sufficiency and stability and for guaranteeing peasant payments through mutual responsibility (krugovaia poruka). For members of the intelligentsia like Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Chernyshevskii, the commune seemed to offer an indigenous path to socialism by which Russia might create a just society and avoid the ills of capitalist modernity. Even Marx admitted that Russia might progress to communism without enduring the atrocities of capitalist exploitation.81 Most urban elites were unaware of the commune’s collusive role in maintaining social control through the institution of serfdom.82 Opponents of the commune, like the jurist Boris Chicherin (a liberal monarchist who supported the activist state of Alexander II), argued that it was an artificial entity created by the state for fiscal purposes and detrimental to agricultural improvement. Supporters of the ­commune, such as the Slavophile I.D. Beliaev, portrayed it as a native Russian institution that had been corrupted by the serf system.83 But this historical approach of the Hegelian “fathers” lacked positivist proof, so by the end of the 1860s their “sons” were seeking empirical evidence of native socialism in the village itself. Rural studies blossomed throughout the 1870s and 1880s.84 These decades were the formative period of Russian Populist ideology, which combined a faith in the peasantry and its institutions with a messianic philosophy of service to “the people.” In the spring of 1874 nearly 2,000 idealistic young people – most of them students who believed in the Russian peasantry’s innate socialist impulses as embodied in the land commune – left their classrooms and urban discussion circles and went “to the people” to take up manual and professional jobs among the peasantry in the village itself. They believed that sharing peasants’ lives and

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hardships would position them to agitate in the village for the overthrow of the tsarist government. More than three quarters of them were arrested; many of them had been turned in to the police by peasants suspicious of outsiders. With soft hands and backs, many others perished due to injury or disease.85 The peasants’ rejection of the “to the people” movement, and the base reality of village life its members encountered in person, turned some of these youth towards terrorism or Marxism. For others, that same experience and the works of writers like N.N. Zlatovratskii and G.I. Uspenskii set them in search of a deeper understanding of the lives of the peasants and the hardships they faced.86 Systematic empirical observation, they hoped, could explain the contrast between observed reality and the idealized version of communal life that was embedded so deeply in their hearts and minds. Uspenskii urged the intelligentsia to study the peasantry the way an artist studied his craft and to use their findings to preserve the natural harmony of peasant life and protect it from the intrusions of modern civilization.87 Preservation required empirical knowledge of how the commune worked and, it followed, how civilization (mainly the market) affected it. This research agenda found a welcome reception in Moscow salons, where discussions between writers, academics, and university students folded statistics together with the commune question.88 Influenced by Moscow salon culture and trained in the society-oriented school of statistics taught by their mentor, Professor A.I. Chuprov, students began to study the commune through numbers. Statistics were an ideal tool for dissecting communal life, understanding it on its own terms, and ascertaining its links to the intrusive modern world (i.e., the market). They did so by revealing, as Saratov statistician S.A. Kharizomenov noted, “empirical laws of social phenomena.” Kharizomenov came to statistics after becoming convinced that his revolutionary activities with the group “Land and Liberty” (Zemlia i Volia) and its more radical revolutionary successors would come to naught, as they knew little about the lives of the peasants they hoped to liberate. He and his peers believed that their research would yield statistical laws of peasant behaviour that would prove scientifically that the commune was a viable alternative to capitalist development.89 Faith in science salvaged a shaken faith in the commune. In the process, a peasantry known mainly through anecdote and literature took on a new, modern existence as it was objectified in numbers that could be manipulated, compared, and displayed in

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tabular form. Joining the people had failed; counting and categorizing them would prevail – or so it was hoped. Chuprov, who held a chair in statistics and political economy in the Juridical Faculty at Moscow University, inspired his students to explore the social implications of their studies. From his perch as an expert he received many requests from zemstvos seeking statisticians to devise and implement tax assessment programs. He attempted to fill these requests by sending out dozens of his best students, such as V.I. Orlov and N.A. Kablukov. As Kablukov explained, Chuprov insisted on the importance of what we would today call “experiential learning” as preparation for further scientific work and as a contribution to society.90 His students’ curiosity about the commune and the peasantry had been piqued by publications such as Zlatovratskii’s and Uspenskii’s. Now he orchestrated the mixing of his students’ study of statistics with opportunities for practical experience and service. In Kablukov’s case, that experience began when Chuprov introduced him to another of his students, Vasilii Ivanovich Orlov, for whom Chuprov had secured a position as head of the Moscow provincial zemstvo’s statistical bureau. When Orlov collapsed and died in 1885, Chuprov convinced Kablukov to put his academic career on hold and take Orlov’s place.91 We can see the extent of Chuprov’s impact on zemstvo statistics in the fact that, of the fifty-three persons employed as zemstvo statisticians in the 1870s and 1880s with complete or partial higher education, fifteen had attended Moscow University and nine of those had studied directly with Chuprov.92 By the end of the 1880s, most zemstvos had statistical bureaux staffed either by Chuprov’s students or by persons closely associated with him. To understand zemstvo statistics we must have some understanding of the statistical perspective that Chuprov imparted to the statisticians – his students. From an intellectual perspective, Chuprov (and his counterpart in Saint Petersburg, Ianson) rejected what many saw as the determinism that laced Quetelet’s work, preferring instead the views of a group of scholars described as the German Historical School, particularly the work of Göttingen professor Wilhelm Roscher. Thus, Chuprov and his students (being the budding modern social scientists that they were) shared Quetelet’s commitment to the idea that the collection and analysis of statistics could reveal general laws of society (just as it had for planetary motion); but at the same time, Chuprov and his German counterparts believed that mass observation obscured as much as it revealed about human activity. Theirs was a

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much more organic, as opposed to mechanical, conception of society. Human beings were more complex than the motion of planets, and the compilation and analysis of data needed to take this into account.93 The method developed by zemstvo statisticians associated with Chuprov, the “Moscow Type,” reflected this. The “Moscow Type” zemstvo statistics were developed to satisfy statisticians’ curiosity about the commune as well as employers’ concerns about both tax assessments and the peasantry’s condition and needs. Concerned that individual nuance not disappear under piles of data covering large territorial units (for which they criticized the statistics of the Central Statistical Committee), the zemstvo statisticians set out to examine the peasant economy at its most basic level: the household (dvor). The instrument Orlov championed and that became the hallmark of zemstvo work, the household inventory (podvornaia perepis’), mirrored the inventories that serf-owners used to manage their estates. Such inventories collected a wide variety of data for assessing the peasant economy beyond the amount and quality of the land they tilled. As statistician and social activist N.F. Annenskii put it some years later (when the state was attempting to limit statisticians’ interactions with peasants), the proper assessment of the condition and tax burden of the peasant’s “natural economy” required consideration of a host of “social factors” beyond what was typically considered in cadastral work.94 Thus, besides gathering information about allotment size, quality, climate, and local commodity prices, when interviewing household heads in the communal assembly (skhod) they recorded data on family composition (number of workers and non-workers), number of draft and other livestock, land tenure relations, tillage methods, and payments and other obligations. Statisticians working in Chernigov in the late 1870s approached their work and analysis from a more territorial perspective (assessing by survey parcel from the General Land Survey) but arrived at a similar system for collecting data to determine tax assessments and serve other zemstvo informational needs.95 Thus throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as statisticians developed their methods, input measures and the categories of serf estate management were enshrined as the categories by which zemstvo statisticians and those who followed their work would comprehend the post-emancipation peasant economy and assess its well-being and needs. In the end, the intimate knowledge of locale that statisticians developed through their work prevented agreement on a universal

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methodology or set of rubrics to use in research, thereby ensuring that contemporaries and future historians would forever live with the frustrating difficulty of making empire-wide comparisons between data sets gathered according to a variety of criteria. Notwithstanding their reliance on input indicators to measure peasant well-being, their emphasis on the particular and the local – especially the distinctive nature of the peasantry’s natural economy – distinguished the lens through which they viewed the peasant economy from that of the state. In this case, local (in one sense peasant) knowledge prevailed over that of the metropole.96 In a tour de force of imperial particularisms, statisticians from one province argued at statistical congresses that, given the peculiarities of peasant husbandry, soil conditions, allotment distribution, and a host of other items, counting one thing in their province (or part thereof) was more important than counting another. At one extreme, Voronezh statistician F.A. Shcherbina counted nearly everything, a tactic well-suited to a statistical world that had yet to make its peace with the idea of sampling (he would help pioneer it) and in which those who were counting were keen to satisfy their own curiosity about the peasant economy. In the end, countless debates in congresses hosted by the statistical departments of various organizations such as the Moscow Juridical Society and the Free Economic Society failed to arrive at a unified research program. So statistician S.N. Veletskii simply published a two-volume compendium of all the individual household inventory programs.97 Throughout these debates (much like those measuring from Saint Petersburg), inputs (land, labour, and draft animals), as opposed to measures of productivity (e.g., yields), remained unquestioned categories for assessing peasant well-being. Part of this was conditioned by the statisticians’ own interest in gleaning the “causal factors” that made the peasant economy tick, a search that made A.S. Shlikevich an early discoverer of the statistical analysis of variation (A N O VA).98 In other words, the questions statisticians were asking contributed to their ongoing consideration of well-being in terms of inputs, and hence – despite their knowledge of the need to improve peasant husbandry –­­­ their continued support for categories that expressed extensification (peasant need for an additional land allotment). The fact that their own numbers reinforced a negative assessment of the emancipation allotments reinforced this. Outside of their own research interests, zemstvo statisticians insisted that only the household inventory method could ensure that data

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crucial for considering the unique attributes of the peasant economy would be considered in tax assessment.99 Annenskii and others joined a popular chorus in and out of government that emphasized that rental prices were an unfair indicator of land values given land-short peasants’ common practice of renting noble lands at inflated prices; rental prices were artificially high and did not reflect the land’s real income under peasant tillage. You could discover the extent to which rent and sale prices were skewed only by interviewing the peasants themselves.100 Furthermore, only a detailed inquiry into the household economy (including its budget) would indicate what level of monetary income those commodities produced beyond the needs of consumption – the value of those products consumed and those sold for cash.101 Statisticians thus considered income – one of the primary means by which we consider economic well-being today – only to the extent that it was connected to their concerns that peasants be taxed fairly. The assumption here was that peasants were entitled to subsistence and should be taxed only on any surplus beyond this – an entitlement to sustenance at the heart of which rested an entitlement to a sufficient nadel. The zemstvo statisticians’ household inventory program found support from others interested in the fate of the post-emancipation peasantry. Prince A.I. Vasil’chikov’s Rural Life and the Rural Economy in Russia (1881) affirmed zemstvo statisticians’ approach to measuring the peasant economy from his perspective as a serf-owner with a record of state service.102 The book aimed at providing a framework for identifying insufficiencies in the peasant economy by cataloguing the “main indicators of poverty and disarray in rural life.”103 Achieving this goal required more than the average figures compiled by state agencies. Although averages might “demonstrate the relationships of various subjects of economy and wealth,” when it came to individual inhabitants, averages were more apt to “give false conclusions.” An “objective” understanding of the peasant economy that could give guidance to policies for eliminating poverty could be gained only by preserving the individuality of households in the research process—that is, each household’s individual use of land, labour and capital. Average figures obscured cases where “the land hungry population” included peasants that, “in their solitude and lack of working hands are oppressed by their meager allotment,” or where families in rural societies were still, on a household basis, in need of ploughland or pasture.104 Average figures hid the deficiencies

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that the state and the zemstvo needed to address. Lacking proper information, political opponents and revolutionaries drew dire portraits of village life. Lack of proper studies deprived administrators and reformers of the information they needed for a productive discussion of wealth and poverty.105 Vasil’chikov’s main concern was collecting information to address peasant poverty. Such information would enable zemstvo and state authorities to differentiate between average and poor peasants. Significantly (as we shall see), he did not define “average” arithmetically, but a priori as a household with a married couple, a horse and a cow, and various other livestock. “Poor” households were defined, with a similar level of subjectivity, by their inability to work an allotment or make payments. This approach required data that investigated household “sufficiency” in various input categories, including the following: the number of souls actually present in the household (excluding those in the military or in prison), subdivided by sex and age (workers, half-workers, non-workers); the number of draft animals and other livestock; and the amount of land comprising the actual landholding of the head of household, including communal allotment land, purchased land, and rented land, as well as an indication of whether or not he had refused his communal allotment.106 This information would make it possible for “both the zemstvo and government organs to comprehend the insufficiencies and needs of the local population and to undertake corresponding measures” to address them.107 Ultimately, this would make it possible to compile and communicate lists “of those peasant families or villages that might be recognized as land hungry, defining beforehand norms by which they recognize peasant landholdings as sufficient or insufficient” and, in so doing, meet stewardship obligations in a rational way that facilitated rural development.108 Like Vasil’chikov’s and others’ works, zemstvo studies, especially V.I. Orlov’s work on Moscow province, had a number of impacts on educated society’s conception of the peasant economy. First, the household inventory method shifted conceptions of the peasantry and its economy away from the commune and towards the household. Results from Moscow and elsewhere indicated that peasants were less communal than society first believed and were equivocal when it came to assessing the importance of the commune. On the one hand, Orlov noted that most peasants gave communal tenure a positive evaluation when asked, and he recorded several cases of communal cooperation

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in the rental or purchase of land, introduction of new crops, and improvement of livestock herds.109 Much evidence, however, pointed in the opposite direction. Despite his attempt to demonstrate the viability of the commune, Orlov’s work pointed to a commune that was disintegrating internally due to an invasion of the market, increasing socio-economic differentiation, less frequent repartitions, and other factors. His work revealed that the “communal instinct” was a myth, given that outside of the constraints imposed by communal tenure, peasants operated as individual farmers.110 Thus, for many in educated society, the household took on a greater importance than the commune. This led some Populists to exchange their faith in the peasantry for a bet on the proletariat.111 Although some retained faith that the commune, if cleansed of outside interference, could remain a just basis for rural life, the household as a category for understanding the peasant as an economic actor weakened previously held conceptions of peasant economic behaviour and replaced the commune as a unit of analysis and a target of state policy, most notably in the work of A.V. Chaianov.112 The path towards the neo-Populism of the People’s Socialist Party that emerged after 1905 began here.113 Second, zemstvo studies added fuel to the controversy over the Emancipation’s legacy in that they helped confirm that peasant allotments were insufficient. In 1878, the same year as the publication of a second edition of Ianson’s work, Tver’ zemstvo statistician V.I. Pokrovskii asserted that analysis of income and expenditures for an average peasant household revealed that such a household ran an annual deficit of nearly 109 rubles.114 When zemstvo statistician A.V. Peshekhonov analyzed the budgets of 1,313 households in Kaluga province’s Kozel’sk district in the 1890s he discovered large discrepancies between the market value of farming inputs and their actual cost to the peasant household.115 Monetizing peasant household budget items (such as production costs) according to market prices and subtracting such figures from gross income (assuming the sale of the entire harvest) inevitably left – on paper – few, if any, resources, and Peshekhonov noted that in many cases peasants received “almost no net income in the legal sense.” On this basis he argued for the use of actual peasant production costs when peasant lands were being assessed for tax purposes.116 He also lamented the role that allotments smaller than those that peasants had held as serfs played in peasant impoverishment. As he noted in 1904, “under serfdom, the pomeshchik allotted land to each new tiaglo [and] during misfortunes

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considered it necessary to come to their aid.” Did not the post-­ emancipation state have the same obligation as the serf-owner to ensure that had peasants sufficient access to land?117 The statisticians’ categories came with preconceived notions of what constituted sufficient or “normal,” and this conditioned the “scientific” nature of these critiques of the Emancipation. The work of the Kursk statistical bureau provides a typical example. Commenting on the advantages and disadvantages faced by communes of various sizes in Sudzha district, the head of the bureau, I.I. Verner, noted that although communes with a small number of households faced an easier task of distributing land allotments, the small size of the commune “did not provide the possibility from such a small land allotment to delineate a sufficient amount of land for hayfields and the pasturing of livestock.”118 Verner never offered a figure for what might constitute “sufficient,” nor did he suggest a better mix of ploughland and other types of arable, except to point out that areas with larger communes (where the average size was 114 households) held allotments where pasture and meadow comprised around one fifth of the total, whereas areas with smaller communes (an average size of forty-three households) held allotments where these additional resources comprised only about 12 percent of allotments. Breaking down the population’s land resources from another perspective, Verner noted that households holding up to two soul allotments comprised the majority of the population and could be considered land short.119 Having immersed himself in the history of landholding in the region, he noted that the unspoken “sufficient” allotment with adequate access to ploughland and other arable was that held prior to 1861. The bureau’s indirect critique of the Emancipation emerged from Verner’s analysis in other ways as well, all of which pointed to insufficiency but without specifically indicating what figure would constitute “enough.” “Horseless” and “horse short” households were defined from the perspective that more horses– at least the average figure for the district – were essential for peasant well-being (although Chaianov would later demonstrate that such was not always the case).120 While it was plausible to assume that households with one adult male worker or none (especially if there were none) might indeed be “labour short,” and that such shortages were “one of the causes influencing the decline of peasant well-being,” the fact that 57 percent of the population fell into this category would seem to indicate that this was a normal state of affairs. The real tragedy of the situation, it turned out, was that

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“an insufficient number of [workers] deprived the household of the ability to carry out an independent [i.e., farming] economy,” compelling them “to refuse their allotment,” “turn to trades,” “resort to hiring wage labourers,” or rent out their allotment – in all such cases thereby abandoning their essential peasant-ness.121 Equally troubling was the extent to which insufficient allotments, especially among the darstvenniki, raised rental prices for those in need. Peasants in the district paid 166,980 rubles to rent 9,770 desiatinas of land, a sum that, at the average cost of allotment land (redemption and other) payments in the district, would translate into 52,180 desiatinas of allotment land.122 The implication was that the Emancipation had created circumstances in which peasants could not maintain themselves in their ascribed legal-economic place as tillers of the soil. Categories from the servile past based on an idealized conception of who peasants were, what they should be doing, and what “normal” level of resources they required to do it produced “insufficient allotments.” We find a similar case in Riazan’ province, which, prompted by state requests for information, took on the task of monitoring the rural economy and assessing the Emancipation. As the chair of the Riazan’ provincial zemstvo assembly explained, the purpose of the zemstvo’s statistical bureau was to “study … the condition of the peasant economy now [1882] and in the pre-reform [pre-Emancipation] period with a view to acquainting the zemstvo with the influence of the Emancipation on changes in the peasant economy.”123 A study of several townships in Dankov and Rannenburg districts in Riazan’ province commissioned by the zemstvo to investigate growth in peasant out-migration (published in 1882) painted a portrait of peasant poverty. As reported in the zemstvo publication and to the Central Statistical Committee on the redemption payment reduction forms, payments exceeded income in many of these villages. Furthermore, of 19,000 peasant households in Rannenburg district, 7,000 had no horses and 5,000 owned only one horse. In addition, rents, water rights fees, and pasturage payments were higher than usual, while wages were lower. The study also concluded that the activities of local nobles hindered peasant economic activities.124 The poor condition of the peasantry in these areas was nothing new to Riazan’ zemstvo deputies; an 1876 study by one deputy, Prince N.S. Volkonskii, had reached similar conclusions.125 Yet publication of a volume compiled by an outsider at the zemstvo’s expense sparked outrage among those zemstvo deputies whose actions the study linked to peasant poverty.

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Many were concerned that the “distorted truth” published in the zemstvo’s statistical digest would lead to peasant disturbances (as if peasants frequently read such publications). The unspoken consensus was that, besides peasant moral failings, the insufficient emancipation nadel and nobles’ rapaciousness were the main causes of peasant poverty and the flight to wage labour. The statisticians’ most telling critique of the Emancipation, however, was more subtle. They still recorded the amount of allotment land held, but as they sought to understand how the peasant economy worked they soon realized that the land allotment increasingly did not account for the household’s entire agricultural activity. As they launched their quest to discover the universal laws governing peasant economic activity – a theory of peasant economy – they began to consider total sown area – allotment land, rented land, and purchased land – in their calculations.126 The allotment itself had become so inadequate that it could not be used exclusively as a category of analysis (if indeed, it had ever worked127). This further undermined the communal conception of the peasant economy and, for much of the public, showed that the state’s greatest moral act – the Emancipation – had failed, evoking in some quarters nostalgia for an idealized servile past where mutual obligation protected peasants from the market and natural disaster.128 The “thick journals” of the post-Emancipation decades delivered historical works and zemstvo statisticians’ “scientific” interpretations of the condition and dynamics of the peasant economy to an increasingly educated and interested public, keeping peasant land hunger and the state’s perceived failings at the centre of state and society’s view of the countryside.129 Most noteworthy in this regard were the “Internal Review” (vnutrennoe obozrenie) sections found in most editions of The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl’), and other journals, especially throughout the 1880s. Peshekhonov was a founder and editor of Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo). Besides articles on the commune, the peasantry, and other matters, the journals’ “Internal Review” sections provided regular summaries of the conclusions contained in a growing number of zemstvo statistical publications. In other words, you did not have to pore over all of the statistical publications yourself to get a sense of the “scientific” approach to understanding the peasant economy or evaluating the Emancipation. In the case of The Herald of Europe,

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most of these reviews were written by the Populist economist V.P. Vorontsov, more commonly known by his initials, “V.V.” Woven into all of these, zemstvo studies provided “scientific” evidence that the peasant economy was a distinct and viable entity in its own right. This essentially normalized peasant economic difference by demonstrating its internal logic. Zemstvo statistical research made it clear that the peasantry’s “natural economy” was not a deficient part of a single rural economy; instead it normalized that economy, presenting it as an equally viable form of rural development provided that the state met its needs for inputs and provided expert guidance.130 Normalization evoked controversy, however. Discussion began with the 1897 publication of a work commissioned by the imperial finance minister, S.Iu. Witte, and compiled by Chuprov and his colleague, professor A.S. Posnikov.131 The Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Several Aspects of the Russian National Economy was the first systematic attempt to investigate the impact of rural Russia’s integration into the world market.132 The researchers’ conclusions – summarized by Chuprov and Posnikov in the introduction – contradicted most expectations. Rather than confirming popular (and official) views that the fall in world grain prices (which settled on the Russian Empire in the mid-1880s)133 had been devastating for peasant and noble producers alike, the articles in the compilation argued that the vast majority of producers, peasants, and smallholders tenuously tied to the market had actually benefited from the situation. As self-­ sufficient enterprises, peasant households and smallholders benefited from larger harvests regardless of the price. Smaller harvests cast even more peasant households than usual onto the market as grain purchasers, meaning that the peasantry, as net consumers, benefited from low prices (whereas large estate owners produced surpluses for the market). Changes in grain prices without changes in harvest size had varying impacts depending on whether a given household ran a deficit or a surplus of grain in a given year. Finally, the assumption that high grain prices were good for private landholders held true only for those with more than fifty desiatinas of sown area and only really became noticeable on estates larger than 250 desiatinas.134 Peasants and those farming small to medium-sized estates had mutual affinities – an interesting observation that would come into play in the following decade. In short, as Chuprov noted in his defence of the work in the Free Economic Society, these conclusions demonstrated that “the

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opinion that our motherland has forsaken the stage of a natural economy and is beginning to enter the stage of a money economy is unfounded.”135 The policy implications of these conclusions pointed towards a strategy that would reflect the current state of Russian economic development. The natural development of a peasant- and smallholder-centred economy (cooperatives, etc.) was something to be promoted. Such a policy would also keep grain prices low (e.g., through the continued development of transportation systems). Because of these implications, Vliianie urozhaev generated heated discussion in the corridors of the Imperial Free Economic Society during March 1897. Criticism of the work centred both on the evidence it presented and on its assessments of rural Russia’s current (and future) state of economic development. Several critics questioned whether rail freight statistics were an adequate means to ascertain whether a given area exported certain types of grain (high export levels of peasant staples such as rye would indicate peasant market integration, whereas low levels would buttress the natural economy thesis). The use of such figures, Marxist M.I. Tugan-Baranovskii argued, did not reflect the heavy reliance on water transportaion and the peasants’ use of local markets. This was a valid criticism, as Chuprov admitted in noting the less than ideal state of transportation statistics in the empire. But he also countered that argument by pointing out that a large amount of the grain transported by water reached railheads and ports; it may not have been counted at its point of departure, but it was counted at its destination. Moreover, peasant use of local markets did not detract from the book’s theses, given that peasants themselves generally consumed the grain traded in these venues.136 Other critics, such as V.I. Iakovenko, questioned the reliability of the sample size for a key point of analysis, peasant household budgets, noting that 60 to 70 million peasants were represented by a sample of 293 – 126 of whom were from Voronezh province. Chuprov never addressed this criticism of F.A. Shcherbina’s essay. Had Shcherbina been there to defend himself, he would have argued that the careful selection of “typical” households compensated for the small size of the household budget sample (though he might also have conceded that Voronezh might not represent the empire as a whole). A number of critics also questioned the work’s conclusion that most households’ money needs were satisfied by wage labour rather than by the sale of grain in the fall. Chuprov asserted in rebuttal that peasants harvesting

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barely half of their annual consumption needs would be loath to part with any of their crop.137 Finally, many questioned how Chuprov’s classification of the rural economy as “natural” could possibly explain the increasing frequency with which peasants consumed items requiring money: sugar, tea, spirits, and kerosene. Looking favourably on this trend, the economist L.V. Khodskii argued that state economic policy should be such that “peasant consumption is not limited only to those things that he can gather from his field” and that such a picture of rural Russia was “inconceivable without the development of a money economy.”138 For Chuprov, such a position was not only ahistorical but “fantastic” in its assumption that Russia’s history of economic development offered little more than a well-worn path towards a market. Even if opponents could prove the development of a money economy, Chuprov questioned whether this was cause for rejoicing. “I have become accustomed to believing, believe, and will believe,” he said, “that the form of economic relations such that a man of labour possesses land and all aspects of production in general is preferable to any other.”139 Chuprov was not denying the peasantry its tea, but simply proposing that the evolution of the small producers’ natural economy, assisted by economists and other professionals, would allow peasants to have their tea by integrating them into the market rather than subjugating them to it. Especially noteworthy in this debate is that the book’s critics were sounding off as if its conclusions pertained to the peasantry alone. In doing so, they completely ignored the fact that the authors were arguing that the same conclusions could be applied to a large percentage of private landholders as well. The study was suggesting that, setting aside those who owned estates larger 200 desiatinas (only 10 percent of private landholders), the majority of noble landowners consumed much of what their estates produced and thus had more common interest with the peasantry than many would have guessed (and this was not simply because employment on noble estates satisfied peasants’ need for access to wage labour). In addition, several defenders of the book pointed out that the critics had themselves constructed a narrative of Russian difference in their attempts to show that laws governing economic development in the rest of the world also applied to Russia. As one supporter noted, low prices were beyond Russia’s control – the result of the world market. Why should Russia’s experience differ? To suggest that prices should be increasing

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was “unnatural,” given the increasing competition.140 The authors, he asserted, were simply pointing out that small producers proved better able to cope with declining prices than those whose enterprises were geared towards the market. Along similar lines, Chuprov’s former student N.A. Kablukov noted that throughout Western Europe, progressive parties were engaged in constant struggle with agrarian interests to reduce the cost of grain for the sake of cheaper food prices. Only in Russia, it seemed, was cheap grain undesirable. “Could it be,” he asked, “that in Russia there exist special [economic] laws? [A]nd that, most amazing of all, such [high] prices are defended by Russian Westernizers!”141 There was, Kablukov argued, a profound discrepancy in arguments that both pointed towards a Western model of development and contradicted its basic premise that increased competition would lower commodity prices. Therefore, rather than attempting to cut and paste Russia into a universal narrative of development, the sound alternative was to continue to study the current state of Russia’s natural economy as it operated within this world of declining prices. At the same time, the government and zemstvos should pursue policies that favoured and supported smallholders, especially peasants, by providing them access to the resources they needed to succeed, including land. Such a course was proper, given Russia’s historical development.

C o n c l u s ion Among post-emancipation educated elites, the modern disciplines of history and statistics did much to raise the profile of particular assessments of rural ills and the agrarian reforms required to address them, all in the monthly issues of popular journals and in the daily press. They presented the allotment of sufficient land as traditional state policy and as a state obligation, while also demonstrating the state’s failure at this task since 1861. From a historical perspective – even one seeking to tell the story of the peasantry itself – the state (personified in the autocrat), even at the height of serfdom in the eighteenth century, strove to maintain its role as overseer of the peasant’s access to a sufficient nadel, that is, the resources required for subsistence. From the perspective of history, this was something that the state, however many its failings, had tried to do for some time. There was precedent, and it could even be seen as a traditional state activity – enough so that one might view it as custom. Throughout this period,

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the peasant repartitional land commune acted as the partner in this endeavour for lord and state alike. Zemstvo statisticians, interested in the commune not as an instrument of social control but as a model for future economic development, used the opportunities provided by zemstvo employment to assess the commune’s efficacy and to discover the causal factors governing peasant economic activity. Employing the household inventory method, they measured the peasant economy in terms of the same input indicators that the state and serf-owners employed and came to the conclusion that the peasant economy operated according to a rationale rooted in its existence as a natural economy. Like those attempting to “see” the village from Saint Petersburg, they came to use their categories – inputs – as fixed measures of peasant well-being. The quantity of land available for peasants to work, rather than what they achieved with their labour, remained the primary means of assessing peasant economic health. In this way, the household inventory fixed conceptions of peasant economic growth and success in terms of the extensification of agriculture. The system of measurement designed to determine what peasants could pay in the serf economy (and to ensure that they did pay) became for state officials and liberal intelligentsia alike, in the post-emancipation period, a set of categories used to measure economic well-being and justice and suggested that neither could exist without “sufficient” land and inventory. Although their analysis took them beyond the nadel, the resort to “sown area” as a category acknowledged allotment insufficiency. The emphasis on inputs supported negative assessments of the Emancipation and presented the extent and consequences of land hunger in numbers for the reading public while at the same time positioning the peasant household as the primary economic actor (and hence a focus for further analysis) in the public mind. Their work portrayed peasants as individual (as opposed to communal) economic actors and pointed towards a moral economy of the household rather than the commune. At the same time, the insufficiency of household allotments, which resulted in peasants having to rent additional land at exorbitant cost, indicated that access to land remained a key moral issue. This required greater paternalistic state intervention. The statisticians highlighted the unique character of the peasant economy as one operating on different principles than that of great noble magnates with latifundia. In doing so, they normalized the peasant economy as a path towards future rural development, in effect

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suggesting that the peasantry shared similar concerns with other smallholders regardless of their social backgrounds. In many ways the empirical demythologizing of the commune and the normalization of the smallholding peasant economy kept alive the notion of insufficient allotments; it also did much to pave the way for the state’s own attempts to dismantle the commune in favour of the household in the early years of the twentieth century. Together, historians and statisticians normalized the state’s allotment of land and the peasant household economy, which was rooted in the peasant farmer who worked his land exclusively with his own labour and inventory and who consumed most of what he produced. Questions remained, however: What constituted a “normal” household within this normal rural economy? And what was its ultimate trajectory to be?

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4 “Normal” Households: Economic Development and the Middle Peasant Having suggested that a peasant or smallholder economy was the norm for the majority of the empire’s agrarian population, and that the state, by established tradition, had an obligation to ensure that peasant households within this economy had access to sufficient allotments, statistical investigations of the village fuelled two additional interrelated discussions in late imperial society. The first had to do with attempts to comprehend and explain the heterogeneity of peasant economic life by determining the characteristics of a “normal” or “typical” peasant household economy and some sort of general law of peasant economic life. The second discussion, intertwined with and growing out of the first, was a broader question about the “normal” path of rural economic development within the empire, in particular the future of the repartitional land commune and socio-economic stratification in the village despite the commune’s presumed levelling influence. Both discussions led to a deeper understanding of the peasant household economy that elevated the middle peasant as an ideal, or at least a benchmark for “normal,” and that further normalized and made viable a future agrarian economy based on the peasant smallholder. Although investigators of various political points of view diverged on some issues, with few exceptions they continued to rely on input indicators, especially land, as a key measure of peasant wellbeing. Despite disagreement about what was happening in the village, all of these tendencies landed on the middle peasant (seredniak) on moral grounds – either as the carrier of the communal spirit or as the representative of an ideal that avoided extremes of poverty and wealth and that denigrated hiring labour.

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In S e a rc h o f t h e “Normal” P e asa n t H o u sehold In conjunction with the tax assessment demands of their employment, zemstvo statisticians and their followers sought to understand the operating principles of peasant economic life. They believed that comprehension of the “universal laws” of peasant economy (its internal mechanisms) would lead to more just tax assessment and better policy at the levels of the state and the zemstvo.1 From their perspective, science, advocacy, and policy could be combined to ensure better lives for peasants and a better agrarian future for the empire. Yet this was a complicated task. Rather than an ideal pastoral portrait of communal agriculturists, statisticians found a more heterogeneous peasantry than they had anticipated. Having expected to find homogeneous hamlets of pastoral fraternity, equality, and new (albeit incomplete) liberty, they found instead contention, filth, and apparent class division. There was no single “peasant economy” or “peasant household” but rather “types” of both. For these nascent social scientists, the Russian peasantry truly was an “awkward class.”2 Investigators found that instead of occupying themselves exclusively with farming, peasants were engaged in a host of other activities of a distinctly non-agricultural nature (as they had been even under serfdom).3 Worst of all, many were finding their way to shop floors and the corrupting influences of urban life, a mobility that alarmed both officials and partisans of the peasantry and that added urgency to the discussion of rural crisis and insufficient land allotments. Local landowners both in and outside the zemstvos, officials, and educated society (out of genuine concern and/or self-interest) viewed peasant labour migration as not necessarily a result of rational peasant economic choice, but as a result of insufficient allotments and other shortages. For statisticians the fundamental analytical problem was the heterogeneity of the subject matter and the great variation among peasant households between regions and even within regions; along with methodology, that problem dominated the agendas of fin de siècle statistical conferences.4 How were they to analyze a household economy that was simultaneously independent farmer and independent craftsman, wage labourer and tradesman? These boundaries were rarely clear when applied to peasant households. Zemstvo statisticians faced a problem that often arose when quantitative techniques were applied to the social sciences: the diversity

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of the subject matter – which was human beings – made it difficult to combine observations into a meaningful general explanation. As one scholar noted, nineteenth-century attempts to overcome this obstacle “by brute force, with massive data bases” largely ended in frustration.5 This was no less true in Russia, where the accumulated facts of a quarter century of zemstvo statistical studies had created as many problems as they solved when it came to formulating a general understanding of the peasant economy. The homogeneity of astronomy – the regularity of the heavens – that Quetelet believed also existed in human society did not seem to exist in rural Russia. In fact, the more zemstvo statisticians learned about the peasant economy, the more complex it appeared. Furthermore, if statistical information was to guide policy, there needed to be some sort of benchmark, a sense of what a “normal” peasant household was so that it would be possible to ascertain more clearly who needed assistance. Here again, the interests of Russian statisticians were in line with global trends. The advent of statistics beyond those collected by state chanceries, and the social sciences that developed under the influence of Quetelet and the International Statistical Congress, encouraged public and institutional curiosity about what was “normal” and “typical.” The point of defining “normal” was to reveal deviancy so that it could be targeted for state action in a variety of settings, most particularly those connected to emerging bourgeois concerns about crime and other forms of social deviance, as well as medicine. As historian Michelle Perrot noted in reference to Quetelet’s work: “That the ‘science of man’ began as a ‘science of crime’ testifies simultaneously to the urban mutations and social psychologies that valorized property, order and sexual continence.” That work was “born of the fascination with crime, a disorder in the rational society of production.”6 As Dostoevsky illustrated in Crime and Punishment, Russians shared similar concerns about normalcy and deviance and their statistical expression.7 But while Russia, too, entertained a fascination with urban deviancy, educated society’s quest to determine what was “normal” also focused on the village.8 Elites believed that policies should be designed to facilitate access to land allotments sufficient to ensure that peasants would live out their “normal” lives as inherently agricultural creatures, thereby avoiding exposure to the inherent deviancy of urban life. This essentialist view of the peasant as a tiller of the soil had its origins in Catherine’s Legislative Commission and the debate on shifting

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peasants from barshchina (corvèe) to obrok (quitrent) and was bolstered by Slavophile and Populist writers throughout much of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century it was firmly rooted in the world view of the emperor, many of his ministers, and much of educated society. The “normal” Russian peasant earned his living farming his allotment with only his own labour and that of his family.9 “Normal” and “sufficient” (measured in terms of inputs) were synonymous. Statistical best practices reinforced this rustic iconography and gave it numerical legitimacy. Statisticians in the nineteenth century approached issues like “normal” from two different perspectives. The most obvious involved equating “average” with “normal.” This perspective was the hallmark of nineteenth-century social statistics as bequeathed by Quetelet. Zemstvo statisticians were skeptical about many aspects of Quetelet’s thought, preferring the work of his German critics (see the previous chapter); that said, properly constructed averages remained for them helpful and necessary points of comparison. Quetelet’s use of averages as measures emerged from the disciplines of astronomy and geodesy in the eighteenth century. For those seeking to measure the earth’s circumference or the distance between heavenly bodies, averages were convenient means to eliminate error or the effects of varying conditions and measurers on the final product. In other words, they turned a heterogeneous collection of measures into a single (and hence homogeneous) figure. Averages were thus measures in which error had been eliminated within a given probability. That is why when Quetelet applied these concepts to human measurements, the “average man” stood out as an ideal and the ends of the curve remained as error. Averages, then, were an ideal standard of comparison, even if one could not expect to be introduced to the “average man” at a cocktail party. They were by definition “norms” or an indication of a normal state of affairs.10 But for averages to have value, they needed to be derived from like measurements of like phenomena – a social equivalent of the same observer making the same measure between the same heavenly bodies with the same instruments. Zemstvo statisticians and others denounced the averages published by the Central Statistical Committee and other central institutions because they failed to do this. For example, critics noted that when ascertaining the average rye harvest for a province, the resultant state figure blended the rye harvested on noble land with that harvested on peasant land (and lands of varying quality recorded

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by various reporters/enumerators at that). Zemstvo statisticians viewed such averages as inherently faulty, the equivalent of averaging the size of apples and oranges. For averages to be useful, they had to combine like items. This paved the way for statisticians to incorporate a second approach to statistical study available in the nineteenth century – a “thick” approach based on the study of “typical households” or “types of households” pioneered by the mining engineer turned sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882) in his comparative study of European households (including some in Russia, where he travelled as the head of an expedition commissioned by A.N. Demidov in 1837­–38).11 Le Play believed that numbers alone failed to reveal the complexities of human nature. For this reason, a statistician needed to be more of a naturalist than an astronomer. He thus rejected Quetelet’s study of averages in favour of the study of types. Where Quetelet used averages as representative of national norms (e.g., the average chest size of Scottish soldiers), Le Play selected instead a typical family for the locale (typesetters in Brussels or nomads in the Urals). Based on the assumption that the family was the basic unit of every society (which resonated with the zemstvo statisticians’ focus on the dvor), Le Play collected detailed household budget data on families identified as “typical” by local officials. F.A. Shcherbina (1849–1936) pioneered this work in the Russian Empire, first as the head of the Voronezh zemstvo statistical bureau and later in other studies, most notably as part of a state expedition to Turkestan that established land norms for the indigenous population so as to ascertain how much land might be used for resettling Russian peasants.12 Restrictions on zemstvo statistical work beginning in the 1880s (the interior ministry viewed statisticians’ contact with peasants as dangerous, and the finance ministry viewed their methods as too slow and expensive), as well as statisticians’ enthusiasm for thick description, pushed many zemstvo statistical studies in this direction, especially as it seemed to provide methodological cover for the need to use sampling (a practice not normalized in statistics until well into the twentieth century).13 Initially, investigators (beginning with early literary accounts) were shocked to find “types” of household economies in the village at all; they had expected to encounter a homogeneous communal peasantry rooted to the land and imbued with indigenous socialist impulses. Types were the first of what may be described as anomalies that rural investigators encountered – the first challenge to the Populists’

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conception of the peasant and his commune. As Wortman admirably summarized in The Crisis of Russian Populism, the first generation of rural investigators who went to see for themselves were immediately struck by the socio-economic differentiation they found in villages that they had expected would be imbued with the spirit of native Russian socialism. In many ways, then, type studies were an intellectual response to this unexpected encounter with what many concluded were “classes” in peasant society.14 Statisticians engaged in type studies took their cue from what Frierson termed “iconographic” images of the peasantry created by the literary figures who, as noted in the previous chapter, had inspired them to search for scientific explanations of the peasant economy – including socio-economic divisions – in the village itself.15 Their representations came to serve as guides to data organization. As N.N. Zlatovratskii wrote in the journal Notes of the Fatherland, the peasant village could be divided into “rich” peasants, “middle” peasants, and “communal proletarians.” To the category of rich peasants, Zlatovratskii assigned the kulak (literally, “fist” – the wealthy village exploiter) and the craftsman and/or tradesman, as well as private landowners living within the commune.16 He listed the sick, the horseless, and other economically disadvantaged peasants under the rubric of the “communal proletariat.” These were the anomalies. The “middle peasants” were, of course, the ones that Zlatovratskii and others had expected to find when they went to the village. These were the “rooted communal” peasants who made their living working their allotments and possibly some rented land.17 Contempt for the rich, pity for the poor, and admiration for the middle – the preservers of the communal ideal – persisted in varying degrees among Russians of all political persuasions until collectivization made all peasants communal proletarians.

C at e g o r iz in g by Type The statistical study of “types” involved categorizing households into Zlatovratskii’s and others’ groupings or “classes” according to a variety of input indicators. This left much room for the observer’s a priori assumptions to insert themselves into the process. Ultimately, it also allowed statisticians to combine both averaging and the selection of the typical in the process of creating groups and categories for analysis, as they and economists simply classified households by type according to quantities of given input indicators, using averages

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to find the normal around which to array other groups. This method provided a cross-section of peasant society (thus providing a recipe for a “normal” household); it also served as a convenient way of answering the difficult question of how to factor peasant off-farm economic activities into analyses of the household economy. The normal household was one that had so many horses, so many workers, tilled so many desiatinas of land, and relied nearly exclusively on agriculture for sustenance. When statisticians and other researchers encountered heterogeneity in peasant society – social differentiation, and peasants employed in non-peasant pursuits – averaging these deviations away into an ideal “average peasant household” (srednii krest’ianskii dvor) stood as a ready means of coping with unexpected variety. The average or “middle” peasant, who was employed primarily in agriculture on his own allotment with an average number of horses and other livestock, emerged as “normal.” With such tools in hand, rural investigators began a thorough study of peasant household “types”: poor, middle, rich, and gradations in between. In this scheme, the average or “middle” was an ideal and the other ends of the curve represented deviations from the norm. Initially, the norm might be defined a priori. As we shall see below, the statistical data expressed the middle numerically as a quantity or an average, but the preconceived definition of a normal peasant household persisted throughout the numbers. Non-agricultural pursuits – crafts, trades, and wage labour – were singled out as abnormal. Statisticians soon found that, especially in non–black soil areas, this was far from true, but the sense that households engaged in non-agricultural pursuits were different from the norm continued to exasperate analysts until these households were analyzed as separate types or folded into Chaianov’s theory of peasant economy.18 The question of types naturally lent itself to statistical study. Given the existence of rich, middle, and poor peasant households, statisticians only needed to label the points on the curve with actual numbers. The nagging issue, of course, was how best to characterize human beings and their institutions – in this case, peasants and their economy. Researchers fell back on the standard economic indicators offered by the economic paradigm of the day: some combination of input indicators. Three works – two by members of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society and one by a Poltava agronomist – illustrate both this and the idealization of the middle. A study of Samara province by Geographic Society member E.N. Anuchin categorized households according to the number of horses

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owned, believing that on the steppe, available horsepower had a direct relationship to the area sown and was thus the best indicator of peasant well-being.19 He categorized households with one horse or none as “poor,” those with two or three horses as “satisfactory,” those with four or five horses as “average,” those with six to ten horses as “good,” and those with eleven or more horses as “rich.”20 At first glance, Anuchin was simply presenting a distribution of horse ownership among Russian peasants in the province. However, his report to the Geographic Society (reprinted in the government’s newspaper, The Government Herald) indicated a deeper concern with the ends of the curve. He took great pains to point out the disparity between rich and poor. Within the distribution, the average was something more than a calculation. As he stated, “for working the land with a plow, it is possible to consider as normal and average a household that has four or five horses. Such a household also occupies a middle place between rich and poor in terms of the value of its property.”21 Anuchin’s “normal” and “average” household was not a statistical abstraction, but a “type” based on local agricultural conditions. These average peasant households had faces – they were the ones with four or five horses. P.P. Semenov, long-time head of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society and founding head of the Central Statistical Committee, took a more sophisticated approach when studying Muraevenskaia township (Riazan’ province) as part of a joint Geographic Society and Free Economic Society study of the peasant commune. Semenov divided households into six categories (rich, well-off, sufficient, insufficient, poor, and propertyless) based on a crude study of income levels. Semenov’s use of income levels rather than input numbers made his study unique. Indeed, had statisticians continued to develop analysis in terms of income rather than inputs, the statistical portrait of the agrarian economy would have appeared quite different. Yet this was a path not taken. Semenov’s conclusions and other categorical details fell into line with the assumptions about peasants employed in other studies. “Rich” households (1,000 to 2,000 rubles/ per year in gross income) rented or purchased significant amounts of additional land, worked that land with hired labour in addition to their own, and were heavily involved in crafts and trades (about 7 percent of all households). “Well-off” households grossed 500 to 900 rubles per year and operated by the same means though to a lesser extent (about 16 percent of all households). “Sufficient” households grossed 300 to

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500 rubles per year, rented land as needed, worked off the farm a little, and sometimes relied on hired horses for draft (about 37 percent of all households). “Insufficient” households grossed 150 to 300 rubles per year. They usually had only one worker, and if more than one existed, those other workers worked off-farm. Generally, these households hired both horses and implements; if they had a horse, they generally lacked a cow (just under 24 percent of all households). “Poor” households grossed 50 to 150 rubles per year. For these households, arrears usually necessitated renting out their nadel and engaging in wage labour (about 13 percent of all households). Finally, “propertyless” households grossed less than 50 ruble per year, had no net income, and thus lived in a permanent state of debt (about 3 percent of all households).22 Thus households with “sufficient” income fell roughly into the middle and corresponded well with the image of the peasant as a man of the land. As a final example, the Poltava agronomist I.A. Bazilevich arrived at five admittedly arbitrary categories based on the following indicators, which focused on the traditional value placed on available household labour in assessments of household viability: number of workers in relation to non-workers in the family; capital, defined by number of buildings and livestock; method of earning income; and amount of land and type of land use. Based on these criteria, Bazilevich posited five types of households. On the bottom rung were the destitute households, the “bezkhoziainye” (economy-less). Households so close to the edge of subsistence that a simple twist of fate would plummet them into the first group sat on the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Next came the “middle” – those households with a sufficient number of working family members in relation to nonworkers, as well as access to sufficient capital and land. Bazilevich referred to this group as “the economic strength of the village.” Households categorized as “above average” and “rich” occupied the top positions in his description.23 A number of points about these early categorizations of households into types need emphasis here. First, note how freely investigators divided households according to criteria that were reasonably or traditionally considered good indicators of wealth – number of livestock, income earned, and “sufficient quantities” of land, labour, and capital. The input numbers themselves indicated the household’s level of well-being, and this diverse group of statistical investigators made no effort to evaluate the relative importance of any of the factors for

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indicating wealth. They were interested not in cause but in effect. Allowing these numbers to stand alone persisted as a key element in the analyses of statisticians and polemicists (such as Lenin), who were particularly concerned with types and the development of the rural economy. Finally, note the idealization of the middle, both explicitly in Bazilevich’s work (the middle as the “economic strength of the village”) and implicitly in Semenov’s study. Semenov’s definition of the “sufficient” household contained many of the same components as the idealized middle articulated by Zlatovratskii and others. It was self-sufficient and predominately agricultural. This was what was normal. Zemstvo statisticians used the data they collected to posit a rural Russian version of Quetelet’s “average man” – the “average peasant household,” which could serve as an objective representation of the normal peasant household. Thus, in his attempt at a “thick” description of a single parish in Moscow’s Serpukhov district, I.P. Bogolepov singled out the household of Ivan Chuliukan for deeper budget analysis because it represented “the normal peasant household in Serpukhov district.”24 Chernigov statisticians constructed their “average peasant household” based on a household inventory of the village of Kashovka. This “average” household was a true average in the Queteletian sense, that is, an acknowledged abstraction. Taking this average as “normal,” they then used it as a measure for defining “poor” and “rich” households, reflecting a growing preoccupation with what appeared to be class divisions within the peasant community.25 They then defined the economic position of other households in relation to this norm. V.I. Pokrovskii’s study of Tver’ province also began its discussion of peasant household types by setting up the “average peasant household” as a point of comparison. The figures for Tver’ province in the late 1870s indicated that this average household consisted of six persons farming an average of 11.6 desiatinas of allotment land and 2.26 desiatinas of other private land with one and one third horses. Pokrovskii lamented that these averages had declined since the Emancipation. Decline in family size and number of draft animals meant that average peasants were being forced more and more to farm with hired draft animals and could not release workers for off-farm labour during summer without withdrawing from agriculture. The numerical average had a connotation of the minimum required to keep peasants primarily employed in their traditional agricultural pursuits – an ideal. As households sank below

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the average, necessity required them to rent their allotments and shift from agriculture to wage labour.26 Pokrovskii feared that the declining numerical average depicted a threat to the agricultural nature of the peasantry as a whole. The “average peasant household” could serve as a standard for determining what was “normal” and “abnormal” in peasant society. The assumption was spreading that peasant agriculture was in the midst of a crisis, and observers offered various explanations for it. Here, the heterogeneity of the village seemed symptomatic. What did the existence of types mean? How, if at all, might state and zemstvo respond to what ailed the peasant economic organism – that is, to the sources of abnormality or deviation from the norm? Statisticians and other students of the peasant economy offered competing explanations for the existence of heterogeneity. But the heterogeneity that many ascribed to error was perfectly normal for others. This is what, outside of ideology, lay at the heart of the debate over the development of capitalism in rural Russia. Was economic differentiation in the village part of normal economic development, an indicator that the Russian empire was travelling the same trajectory as states in the West? Or was it a deviation caused by outside interference in the functioning of the land commune that prevented the triumph of the moral middle peasant?

D e f in in g a “ N o r m a l” Cours e of Rural E c o n o m ic D e v elopment A growing debate over the course of rural economic development – that is, over the extent to which the empire was following or destined to follow what many viewed as the “normal” developmental trajectory of “the West” – connected the question of defining a “normal” household economy to the broader question of the empire’s rural economic future. The ensuing debate between so-called Populists and Marxists – what Walicki labelled “the controversy over capitalism” – made the question of what was average or typical even more pressing, especially in cases where authors harnessed the statisticians’ research as evidence.27 For many so-called Populists, faith in the commune and in rural Russian economic exceptionalism, a unique path to a just society, persisted to some degree. Using the numerical “average peasant family” as a means to objectify their rural economic ideal of an exclusively agricultural household with an allotment

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sufficient to guarantee that it was neither exploited nor exploiter, Populists located the discrepancy between the ideal and the real, and the main impediment to economic prosperity through the land commune, in the disturbance of the natural harmony of the communal organism by outside forces.28 “Abnormal” households and social differentiation within the commune (deviations from the peasantry they had expected to encounter) were viewed as the result of the deleterious influence of the state and the market, which together impoverished some and enriched others. For Marxists like Lenin, however, the appearance of these classes (the ends of the curve) indicated normal economic development in the village – that is, the development of capitalism. Between Lenin and the diehard supporters of the commune, others were more equivocal. Several studies at the time exemplified the “outside interference” thesis, highlighting the importance of the middle peasant and blaming state policy for the commune’s decline and the growth of the kulak class. In the works of V.I. Pokrovskii and V.I. Orlov, government interference manifested itself in the “insufficient allotment,” particularly in their finding that taxes and redemption payments exceeded communal allotment land income. Pokrovskii, as we noted, arrived at this conclusion in Tver’ after analyzing budgets compiled for the “average peasant household.” In terms of provincial taxes, payments exceeded income for each desiatina of peasant land by an average of forty-five kopeks.29 This figure might not sound excessive, but Pokrovskii’s use of “average” peasant budgets personalized his presentation. These budgets indicated that, for the peasant economy, such a deficit was significant, as poor agricultural conditions already necessitated the purchase of more grain than the household produced.30 Furthermore, on an individual level, the total payment burden attached to an “average” peasant household exceeded the household’s annual gross income by more than twenty-five rubles. Payments to state, zemstvo, and commune accounted for nearly half the total household deficit of fifty-seven rubles.31 This, Pokrovskii argued, accounted for peasants’ willingness to abandon their communal allotment in favour of renting or purchasing other land. It also accounted for the high number of Tver’ peasants seeking urban employment. Pokrovskii concluded with a plea that payments be brought into line with income.32 The peasant economy was in trouble. Orlov arrived at a similar conclusion through an analysis of communal mechanisms, particularly the frequency of land repartitions.

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Critics of communal peasant agriculture pointed to frequent repartitions as one of the most glaring inefficiencies of this type of land tenure. They argued that peasants with only temporary possession of their communal allotments were loath to practise good stewardship or to invest in improvements. Orlov, however, demonstrated that in the majority of cases, major or fundamental (radical) repartitions (korenye peredeli) occurred infrequently, averaging only one major repartition every 12.5 years.33 This was the “norm” for peasant communes in Moscow province. Where payments attached to allotment land significantly exceeded income from that land, however, major repartitions occurred “abnormally,” that is, more frequently than once every 12.5 years. The fact that he could demonstrate a correlation between good economic health and infrequent repartitions bolstered his case.34 Repartitions were not a product of any inherent form of peasant socialism, as Orlov found that outside of certain constraints imposed by communal tenure, peasants mainly operated as individual farmers. Periodic repartitions were, rather, an economic necessity brought on by outside interference in the form of excessive redemption and other payments.35 Repartition was a communal defence mechanism. Other critiques were more forceful. Viktor Prugavin (1858–1896) graduated from the Petrovskii Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Moscow and was thus well-acquainted with the circle surrounding Professor Chuprov. He was the brother of A.S. Prugavin, an expert on the Old Believers and other religious sects who had befriended Tolstoy in Samara during the latter’s sojourns there. Viktor Prugavin based his treatise on his own work as a zemstvo statistician in Vladimir and Ekaterinoslav provinces and on other studies. His book, The Russian Land Commune in the Works of Its Local Researchers, reflected the changed circumstances of the debate on the viability of the commune as an agricultural institution and was one of the clearest and most forceful articulations of the “government interference” explanation for peasant differentiation. Prior to zemstvo statistical studies, partisans had argued over the commune’s viability in historical and philosophical terms. Those who viewed communal land tenure as inefficient and as unlikely to lead to improvements in agricultural production found comfort in jurist Boris Chicherin’s portrayal of the commune as an artificial entity that had been created by the state for fiscal purposes. Supporters of the commune such as I.D. Beliaev viewed it as a native Russian institution that had lost its

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vitality as a result of state interference in the form of the institution of serfdom. Prugavin’s work aimed at an empirical explanation of government interference, exploring in numbers the consequences of state policy.36 Prugavin began by assuming that opponents of the commune simply were ignorant of how it worked. Thus, he and other analysts took their cue from the format of Orlov’s work and devoted much of their time to explaining various aspects of communal life, particularly the circumstances involving the periodic redistribution of ploughland. When outside forces disrupted this system, he argued, the commune could no longer regulate itself in such a way as to prevent landlessness and ensure general prosperity. The end of serfdom had greatly disrupted the communal system. Contrary to what might have been expected, however, the government’s greatest sin in this regard was not necessarily shortchanging peasants in the division of gentry lands; rather, it was including provisions in the emancipation statutes that meddled with the commune’s internal regulatory mechanisms. Critics of the commune often based their case on such bulwarks of classical economics as the superiority of private (as opposed to communal) forms of land tenure. Prugavin made the case that the commune was an owner of private property that, if freed from government interference, could and would utilize its property in a productive manner. The commune was a “purely egotistical enterprise,” the result of the individual strivings for survival of each of its members.37 This concept of the commune as a collection of its component individuals was a long way from earlier idealizations of the “inherent collectivist spirit” of the Russian peasant. In Prugavin’s view, the essence of the commune was not “communal assistance” (mirskaia pomoshch’), but the “radical partition” (korennyi peredel) – the basic redistribution of communal land that, as Orlov noted, was the primary mechanism guaranteeing self-preservation for all members.38 The “communal spirit,” then, was a social contract for individual self-preservation. Under normal conditions (i.e., if allowed to operate unhindered), the commune guaranteed each household a subsistence niche. Inequality within the commune reflected a disruption of these conditions. Prugavin argued that two provisions in the emancipation legislation inhibited this process. One was article 54 of the General Statute, which required that repartitions take place only with the consent of two-thirds of the commune’s members. This meant that a minority following its own egotistical interests could easily block any attempt

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to redistribute land to reflect changes in family size. Those with a large number of allotments, especially in black-soil areas where agriculture was rewarding, would naturally try to keep them. Citing evidence from research in Voronezh and other areas, Prugavin argued that this was a principal reason for the lack of repartitions since 1861. Peasants who voted in favour of their own selfish interests were not condemned for it, but Prugavin did note that this legal hindrance to the usual process of repartition was fostering the development of a kulak class and increasing poverty among households stuck with insufficient allotments.39 In other words, government interference had elongated the ends of the curve (error) at the expense of the middle (ideal or average). The process of communal repartition was also disrupted by the redemption process. According to the statute, peasants redeemed their parcels of land as individuals even though they were communally responsible for redemption payments. This naturally made them hesitant to assent to repartitions from which they might emerge with less land than they were redeeming. Historians have noted that peasants took the redemption process and its property implications seriously.40 Again, the problem was worse in black-soil areas, where there was a greater likelihood that income would exceed the tax burden.41 Prugavin argued that article 165 of the General Statute exacerbated this situation by providing for a peasant’s early redemption of his parcel. According to zemstvo statistical evidence, peasants who had taken advantage of this situation often attempted to remove their land from the commune’s jurisdiction, thus decreasing the amount of land available to sustain the commune as a whole. By supporting the interests of the few over the many, the law was contributing to a further deterioration of rural economic conditions.42 Prugavin concluded by recommending a series of measures aimed at “deregulating” communal agriculture, including abolishing articles 54 and 165, easing restrictions on internal migration from areas short on land, reducing taxes, and providing support for the development of peasant manufacturing. Foreshadowing the Soviet future, Russia’s economy was to be “an organization of national production on the principles of collectivism, at the base of which lies the demands of the people and state, not the interests of the market.” The nationalization of all land would resolve problems associated with the redemption process. Proceeds from renting nationalized land to the commune would be used to further the interests of the state and its citizens.43

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Few shared Prugavin’s vision of nationalized land, but many – including those not especially friendly to communal agriculture – supported his short-term policy recommendations. The landed nobility and its supporters often criticized the state for interfering too much in the rural economy in some cases and too little in others. Although a staunch critic of communal agriculture and a defender of the peasant’s right to leave the commune, the conservative aristocratic publicist K.F. Golovin conceded there was a need for greater internal migration and regular repartitions on the basis of his reading of similar zemstvo statistical evidence. Golovin grudgingly acknowledged the increasingly influential role played by statistical studies in economic debates, cautioning his readers to beware of the double-edged nature of statistical data. More importantly, although he often disagreed with the statisticians he cited in his book, those differences were mostly of degree. He tended to accept the numerical evidence itself as fact, ascribing errors to omission rather than to a mistaken view of the situation. Like those who supported the commune, Golovin treated Orlov’s work as an oracle.44 Populist economist V.P. Vorontsov (1847–1918), the notorious “V.V.” of many articles in popular serials, authored the other major treatise in the government interference vein that was rooted in statistical research. He advocated for the commune as an institution of rural development. Vorontsov had trained as a doctor and had served as one for the Belozerskii district zemstvo (Novgorod province) after completing his degree. His work on the commune, published in 1892 in the midst of a terrible famine throughout the empire, was part of a compendium that included a foreword by Professor Chuprov and an introductory article surveying zemstvo research by A.F. Fortunatov (1856–1925).45 He offered conclusions based on the entire corpus of zemstvo studies up until that time, particularly the work of the “Moscow type.”46 He believed that the commune was capable of improving its husbandry and serving as an institutional path to Russia’s economic success.47 Capitalism, he believed, would never survive in Russia because Russian industry lacked sufficient market access to develop to the extent it had in the West. The study, like Vorontsov himself, became the whipping boy for critics of Populist economics such as Lenin and Peter Struve.48 Besides discussing the adverse effects of government interference in communal repartitions, he argued that the “middle peasant” (again for egotistical reasons) stood as the embodiment of the national agrarian ideal.

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Citing I.A. Verner’s zemstvo research in Kursk province, Vorontsov noted that all peasants naturally attempted to increase their landholdings. But it was not peasants with insufficient allotments – the land hungry (malozemel’nye) – who drove the process of repartitioning communal lands. Rather, it was the middle peasant, who saw the advantages of repartition and ensured that it took place. “The association of peasants with average landholdings with the supporters of equality [poor peasants],” he noted, compels one to propose that in this they see nothing more plausible than the expropriation of the rich in favor of the poor. For the transfer [of land] to the commune means not only the equalization of land in the present, in which the given group [average households] does not participate, but the idea of the commune, linked in its image with the idea of a form of life, of a form of relations distinguished from those which characterize individual tenure.49 In other words, even though the middle peasant stood to gain little from repartition, his belief in the communal ideal led him to support repartition as a guarantee of future security. The middle peasant or the peasant holding the average amount of land thus stood as a bastion of the fundamental communal act: the repartition. As such, he was the embodiment of the commune itself, its moral compass. Vorontsov attempted to bolster this description of the repartition ethic with data gleaned from Shcherbina’s study of thirty-three villages in Voronezh province’s Ostrogorzhsk district. Of the 6,590 households eligible to vote for repartition, 4,924 (74.7 percent) voted to repartition communal lands, and 1,666 (25.3 percent) voted against repartition. Thus, votes in favour of repartition exceeded the required two-thirds majority by nearly 8 percent. Of those households that voted for repartition, 3,562 (72.3 percent) ended up with more land, 1,134 (23.0 percent) with less, and 228 (4.7 percent) with the same amount of land as before the repartition. Of those households that voted against repartition, 95 (5.7 percent) found themselves with more land afterwards, 1,554 (93.3 percent) lost land, and 17 (1.0 percent) experienced no change. Looking at the totals, 3,657 (55.5 percent) of households received more land, 2,688 (40.8 percent) lost land, and 245 (3.7 percent) were left to till the same amount of land.50 One could spend hours looking for ethics in this beyond the fact that

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those who voted for repartition generally got more land and those who voted against it received less. For Vorontsov, however, ethical motives were easy to find if you looked in small places, such as in the fact that of the 245 households that experienced no change in their landholdings, 228 (93.1 percent) had voted for repartition. This was a sign of the “ethical motives” and “non-material interests” of communal life.51 Who were these selfless creatures? Those in the middle, of course – those who already tilled land in exact proportion to their needs, peasants who had sufficient allotments – neither too much land nor too little. Once again, government regulation of communal life interfered with this ethic. The Emancipation had an especially strong impact on the development of “regressive tendencies” among the peasantry. Vorontsov noted that such things as the emancipation statute’s allotment of land by individuals (so many desiatinas per adult male) encouraged base instincts among some peasants. Article 165 also bore a large share of the blame for peasants seeking to leave the commune, as did the law on the “mutual responsibility” of all commune members for the debts of the commune as a whole (krugovaia poruka). Peasants who did not receive a large enough allotment to make their payments often refused their land. This left other commune members stuck with the bill, and many of them saw exit from the commune as a way to avoid this extra burden. Thus, like Prugavin, Vorontsov pointed to state regulation as the leading cause of problems with the communal structure.52 If left to its own devices, the commune would regulate itself to ensure the prosperity of its members and eliminate social cleavages, thanks to the high-mindedness of the middle peasant. From the Marxist perspective, the middle or average peasant was anything but normal, let alone some sort of an ethical ideal. Zemstvo studies cured many Russians of any hope for the commune, driving some towards Marx and the proletariat. The impact of those studies on the founder of the first Marxist political movement in Russia, Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), was profound.53 As with Populist economics and the debate over capitalism, this story has been told well by Walicki, Kingston-Mann, and others, so the main interest here is in connecting Marxist works to the study of types and to notions of what constituted a normal peasant economy and economic trajectory, as well as the role zemstvo numbers played in the discussion.54 Marxists, too, made extensive use of zemstvo research to describe the assault of outside forces like the market on the village economy.

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Individuals such as Professor Isaak A. Gurvich (1860–1924) and V.I. Lenin (1870–1924) viewed the economic disparities that Vorontsov and others saw as the result of government interference as the natural course of Russia’s historical advance towards capitalism. From their perspective, the average or middle was not normal, but a transitory state. Normalcy consisted in the continued development of classes. The various types of peasants that rural researchers encountered in the village – rich, middle, poor, agricultural, non-agricultural – demonstrated rural class differentiation. The existence of different types (classes) of peasants, the rise of land rental and wage labour, and the growth of rural handicraft industries indicated that Russia’s rural economy was operating according to the universal capitalist economic development model of the West. Gurvich wrote his treatise as a PhD dissertation in political science at Columbia College in New York. In it he made extensive use of Shcherbina’s Voronezh data.55 Based on those data, he divided households on the basis of off-farm labour and arrived at three classes. The first class corresponded to the Populist ideal of the purely agricultural household and thus consisted of households that hired out for wages only rarely, in order to make up deficits. This class deviated from the Populists’ configuration, however, in that it possessed greater-than-average economic resources.56 The second class consisted of those households that could not sustain themselves without performing off-farm labour. This was the “transitional class” – a class grounded neither exclusively on agriculture nor exclusively on wage labour, but split between them. This also corresponded to the statistical centre, for these households possessed an average number of horses and an average amount of land.57 Finally, the third class consisted of landless and horseless households that survived solely on the basis of wage labour. These were Russia’s rural proletariat.58 We can note three things from Gurvich’s work. First, from the Marxist perspective, the middle or average was not a normal state but a transitional one. The ends of the curve were expected to keep pushing themselves out. This idea was firmly rooted in Marxist thinking about the peasantry and the economy in general. Second, off-farm labour was being portrayed as something unnatural – as something done only out of necessity. Finally, notwithstanding the Marxist analytical scheme, Gurvich was among the first to see a connection between economic position and family size in the data he used (more about this later).59

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Lenin’s use of zemstvo statistical data in The Development of Capitalism in Russia is perhaps the best-known example of the intellectual impact of the huge mass of numbers that had been collected in the last half of the nineteenth century. Like Marx, he based his case on the assumptions of classical economics, gleaning evidence for his argument in relation to the village from the pages of zemstvo statistical publications. Using sown area and number of livestock per household as indicators (grouping in the same quantitative terms used to manage serfdom and taking quantity as indicative of class), Lenin argued that the rural bourgeoisie already comprised 20 percent of the countryside’s population and that a rural proletariat already existed, comprising 50 percent of the peasant population. The remaining 30 percent were the “middle peasant.” This differentiation was a result of the increasing trade/money character of the economy, the increased production of grain for the market on rented lands, and the increased use of hired labour to farm those lands (production beyond the labour capacity of the household).60 Lenin had no sympathy for the communal view of the peasantry and its idealized middle, believing that the “decay of the patriarchal peasantry,” and hence the development of capitalism, was already well under way in Russia. Class differentiation – the pushing out of the ends of the curve – was the norm. Lenin’s conclusions are less significant for this discussion than the way he used zemstvo statistical data to reach them. Two things are important here. First, even though Lenin went so far as to agree with Vorontsov on the importance of cross-tabulation tables and other forms of statistical analysis as it existed in the nineteenth century, his analysis made little use of the notion of correlation or the relative weights of causal factors. Like many of his Populist nemeses, he took a “just the facts” approach to the data. To the extent that these relationships received any attention, it was in the act of pointing out that “rich peasants” controlled a proportion of available ploughland in excess of their percentage of the population. Defining “rich” in terms of number of horses – the means of production available to the farmer – Lenin proceeded to note that households in this category were responsible for a disproportionate amount of hiring and land rental, owned a disproportionate amount of the total land purchased, and had a disproportionate share of modern implements.61 A second important feature of Lenin’s use of zemstvo statistical data was that he derided the Populists’ use of averages. From his perspective, the Populists’ equating of average and normal obscured

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what was really normal – the ends of the curve, or classes. Lenin believed that Populist statisticians were using average figures to mask rural differentiation. Remarks on the statisticians’ “fictitious averages” constituted his chief criticism of zemstvo work. According to Lenin, the most glaring abuse of averages resulted from the statisticians’ preoccupation with using allotment land as an indicator; he noted that this ignored “a fundamental feature of Russian life, namely the unfree character of allotment-land tenure.” The “egalitarian character” of nadel land hindered access to it. The story of peasant land rental and purchases, which Lenin tied to differentiation, was thus “one of real life evasion of these [legal] bounds.” Any definition of the peasant household in terms of allotment land ignored this important process and gave a false impression of the countryside. “In classifying the peasants according to allotment,” he noted, we lump together the poor peasant who leases out land and the rich peasant who rents or buys land; the poor peasant who abandons the land and the rich peasant who “gathers” land; the poor peasant who runs the most wretched farm with an insignificant number of animals and the rich peasant who owns many animals, fertilizes his soil, introduces improvements, etc., etc. In other words, we lump together the rural proletarian and the members of the rural bourgeoisie. The averages thus obtained obscure the differentiation, and are therefore purely fictitious.62 The fictitious nature of these averages, he argued, emerged from an examination of the calculation process. For example, the average sown area for Kamyshinskii district (Saratov province) was 2.9 desiatinas per household. Saratov statisticians arrived at this average by combining data on households sowing eighteen desiatinas with five or more horses (one eighth of the total households, but possessing nearly half the total sown area for the district) with data on “the poor, the horseless peasants with 0.2 desiatinas per household” – that is, by combining data on large crop growers with data on the poor. In this way, Lenin argued, averages obscured differentiation by making the poor seem better off and the rich seem less powerful.63 Lenin correctly accused Populists of idealizing the middle or average. Discussing the subject of land rental, he noted that Vorontsov attributed to it very little meaning, mainly because it had a negligible impact on the average peasant household.64 Vorontsov argued that, even

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though most peasant households rented, the rented parcels were small (generally true). Furthermore, as those with less land rented the most, the effects of land rental did little to disturb the average figures on land farmed.65 Lenin argued that although the average amount of rented land stood at twelve desiatinas, this average figure hid the very real difference between the peasant household that rented two desiatinas at an exorbitant price “out of dire need” and the household that could afford to purchase several times that amount at a lower price. The average amount of land rented obscured the fact that the majority of the renting was done by the extreme ends of the curve, and that of those two ends, the better-off one rented the most. Quoting V.E. Postnikov, Lenin argued (fairly) that Populist statisticians sought to downplay the role of rental because they regarded it as an illegitimate aspect of peasant economic existence. Average figures facilitated this.66 Averages also obscured other peasant pursuits deemed “unnatural” by the Populists, such as crafts and trades. Echoing other commentators, Lenin noted the fundamental problem with the use of the category “crafts and trades,” namely, that it often became a catch-all for a wide variety of occupations, from unskilled day labour to owning a flour mill. Lenin, of course, advocated detailed individual studies of all these occupations, at least in the sense of separating wage earners from employers. He attributed the persistence of this “barbarous misuse of words” to the “survival of the traditional – and we have every right even to say: official – view” that the “’allotment’ was the ‘real,’ ‘natural’ occupation of the muzhik.” All other occupations were thus classified “indiscriminately to ‘outside’ industries,” as outside the parameters of normal peasant behaviour. “Under serfdom,” he noted, this practice had a certain purpose. But now, “such terminology is retained partly because it harmonizes wonderfully with the fiction about an ‘average’ peasantry, and rules right out the possibility of studying the differentiation of the peasantry.”67 For Lenin, this average peasant was fictional, besides being of little interest. “Middle” peasants clustered around this average were merely transitional figures in a story about the ends of the curve – the rich and the poor. The kulak, the miroed (commune-eater), the usurer, and the bedniak (poor peasant) were not alien outside forces, different from “enterprising” muzhiks, but a new reality.68 This was normal. Others who looked at the question of rural economic development were, not surprisingly, more equivocal than Lenin about the development of capitalism. The Marxist turned liberal economist Peter Struve

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(1870–1944), for example, began his analysis by challenging the standard materialist interpretation of the Emancipation that held that serfdom was in decline. Given his discovery that serfdom on the eve of the Emancipation was still very profitable for many lords, Struve believed that, because the Emancipation was not the result of a crisis in the Marxist sense, what was happening in the village was less about the decay of the commune into classes and more about the material unravelling of the serf system after the state had brought an artificial end to its legal existence.69 Struve’s contemporary, the economist turned theologian Sergei N. Bulgakov (1871–1944), disagreed with Struve on many philosophical topics but reached a parallel conclusion in his doctoral dissertation, “Capitalism and Agriculture.” Originally planned as a comparative work of Marxist analysis of agriculture in the global economy, Bulgakov’s treatise, influenced by his religious epiphany, ultimately concluded that Marxist theory was inapplicable to agriculture, where the predicted concentration of capital and production did not take place.70 Perhaps most significantly, Bulgakov (who was a student of Chuprov) reinforced for educated society, in his own philosophical terms, the idea of the household as a labour economy that provided a metaphor for the national economy as a whole (making use of the double meaning of the Russian word khoziaistvo as both economy and household).71 In addition, his Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (1912) challenged the linear view of economic progress and the universalizing tendencies of the social sciences as inherited from Quetelet, Comte, Marx, and others. The economy of the household existed outside of institutions, residing exclusively within the soul of the individual economic actor and his organization of production.72 In this, Bulgakov and Struve were unique in their definition of the national economy (narodnoe khoziaistvo) as a “popular economy” (picking up on the dual meaning of narodnoe), a non-state entity to be stewarded but not administered by the state.73

C o m b in at io n T a ble Analysi s Ultimately, however, getting at what the statisticians wanted to know – the inner mechanisms of the peasant’s economic life – so as to develop a more nuanced portrait of the “normal” household, necessitated analytical groupings in so-called combination tables (kombinatsionnye tabitsy – cross-tabulation tables). This sort of analysis

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acknowledged rural stratification and entrenched input measures as indicators of peasant household well-being (while also trying, occasionally, to overcome them). Despite arguments to the contrary, these analytical works continued to entrench the categorization of households into types based on the level to which they were occupied in agriculture. They also shared a common conception of the middle peasant – the normal farmer. The inventor of combination table analysis of the peasant economy (and a contemporary inventor of what Francis Galton termed correlation and, ultimately ANOVA), Chernigov statistician A. Shlikevich (1849–1909), dealt specifically with household economies that he considered purely agricultural. For him, trade and manufacturing were issues to be studied separately. To the extent that trade and manufacturing entered into the agricultural picture, he believed they were already subsumed under other categories related to the total household labour force and total labour force engaged in its own economy.74 The numbers collected and presented according to type influenced and were influenced by competing Marxist and Populist type definitions. Combination table groupings were made on the basis of qualitative types of household economies, such as “purely agricultural,” “wage labour,” and “using hired labour.” Cause and effect became intertwined as Marxists and non-Marxists alike pressed the use of class groupings in combination table analyses. Pure types seldom existed. In Penza province, Vladimir G. Groman (1874–1932), a Marxist statistician and future Menshevik member of the Soviet State Planning Committee (GOSPLAN), believed that he had developed a methodological way around this difficulty.75 In a report to the Statistical Section of the XI Congress of Russian Naturalists and Doctors in 1901–2, Groman made a case for grouping peasant households by class defined in terms of occupation.76 This resulted in a number of composite types based on the class characteristics of the household, the types of household economic activity, and the size of production. Grouping households according to these characteristics yielded three general classes – capitalists, independent producers, and wage labourers. The groupings were then fine-tuned by dividing households in each category into fifteen groups which in turn could be sorted into seven more precise class groupings: capitalists; capitalists who hired themselves out; independent producers; independent producers who hired themselves out; independent producers who hired themselves out and relied on wages for the bulk of their sustenance; wage labourers; and wage labourers with

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insignificant independent means of support. He derived the final groupings for analysis by subdividing each class into three groups according to their class character – those that hired labour, the selfsufficient, and those that sold their labour. Internally, these groups were divided by type of activity (crafts and agriculture). In this manner, qualitative “types” formed the basis of household groupings for combination tables instead of single indicators.77 In essence, Groman came up with a Marxist rendition of the same scheme used by Populists. The semantic differences reflected opposing evaluations of Russian rural capitalism. Groman replaced the Populists’ alien kulak with the progressive (although still exploitative) capitalist farmer. The poor peasant became the wage labourer – a victim still, but one whose plight could not be changed by attempts to halt progress. Most significantly, Groman’s middle stratum – the independent producer – maintained the same characteristics as the Populists’ “average peasant” ideal: a farmer who could survive almost solely by farming his own land with his own labour and that of his family. Once again, the statistical middle peasant corresponded closely to the ideal. Like the Menshevik Groman, Populist statistician G.I. Baskin (1866–1940) attempted to analyze the peasant economy from the standpoint of class.78 As a norm of comparison, Baskin selected the “labor economy” household, that is, the household that survived almost exclusively on the basis of agriculture. All other households in his distribution of sixteen types were deviations from this norm. Hired labour emerged as the villain in this analytical drama, as Baskin noted that it created the most social differentiation. His 1926 analysis of this data, published at the beginning of the “differentiation debate” that preceded collectivization, added evidence that suggested a certain “regression” towards the norm, that is, a decrease in the number of households at the extreme ends of the spectrum and a corresponding increase in the number of households in the middle group (not necessarily what many Soviet officials wanted to hear).79 Baskin used this information to argue for enhanced government support of the middle peasant.80 As another statistician pointed out, however, neither Baskin’s nor Groman’s work, despite their detailed attempts to categorize household types, was able to determine the extent of exploitation behind this stratification.81 V.E. Postnikov’s (1844–1908) work on the peasantry of Russia’s southern provinces offers a third example of grouping by types or classes as a way to cope with the analytical problem of the peasantry’s

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multitudinous methods of economic survival.82 Postnikov was another graduate of the Petrovskii Academy in Moscow. His research flowed from his subsequent employment in the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains. Based on the nature of peasant households’ economic activities, Postnikov divided his study group into four household types: the purely agricultural (households that derived their income exclusively from raising grain); households that mixed agriculture with animal husbandry; households that mixed agriculture with trade; and households that subsisted on trade alone (i.e., those in which agricultural income was only supplementary). Postnikov, however, was not willing to end his analysis at this point. He insisted that only the use of input indicators beyond types would permit a full understanding of the household’s condition. Distinctions needed to be made between ploughing households and those still using the wooden scratch plough. There also needed to be some comparison of indicators reflective of a household’s ability to support itself, such as sown area in comparison to household labour force and number of draft animals per person. This would allow an additional grouping of households by their level of economic independence – from those with their own tools and an adequate number of workers and draft animals (tiagovye) to those with little or nothing (beztiaglye).83 Despite the pull of indicators that reflected income, the pull of such input indicators remained strong. So, however strong the historical and contemporary focus on types of peasant households – from the first encounters with rural differentiation in the 1860s and 1870s to the Marxist–Populist debates of the 1890s and after – statisticians and others seeking an understanding of the peasant household economy remained locked in a feedback loop of categories that continued to rest on a definition of the normal peasant household as an agricultural enterprise, even though defining households as “agricultural,” “partly agricultural,” or “non-­agricultural” created as many problems as it solved, as researchers attempting to categorize households by this scheme were compelled to decide what percentage of income from crafts and trades placed a household in one category or another. When Tula statistician A.I. Khriashcheva (1868–1934) attempted to group peasant households into craft-based and agricultural households, she failed. In fact, she noted that although the use of these qualitative indicators was desirable, it often created groupings that were artificial in character.84 This issue arose at the Free Economic Society’s statistical congress

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of 1900, but the political overtones of the discussion (given the rising debate over the development of capitalism) prevented the congress from reaching a conclusion.85 Even Populist researchers like Postnikov who were willing to criticize their peers for viewing the peasantry as overly homogeneous were unwilling to attribute the differences strictly to the assumption behind the use of classes – the development of capitalism.86 Dividing households into types had not made managing and analyzing the heterogeneity of peasant life – or determining a “normal” benchmark – any easier or less controversial. Anomalies added further irritation to this persistent problem of heterogeneity. It became even more apparent that peasants did not behave economically in a way that could be predicted by political economy. Shlikevich noted that, contrary to his expectations, peasant capital inputs decreased with the increase in sown area. Postnikov noted the same phenomenon in his study of southern Russia several years later. As mentioned in the last chapter, this and other anomalies stengthened Peshekhonov’s and others’ assertions that the peasant farm was different from the capitalist farm. Lenin attempted to explain this as a indication of the stability of larger farms, which could take advantage of economies of scale; this contention, however, was not readily embraced within the research community.87 The Marxist economist V.A. Kosinskii went so far as to declare that in the peasant economy there was “neither a question of rent nor profit,” a conclusion with which commune supporters such as A.I. Chuprov and N.A. Kablukov agreed.88

H o u s e h o l d L if e C ycle as Normal In the midst of all of this, tragedy, time, and replication offered yet another alternative answer to questions about the “normal” household and the “normal” course of economic development. The great famine of 1891–92 drew public and scholarly attention to the question of peasant household consumption.89 This interest in consumption focused research attention on the family. Tax research provided statisticians with time series data – that is, a statistical portrait of households in a given locale over time. This enabled them to ask questions about the “dynamics” of the peasant economy ­– not just how it was differentiated, but the source of that differentiation beyond access to land and employment outside of agriculture. These works, particularly that of of the Socialist Revolutionary statistician N.N. Chernenkov,

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cast doubt on the Populist and Marxist interpretations of rural economic change and lifted family size to a prominent place in discussions about the nature of the peasant economy and what constituted “normal” in that economy. Concern about family size had been a feature of the state’s earlier populationist policies as well as a key component of serf estate management. On the basis of the estate steward’s input measures, statisticians and other students of the peasant economy realized that family size had something to do with peasant prosperity. Prince A.I. Vasil’chikov refined this idea to consider the relation between the number of workers and non-workers in the family.90 Researchers had never ignored family size, but other concerns – particularly the sufficiency of land allotments – had pushed it into the background. Early analyses, like Shlikevich’s, however, indicated that the number of adult male workers in the household (a figure closely associated in zemstvo statistical circles with family size) was of secondary importance. Lenin attached little meaning to family size, noting that even though large families tended to be better off (i.e., have more access to land through the commune), they still employed hired labour to work their larger plots of allotment, purchased, and rented land.91 Yet the increased use of budget studies not only drove research towards the consideration of types but also pushed attention towards family size, the ratio of workers to non-workers, and consumption. With the appearance of N.N. Chernenkov’s 1900–02 work, Towards a Characterization of the Peasant Economy, in the pages of the well-known zemstvo publication The Saratov Zemstvo Week (Saratovskaia Zemskaia Nedelia), the issue of family size emerged from the background of research. Chernenkov’s study provides the best discussion of the origins of the increasing interest in family size and the importance of time series data in illuminating the role of family size as a determining factor in the peasant economy. More importantly, his study redefined the “normal” peasant family, suggesting a dynamic alternative to the standard view of large extended peasant families and of the dichotomy of rich and poor. Chernenkov deplored the fact that, after nearly three decades of zemstvo statistical research, statisticians and economists had yet to develop a general theory or characterization of the peasant economy on its own terms (i.e., other than in the terms of political economy). In addition, zemstvo materials provided a static portrait of the peasant economy, allowing researchers to discuss its nature only at isolated

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points in time.92 Three false assumptions about the state of the peasant economy (both before and after the Emancipation) had prevented a real understanding of the internal dynamics of the peasant household. One was the idea that the large, complex family comprised of parents, sons, and their sons’ wives and progeny was a normal or natural state of peasant existence and that the post-emancipation peasantry had been destroying itself as a result of frequent family divisions. This was essentially the view of former serf-owners as well as the government, which in 1886 had passed a law aimed at regulating family divisions.93 The second erroneous assumption, Chernenkov noted, was the idea that the peasant economy had declined in the postemancipation years – the empire’s perceived rural “crisis.” Family divisions were assigned some of the blame for this supposed decline. Most often, however, this assumption of decline rested on statisticians’ numbers that revealed a decline in draft animals and major livestock – as well as an increase in payment and tax arrears – since the Emancipation. This faulty assumption was the source of the government’s and zemstvos’ greatest fear and the Populists’ greatest proof that the communal organism had been disrupted by meddlesome state policies, as well as evidence of the insufficiency of emancipation allotments. The final erroneous assumption, Chernenkov believed, was the idea that the decline of some households went hand in hand with the enrichment of others. For just as collected data indicated an increasing number of “horseless” or poor households, it also indicated that the number of rich households had increased at the same time. This assumption – the notion that the countryside was involved in a zero sum game that manifested itself as a two-sided process of stratification (razsloenie) – guided Marxist interpretations. Chernenkov’s work aimed to demonstrate that both these assumptions only explained the outward manifestations of a complex internal process centred on the family. He began by dealing with the issue of frequent family divisions. The conventional wisdom among serf-owners was that the large extended family was an essential component in the maintenance of peasant (and hence personal) prosperity. Because a large family fielded more adult male workers, there were more hands to do field work or to sell their labour for money. This provided insurance against demographic and other disasters. Also, given peasant participation in a communal land tenure system that allotted land based on the number of adult male workers or married couples, large families meant access

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to more land. From this point of view, the apparent steady decline in family size since 1861 had played a large role in the economic decline of the countryside. Chernenkov argued, however, that although large families made economic sense to outsiders, the large extended family had never really existed. It was the product of faulty data on family size (i.e., inherent problems with the 10th Revision of 1857) and a faulty understanding of the peasant household. The revision had erroneously recorded fewer and larger families, a mistake that was compounded over the years as new enumerations by local authorities magnified the error.94 Family size had indeed decreased since the Emancipation, but that decrease was less significant than believed. Other evidence supported Chernenkov’s skepticism that large extended families were widespread before the Emancipation. Referencing work by a specialist on peasant common law, E. Iakushkin, Chernenkov noted an increase in peasant family divisions dating back to the 1840s and 1850s, a trend that Iakushkin connected to the declining power of the head of household. In addition, Chernenkov noted that some of the increase in family divisions after 1861 could be attributed to the fact that prior to that time, there was barely any growth in the serf population, so there was little internal population pressure to divide land. A significant increase in population growth after 1861 did exert such pressure, making family divisions a general characteristic of the peasant household. External factors such as the corvée (barshchina) system also contributed to a false picture of the peasant family, as serf-owners employing it tended to limit strictly family divisions. In areas where the quitrent (obrok) system predominated, there were fewer large families.95 On top of all of this, tentative comparative work in Chernigov, Saratov, and Voronezh gave cause to question the prevailing view that large peasant families were disintegrating; this suggested that family divisions were fewer than believed, their effects less dramatic, and average family size relatively stable over time.96 Comparative data for the preceding decade (the 1890s) suggested that family composition was static and that there had been a slight increase in family size and number of workers per family.97 How then did the prevailing comparison of the large preemancipation family and the diminishing post-emancipation family come to dominate discussions of the peasant family? How did the large peasant family become “normal?” Chernenkov suggested that the incorrect view was the result of an erroneous conception of the peasant family. According to him, families

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could be divided into two sorts: the “normal type of family of the average peasant” (the “simple” family consisting of one married couple), and the “complex” family consisting of a set of parents and a married son. As defined in these terms, the “complex” family was similar in structure to the “simple” family. However, the large extended family – the “truly complex family” consisting of two or more married sons and parents – differed from the “simple” family substantially. In fact, the complex family differed from the simple “family” not only in terms of size but also by type. It was not really a family at all, but “a special sort of complex cooperative unit, comprised not of individuals, but of several simple families.”98 Viewing these large, extended “complex families” as a single unit presented an artificial view of the peasant family because each of these families consisted of several units capable of independent existence. In reality, the complex family was not a very efficient economic enterprise, for “even while maintaining part of the benefit arising from cooperation,” it became “a barrier to the full development and application of all of its productive forces.”99 Contrary to prevailing opinion, the complex family was not natural or normal at all. Family divisions were not destabilizing; indeed, they were necessary in order to restore the natural balance inherent in the structure of the “normal,” “simple” family. Thus Chernenkov concluded that family and workforce sizes tended to remain stable over time and that family divisions were in fact an indicator that the natural balance of the “simple” peasant family was being restored. It followed that, if family size and labour force size were fairly constant, then each family had an internal dynamic that carried it through various phases – periods of development and decline. The peasant family and its economy thus needed to be studied as a dynamic entity – as a unit whose composition and functioning changed over time. There was no linear “decline” resulting in the “stratification” (razsloenie) of the peasantry; instead, the normal course of a household’s life changed over time. Chernenkov asserted that “decline or stratification” of the village resulted from a static view of the peasant household, which was itself the product of statisticians’ and other researchers’ attempts to study and explain the various “types” of peasant economies. Such research had not “led to any full and proven illumination of the given problem [the heterogeneous nature of peasant society]”; it provided only a snapshot that revealed nothing of the “inner totality” of peasant economic life.100 Populists who ascribed differentiation to “alien” forces, focusing on peasant impoverishment,

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and Marxists who saw the development of capitalist classes in the impoverishment of some peasants and the enrichment of others, assumed the process from the effects. They viewed a “given static position” as an “illustration and proof of the existence of defined changes of a dynamic character.”101 Either for political reasons or because examining these problems was part of their job, statisticians had helped buttress this erroneous view by treating the peasantry as a homogenous whole within the commune and by focusing on decline. The very terms statisticians used to typify households – “allotmentless,” “horseless,” “cowless,” “livestockless,” and so on –­ perpetuated the notion of decline while at the same time supporting ideas about differentiation and concepts of economic development borrowed from the West. Instead of viewing decline and the rise of kulaks as exceptions, researchers began to merge these two items into a single process. The growing popularity of Marxism in the 1890s transformed this seemingly related dual process of decline and rise into class differentiation and capitalism’s advance.102 Thus, variation in peasant society – all of the types – might not be part of a linear process. Indeed, it was entirely possible that “the variation of the peasantry as a whole does not represent any sort of new phenomenon, but might exist in approximately the same sizes as in a previous time.” Variation “might not be greater, but smaller in comparison with a previous time about which we have only the most extremely troubling representation.” Peasant households that appeared to be wealthy were not necessarily exploiters; they might instead be “a residue of the stratification of more numerous and strong [households] in the previous time.”103 Given that family size tended to be stable over time, was it not entirely possible that researchers had been blind to a similar stability of peasant household types? As troubling as such implications might be for those with a more teleological view of the empire’s rural development, increasing concern among rural experts about the “evolution” or “dynamics” of peasant society, rather than the development of capitalism or rural decline, added a new arena for state and zemstvo professionals to intervene in the peasant economy. The focus on household dynamics also heightened the important role assigned to the household and the organization of its economic life as an entity existing within, and independent of, the commune, reinforcing earlier work that offered similar conclusions and that validated a future agrarian economy based on the smallholder. The “normal” peasant household came to be seen as more complex;

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and as it became more understandable, it also came to be seen as a more viable economic unit.

C o n c l u s i on At the end of the nineteenth century, the course of Russia’s rural economic future – especially the future of the commune – remained an object of debate among rural experts, who continued to wrestle with how best to categorize, interpret, and understand a peasant household economy that displayed vast heterogeneity and that resisted giving up any of its general operating principles ­– be it on the basis of carefully constructed averages, or on the basis of types founded largely on input indicators. In their attempts to explain the existence of social stratification and reliance on wage labour or crafts where they did not expect to find these things, statisticians and commentators turned to varying conceptions of “normal.” The issue of normalcy stood at the centre of the debate between Populists and Marxists over Russia’s economic future. Populist partisans of peasant agriculture defined normal in terms of the “average peasant household.” This was a convenient way for them to dismiss variation – social stratification or the intrusion of the market – as error. From this perspective, the middle peasant stood as an ideal, both in the sense of a Queteletian average and in the sense of corresponding to preconceived notions of the sufficient peasant household. Deviations from this norm were the result of government interference with the commune’s self-­ regulating mechanisms. From a Marxist perspective, normality consisted in the growing numbers of rich and poor households or class stratification – an expansion of the ends of the curve. It followed that the average was not normal, but merely a transitory state. Time series data heightened interest in consumption and family size. Dynamic studies supported a new “transitory middle” as normal, offering a non-linear, cyclical perspective. Chernenkov’s middle peasant household (the simple family household), although transitory, validated the average household as normal. Even if it did not, as Vorontsov argued, impute an internal moral compass, the transitory middle still reinforced the idea that there was an important balance to be maintained between available family labour and other inputs – an organization of household production, as Chaianov and his colleagues would call it. Except for the Marxists among them, most rural experts believed that the future of the rural economy resided in the average peasant

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smallholder working the land with a harmonious blend of inputs, either communally or individually. Even analyses such as Groman’s gravitated in this direction. Out of the intellectual melee, the middle peasant (seredniak) emerged as the experts’ ideal. Labour or consumption norms, or simply support for the “average household,” appeared as a means of encouraging and maintaining the middle peasant in the interest of national prosperity. Emphasis – now scientifically determined – on a distinct peasant type of economy that could be understood by experts reinforced traditional notions of the peasantry as a population primed for state development.

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5 Stolypin’s Wager on the Middle: Land Norms and “Sufficiency”

As educated society struggled to understand and benchmark a “normal” peasant economy, state policy inched towards defining and creating a “new normal” for the village and its relations with the state. For a new generation of officials that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – technocrats who owed their positions as much to their training and experience as to patronage – creating a new normal in the village entailed a recognition that the state’s partnership with the repartitional land commune, solidified during the emancipation process, had lost its efficacy. The commune, even when paired with increasing levels of bureaucratic opeka, failed to guarantee sufficiency or political stability.1 Massive crop failure and famine in 1891-92 brought home the budget strains inherent in the existing system. Persistent peasant uprisings from 1902 to 1906 indicated that the commune was an incubator more of violence than of political stability. By 1902 the government, with the emperor’s blessing, had initiated discussions to end support for communal tenure. Revolution in 1905 and its attendant rural disturbances confirmed for many officials the validity of the new course. The so-called Stolypin reforms launched in 1906 (confirmed by the State Duma and State Council in 1910) were the result of these discussions.2 Although aware of the risks that removing the communal “safety net” entailed, Stolypin had faith that weakening the commune would release the productive capabilities of “the able, work-loving peasant, the salt of the Russian earth.” This seemed to signal a new governmental approach to agrarian reform.3 Stolypin referred to the reforms as a “wager on the strong,” a bet by the state that consolidated parcels of land held as personal property (as opposed to intermingled strips in open fields

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held in temporary communal tenure) would release the best characteristics of the Russian peasant. The assumptions behind this were many, but the main one was a belief that unshackling peasants of good character from the bonds of the commune and placing them on consolidated parcels of land they owned would generate rural prosperity and strong conservative support for the institutions of property and autocracy. Converting land allotments to individual property and eliminating the influence of the commune would “solve” the agrarian question by making intensive (or at least more efficient) cultivation possible, thereby providing more produce with existing quantities of land. Perhaps no other topic connected to the peasantry has drawn as much attention from historians as the Stolypin reforms. Historians tend to agree that the reforms, in their shift away from the commune, represented a sharp break from the established approach to agrarian reform in favour of property. Of course, this was how contemporaries (critics and administrative champions alike) perceived and portrayed them. Despite evidence to the contrary, there is also some consensus that a “wager on the strong” meant a bet on peasant households already in good economic shape.4 Yet the reforms, despite their embrasure of individual over communal tenure, were still very much in line with the existing trajectory of agrarian reform based on the sufficient nadel. The overall vision for the rural economy remained one in which peasants had sufficient means as determined by the application of norms. The ultimate goal of opeka and the commune remained, even if opeka became agronomic assistance and the commune became the state’s sale of consolidated parcels of ploughland as individual property according to a norm. When opportunity arose, officials sought to realize a vision of the rural economy in which everything was “just right” – a rural economy of smallholders farming with their own labour and not exploiting one another, whether such smallholders were peasants or others. Stolypin’s reforms were, in fact, a wager on the seredniak (the middle or average peasant) farming a normed parcel of land exclusively with family labour and inventory, be it as an individual household or member of a co-op, or a commune. Stolypin’s “strong” peasant was the sufficient middle peasant, and his willingness to participate in the reform process was the only measure of his character. When possible, the state sought to create these middle peasants out of the very landless or land-hungry (i.e., economically weak) households that exemplified the rural crisis. Land

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norms helped realize this new normal, this new version of sufficiency. Thus, despite their apparent radical departure from the past, the reforms represented continuity. Traditional concerns about sufficient allotments as determined by norms shaped the “wager on the strong” into a gamble on the economy of the seredniak. The middle or average peasant became as much of an ideal for reforming officials as he was for Populists like Vorontsov. The State Peasant Land Bank, in many ways the state’s biggest investment in reform, provides our window into this process.

Re vo l u t io n a n d t h e A grari an Questi on: T owa r d s t h e N o rmed Mi ddle In the years immediately preceding the 1905 Revolution, both officials and educated society approached agrarian reform from the perspective of norms. The line between official positions and those percolating up from the peasantry’s advocates in society became blurred in some ways. People like A.A. Kaufman and N.N. Kutler entered the period in government but soon found themselves on the outside. Zemstvo statisticians and other experts providing needed local information and services to realize the reform found themselves on the inside. The push to reshape rural Russia began in 1902 with a Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture, chaired by the finance minister, Sergei Witte. Rural disturbances had increased the demands for state action; so had the steady commentary in the press, numerous white papers, and the new electoral politics that arose in the aftermath of the October Manifesto in 1905. Between 1905 and 1907, tensions between the traditional reform approach of increasing inputs (i.e., allotting more land) and the need to try something else complicated the process. Although they agreed on much, state and society did not draw entirely the same conclusions from the special conference’s materials beyond a need for state action. The intelligentsia’s chief complaint (shared by many officials and other elites) was that current allotments were “insufficient” in terms of their ability to provide sustenance, make use of available labour power, carry out a rational economy, or even provide a standard of living better than under serfdom. This represented a breakdown in the imagined moral economy of serfdom.5 Those demanding another land allotment as a first step in agrarian reform had transformed emancipation allotment norms from their original purpose as bureaucratic and fiscal measures into measures

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of social justice. Officials were aware that even peasants were beginning to justify their demands for additional land in terms of labour or consumption norms.6 Early state projects pointed towards a commitment to enhancing sufficiency by getting additional land into peasant hands according to a norm. This was the main thrust of the early reform project that came to be associated with N.N. Kutler (but largely compiled by A.A. Rittikh and A.A. Kaufman based on work by Professor P.P. Migulin).7 This plan did not entail simply a blanket application of norms to increase peasant landholding; instead it focused on establishing “norms of compulsory alienation” for private estates. Lands on which the owner conducted “an economy at his own expense” were subject to compulsory alienation only if they exceeded the size established for private landholding in a specific location. All other lands were subject to compulsory alienation up to a certain maximum percentage, with “large” estates liable to greater forfeiture.8 Expropriated lands would then be distributed to local peasants in need according to a norm. These plans did not aim simply at reforming the peasant economy as a separate entity, but at creating norms for a single rural economy. Outside of government, the idea of using land norms to solve agrarian problems came to be well-represented in the platforms of the empire’s new political parties of the centre and left, and throughout elite circles, as evidenced by two volumes of collected articles on the agrarian question that appeared in 1905–07 but reflected earlier work.9 As Kaufman remarked in his commentary on a normed additional allotment, what could be “simpler and more natural” than the idea that “the land allotment, in our agricultural country would in the very least sustain the vital needs of the peasant household” and, if possible, facilitate the use of all its labour power?10 Many local committees and organizations, Kaufman noted, were already on record in their reports to the special conference as supporting the use of norms to allot peasants additional land; the Commission on the Centre took this a step further and attempted to calculate, based on labour norms, the land deficit for all fifty provinces of European Russia. The results indicated that allotment land absorbed only 21 percent of the peasant population’s labour (which meant that the amount of allotment land would have to be increased nearly five times to utilize all available peasant labour).11 Provincial officials and experts were well imbued with the normative spirit.

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Norms were not without problems. Critics argued that land redistribution sufficient for providing peasant households with the amount of land necessary for meeting any norm (labour or consumption) was impossible. As one expert remarked, Russian per capita landholding already exceeded that of other European states. The problem was that average per capita cereal production, less seed, export, and fodder, was several times below the European average and that even in good harvest years it did not “exceed the minimum physiological norm necessary for the sustenance of one person.” Government ministries, as they explored reform options outside of expropriating noble land, made use of these data.12 Given that Russian peasants had aboveaverage access to land and still produced below the needs of subsistence, the granting of an additional allotment alone would fail to solve the empire’s agrarian crisis. Landowners at risk of losing land voiced agreement with this position in the newly created State Duma.13 The left-leaning tendencies of the first two Dumas and their insistence on land reform that included compulsory alienation contributed to their short lives and an alteration of the electoral laws to yield a third Duma with a more conservative and aristocratic tenor after June 1907. By far the biggest problem was that the experts themselves disagreed on the basis of the norm (and hence on which households should be considered in need) and on whether enough land actually existed to grant an additional allotment according to any norm. One group, which included N.A. Kablukov and A.S. Posnikov, argued for a labour norm equivalent to the amount of land that would occupy the full labour resources of the average family in a given area.14 A.A. Manuilov and A.A. Chuprov argued for increasing all allotments to the local maximum as specified in the emancipation statutes.15 M.I. TuganBaranovskii argued for a norm equivalent to the current average size of peasant allotments in each given area.16 All of these norms stemmed from a conception of peasants as inherently (and properly) agricultural beings, taking no account of additional sources of income, and included the assertion that improving peasant husbandry required meeting peasants’ need for additional land first. Differences stemmed from the various authors’ sense not only of what was just and required for an improvement in husbandry, but also from their conceptions of what was actually possible given available resources and state support. A.I. Chuprov, based on his nearly forty years of scholarly experience with the peasant economy, offered a thoughtful commentary on each of these proposals. Chuprov blamed the current difficulties on

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serf-owners’ dilution of the emancipation legislation – in particular, they had deprived former serfs of the full complement of land resources they used and needed (i.e., access to forests, hayfields, and pastureland). This inauspicious start to the Emancipation was made even worse by the state’s total failure over the subsequent forty-five years to increase productivity, the key to any sustainable agrarian reform. For Chuprov, the state had an obligation. “Social charity, state insurance, means of public provisioning,” he noted, “all these things were various forms that manifest[ed] one and the same state concern: to ensure each person a piece of bread. In relation to the agricultural population this same concern is manifested in allotting him land in a quantity sufficient for the satisfaction of his basic needs.”17 Norms were a reasonable means to accomplish this task, especially given that the necessary intensification was not going to happen quickly and would itself require access to additional land resources for many households in order to ensure that they had a viable economy for improvement. This was a principle on which experts inside and outside of government agreed. But which norms? Given the population density in European Russia, neither the labour norm nor the maximum norm of 1861 was a viable option (as Kaufman noted). Tugan-Baranovskii’s recommendation, Chuprov concluded, was also unworkable given that disparities in population growth meant that large areas would see little or no benefit from reform.18 The point of the reform, Chuprov reminded readers, was to improve peasant households’ standard of living. For this reason, he argued that a consumption norm calculated on the basis of current conditions and husbandry was the only norm worth considering, as it best corresponded to the amount of land needed “for providing to the average family necessary sustenance, shelter and clothes, and for the satisfaction of payment obligations.”19 In addition, the consumption norm limited compulsory alienation, in spite of the desires of some peasants and politicians. Finally, an additional allotment was only a beginning; sustained improvement and long-term security required the introduction of agricultural improvements as modelled by those “average privately held estates” where the owners’ need to employ their own labour often translated into use of the latest techniques.20 Increasing peasant income required creating viable economies as a prerequisite for intensification and surrounding them with other types of economies operating on the labour principle. Many in government shared Chuprov’s views.

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Behind the scenes, advocates for the defence of noble property got the upper hand, gaining the ear of the emperor, ending Kutler’s and Witte’s ministerial careers, and severely tempering government references to additional allotments.21 As much as liberal society sought political reform and access to meaningful participation in government, the landed nobility sought protection of its interests and property in the aftermath of rural disturbances and decades of being pushed out of what it saw as its rightful place in government by a burgeoning bureaucracy.22 Yet even the strongest opponents of additional allotments and expropriation had assimilated the idea that the key to success lay in eliminating the landholding extremes of peasants living exclusively from wage labour or nobles operating estates solely with the labour of others (large-scale rentals). Intensification and the resultant guarantees of sustained well-being were best achieved by assisting peasants who farmed sufficient land with their own labour or nobles who ran medium-sized estates. Even a defender of noble agriculture and critic of “petty toilers” as a foundation for the rural economy like the deputy interior minister, V.I. Gurko, envisioned a future consisting of a single rural economy with substantially less deviation from the landholding mean. Gurko turned the labour norm on its head, arguing that it was the state’s task to provide every inhabitant with work sufficient to absorb household labour power rather than sufficient land.23 The problem with the rural economy was that the balance between types of rural enterprises facilitating the absorption of surplus labour was out of whack. Gurko argued that to fix this, the state must consider ways to encourage the development and health of the national economy as a whole. Thus, latifundia on which neglectful owners had failed to apply their knowledge and capital to absorb surplus rural labour (i.e., that rented their estates to peasants instead of developing intensive agriculture) were to be subject to alienation (i.e., sugar beet plantations and processing plants spared, but absentee Tambov landlords liable to expropriation). This would be done in the interest of promoting and sustaining an integrated rural economy of small, medium, and large farms where small peasant farms were large enough to provide sustenance and additional labour for larger neighbours and latifundia existed only to the extent that they could prove their value to the national economy by absorbing surplus labour and generating exports. The main goal was to increase the number of medium-sized enterprises of 50 to 150 desiatinas as, for all the advantages attendant

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to large estates, “in the sense of the productivity of labour in its application to the working of land, first place belongs unconditionally to medium landholders.”24 This was nearly the same range that the Chuprov and Posnikov study had included within the category of smallholders. Thus, the socialization of labour and the lessons of serf estate administration went hand in hand to justify state policies aimed at increasing the number of medium-sized farms in the name of developing a rural economy based on smallholders as defined by a normed labour principle. Gurko’s image of the ideal agrarian future, while it differed greatly from that of Vorontsov, Prugavin, and other defenders of the commune and their ideal middle peasant household, rested on a middle (broadly defined) all the same. An additional nadel of expropriated noble land became a dead issue for the government. The idea of using land norms as a tool for shaping the rural economy and its participants, however, survived. We would be remiss if we did not ask why. First, there was a broad consensus that the purpose of land reform was to guarantee sufficiency. Few envisioned a Russia without a peasantry employed primarily in agriculture. Elites were united in their concern that allotment land remain peasant land not liable to alienation outside of the peasant estate, regardless of what happened to the commune and peasant legal standing. There was also consensus that under any land tenure system, sufficient land was a prerequisite for intensification. At the same time, given that rural differentiation was destabilizing, it would be imperative in the initial stages of any reform to limit the amount of allotment land that any peasant could accumulate in any form, be it as a commune or co-op member, or as a farmer of a consolidated plot (otrub) or homestead (khutor).25 Peasants should have sufficient land but not so much that they could exploit their neighbours. There was a broad consensus that peasants and their economy still required protection from themselves and from the market and that they were objects for the state – assisted by experts at various levels – to fix, transform and develop.26 The state rather than the market would use its knowledge and resources to guide and promote the rural development that it had promised for decades and that Chuprov called on it to deliver; to that end, it would employ norms as levers to move the rural economy towards the “normal” or “average.” The main difference between the state and the political parties revolved around the issue of expropriation.27

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By early 1905 it was clear that any norming of the rural economy would be carried out within a new paradigm that reflected not only an end to support for the commune as a failed institution, but also a commitment on the emperor’s part to expand and strengthen the peasantry’s understanding and sense of private property – an understanding that some argued already existed in embryonic form.28 Thus, in the deluge of white papers and other works on the peasant question generated throughout 1905 and into 1906, norming and enhancing peasant understanding of property went hand in hand. Arguing against communal agriculture and for a path to rural development more in line with the rest of the “civilized world,” D.I. Pestrzhetskii noted that whatever benefits the commune once provided by guaranteeing a subsistence niche had disappeared. Indeed, areas in the empire without communal tenure had fared better than those with it. “Thus,” he concluded, “with the growth of the population communal tenure to all appearances ceased providing an average sufficiency, leading instead to general poverty.”29 Russia required an “intensive economy” consisting of small-scale holdings that could be cultivated by a family without resorting to hired labour.30 Furthermore, as P.P. Migulin argued, even if the commune remained, its lands must become legal property restricted to ownership by its members and “not allowing the concentration of land in individual hands higher than a defined size, not allowing the division of land beyond a known repartition[al size].”31 Only careful state management could create a stable and productive middle and guarantee that any alienation in the name of granting an additional nadel would not be guided by the plans of “naive economists” whose blanket application of norms would “simply be throwing good money after bad,” but rather would be “justified by an ‘economic principle’ [i.e., property] and a guarantee that this act [alienation]” improved “the well-being of the recipient of alienated private lands.”32 The ultimate decision rested with the emperor, who, beleaguered by a war with Japan that his forces were not winning and by a revolution that many thought threatened his dynasty, retreated to the council of close advisers, a “star chamber” centred on palace commandant D.F. Trepov. In February 1905, Trepov passed on to Nicholas II a white paper penned by A.V. Krivoshein, the director of the Resettlement Administration, who was close to Trepov. Krivoshein’s white paper was a direct response to Witte’s late 1904 “Memorandum

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on Peasant Affairs,” which supported compulsory alienation. The white paper convinced the emperor (already irritated by Witte) to shift the focus of reform away from alienation and towards private property. Witte’s Special Conference on the Needs of the Agricultural Economy was closed and replaced by a Special Conference on Strengthening Peasant Landholding chaired by I.L. Goremykin. Krivoshein’s white paper became the basis for the latter’s work.33 Compulsory alienation was out, but the quest for a normed middle remained. “Russia Is a Peasant Tsardom” Krivoshein’s white paper not only framed future discussions and policies but also demonstrated the continuities in thinking about the peasant economy that had guided reform for two centuries and justified the provision of sufficient allotments. This is evidenced by its epigraph, from Pososhkov’s Book of Poverty and Wealth: “Peasant wealth is royal wealth, and peasant poverty is state poverty.” The policies of the previous decade, the paper argued, had abandoned the empire’s core population, the Russian peasant. This required redress, for “Russia is a peasant tsardom.”34 The development of the empire’s periphery and improvement of the well-being of the centre were part of the same process. The decline of the nobility – especially the loss of so many medium-sized estates to small peasant parcels – had injured all parties involved.35 The serf-owner had strictly recognized the right of each soul to an allotment “religiously and under threat of confiscation,” and this principle had been enshrined in the Emancipation itself. The state, however, had abandoned the moral obligation it had assumed from the nobility during the emancipation process, and from this was born the agrarian question.36 It was now up to the state to fix what it had broken, to find some means to fulfill the obligations of the Emancipation Manifesto. The key was to abandon the commune, which “at its core contradicts every human being’s natural striving to completely dispose of the property that provides him the means of existence.”37 To accomplish all this, it would be necessary to reform state institutions so as to better facilitate exit from communal tenure by means of migration or land reorganization; to wield the State Peasant Land Bank as an instrument for providing peasants with the land they needed to maintain a sustainable economy; and to encourage peasants to develop a sense of private property.38 What must have been a revised version of this memo, reviewed by the

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emperor and the Council of Ministers a year later, reiterated these points and sealed the deal for Krivoshein’s career for the next decade.39 Landowners were spared the compulsory alienation of their estates, and the commune took the blame for rural poverty. Refurbished state institutions and the Peasant Land Bank would address peasant needs for additional land and land improvement on the basis of property; those same institutions would serve as means to insert the state and its experts into the village in order to mould peasant attitudes and property relations to create the sort of peasants the state wanted.40 Stolypin’s Wager on the Strong as Wager on the Middle: Norms and the Land Bank By the time Stolypin was appointed prime minister in July 1906, the main principles of reform had been set. The new approach to reform, which would bear Stolypin’s name, entailed dismantling the peasant commune by enabling peasants to become individual owners of their consolidated allotments. As Kotsonis notes, historians have tended to focus on the technical aspects of the Stolypin reforms – be it ­Pallot’s “liking for squares” or Yaney’s “capital city commands” – and in doing so have missed much in the way of deeper questions related to the peasantry’s integration into the fibre of society connected to individualism and rights.41 Technical matters connected to the reform, however, can tell us much about what sort of peasant subjects reformers sought to create and their vision of the agrarian future, for it was through the technical aspects of the reform that the state attempted to create the peasants it wanted. The chosen instruments for this project were a new Main Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture (Glavnoe Upravelenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia – G U Z iZ ), and local land settlement commissions subordinated to G U Z iZ established by decree on 4 March 1906. These institutions were to work in tandem with the State Peasant Land Bank to implement the reforms.42 As Kotsonis notes, Land Bank credit did not create for peasants the regime of individual responsibilities and rights we generally associate with access to credit and property, but the Land Bank’s activities – especially its acquisition and resale of a large portfolio of land acquired from private holders and state institutions (nearly 10 million desiatinas) – did provide a large blank slate that allowed reformers to pursue, for ideological and practical reasons, a normed vision of the

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countryside. The bank’s land portfolio constituted the government’s largest investment in the reform process. Stolypin’s famous “wager on the strong and sober” meant a “wager on the norm” or a wager on the “middle” or “average” peasant household in the context of sufficiency; in that sense the project was connected to past reform efforts more than it deviated from them. Individual homesteads, consolidated plots, co-op shares, and communal allotments remained products of the state’s priorities and norms. There was continuity here, a new sort of “sufficiency” (hopefully) based on increased productivity, but one rooted in the past all the same.43 As in the past, the main emphasis in implementation was on safeguarding the interests of the peasant estate as a corporate whole (and, by extension, the rural stability that served the state’s own interests). The Wager on the Strong? The reforms in the aggregate were aimed at integrating the peasantry “into the general civil order” by addressing land hunger where it existed. This was a first step towards preparing peasant economies to intensify cultivation through consolidation of open field strips and improved husbandry; at the same time, it would foster in peasants a respect for, and psychological investment in, the institution of property.44 As was not the case with previous reforms, reformers wanted peasants to realize the benefits of leaving the commune, and wanted them to do so on a voluntary basis. This was perhaps the most radical aspect of the reforms. Stolypin argued that ending the commune’s privileged position would allow the “strong and sober” (by which, as Treadgold noted, he meant the strong of character, believed to be inherently conservative and monarchical) to develop, prosper, and assume a primary place in the rural economy. Yet even though they granted the right of consolidation and awarded property rights exclusively to the head of household (rather than to the household as a whole), the statutes were constrained in ways that mitigated against any radical assault on the commune and a privileging of the “strong and sober” (indeed, who was to say that the head of household was necessarily its “strong and sober” member?).45 Peasant allotment land remained a special reserve for the maintenance of the peasant estate. Stolypin made that status clear almost immediately after his reference to the strong and sober.46 Even

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consolidated communal land parcels retained their special status as allotment land, and remained inalienable from members of the peasant estate – preferably those registered to the same rural society.47 This is evidenced by Stolypin’s own words and by the fact that nothing in the decree of 9 November 1906 or in subsequent statutes defined property rights vis-à-vis allotment land according to civil property law itself.48 The final reform legislation reinforced this further by preserving the 1893 law prohibiting the alienation of allotment land to non-peasants. Peasant land became private property (chastnaia sobstvennost’ – chastnovladel’cheskaia zemlia) equivalent to that held by other sosloviia only in cases of individual peasant purchases of non-allotment, non-state land. This definition of allotment land as individual (lichnaia) rather than private (chastnaia) property (sobstvennost’) was more than a simple matter of “not giving adequate property rights” to consolidating and/or separating peasants.49 It restricted the extent to which the “strong and sober” might develop their household economies as property owners. In so doing, the Stolypin laws did little to alter those aspects of the tutelage statutes of the 1880s and 1890s that sought to ensure rural stability by maintaining peasant access to sufficient ploughland.50 Furthermore, although the Stolypin-era decrees weakened communal authority over those seeking land consolidation or separation from the commune, even consolidation and/or separation often failed to remove communal influence completely. In the majority of cases, consolidation was limited to ploughland. Because the supply of forest, pasture, and meadow was often in even shorter supply than ploughland, only a household’s relocation to a homestead (khutor) could ensure that the pieces of other types of arable (pasture, forest, hayfields) were not so small as to be functionally worthless. Under the terms of articles 29, 32, 35, and 39 of the law “On Land Organization” (“O zemleustroistve”), peasants could request consolidation of other types of arable required for subsistence but were required to consolidate and separate only parcels of ploughland in order to qualify for assistance.51 Thus, except in cases where such types of arable already existed in individual use, or where separating households relocated to a newly plotted-out khutor on purchased land, consolidators and separators retained use rights over communal forest, pasture, and meadow assets (articles 1 to 5 and 7). Put another way, consolidation and separation largely meant a curtailment of participation in communal repartitions of allotment ploughland “but not an exit from the

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commune as a land unit.” As a consequence, consolidators retained an interest in, and dependence upon, communal affairs, and the commune retained an interest in them.52 Thus, in most cases (and despite elaborate systems to prevent this), consolidation and/or separation – the hallmarks of the Stolypin reforms – still left peasant proprietors with one foot in the commune, in which they were still voting members on all matters except repartitions of ploughland. Notwithstanding the rhetoric about breaking up the commune, limited resources limited the extent to which this was possible. Furthermore, as in 1861, the final text of the law of 14 June 1910 (the legislation the Duma passed that revised the decree of 9 November 1906) took great care to safeguard the interests of those who remained in the commune by specifying a norm for the maximum amount of land that any separator could hold. As in 1861, this maximum varied by region (articles 56 and 57).53 For the Great Russian and Ukrainian provinces, the maximum amount of allotment land that any one owner of newly consolidated allotment land could hold was six times the maximum emancipation allotment for a given district and province. It would appear that the “strong and sober” could indeed become “strong” in the sense of commanding significant amounts of allotment land (even if not entirely “sober”). At the same time, however, rules governing the amount of land one could purchase and access to other types of agricultural credit through the Peasant Land Bank severely constrained how much land or credit any single peasant owner could receive based on a norm. Reforms and the State Peasant Land Bank: Land Norms and Sufficiency The Land Bank played a key role in the reforms, from their inception in the Krivoshein and other memoranda and in the reform statutes approved by the emperor and the Council of Ministers. 54 Given finance ministry stinginess with funding, the Land Bank’s investment was the state’s biggest investment in the process. The primary role assigned to the Land Bank for the realization of the Stolypin reforms allows us to see the continuity with previous reforms’ emphasis on creating some material basis for peasant sufficiency through the application of norms; it also allows us to see more clearly what the “wager on the strong” would have looked like had reformers realized their vision completely. Furthermore, unlike the newly established land

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settlement commissions, the Land Bank was already in place to facilitate the transfer of additional land to peasants and to promote the process of peasant land consolidation. Its position as a credit institution enabled it to “teach” peasants the virtues and responsibilities of property ownership.55 The Land Bank was to be a fulcrum with which the government would leverage state activism and investment to reshape the village by solving the issue of land hunger and “insufficient allotments” stemming from the Emancipation. This differed little from past thinking about the role that access to credit might play in agrarian reform – a role that dated from the bank’s origins in the Valuev Commission’s conclusions of the 1870s. According to the bank’s first chronicler, A.N. Zak, discussions related to the “theory of the insufficient allotment” popularized in the works of Ianson and Vasil’chikov played a key role in the bank’s creation in 1882–83 and motivated its activities.56 From the bank’s inception, officials were concerned that peasant allotments be brought up to 1861 levels, but not above them, and that peasants not perceive the bank’s activities as providing peasants with an additional allotment within the parameters of an extended redemption operation. In preliminary discussions about creating the bank in 1881, the State Council rejected the use of anything called a “norm” for fear that peasants would perceive the bank as a new redemption operation for awarding an additional allotment. The fact that bureaucratic and provincial commentators interpreted it as such was enough for the drafters of the bank’s original charter to steer clear of mentioning the emancipation norms as a specific goal or as a limit on bank assistance.57 Instead, they used monetary limits on borrowing – 125 rubles per individual soul and 500 rubles per household. After ten years of activity using these norms, with land hunger and defaults growing, in 1893 the state convened a commission to solicit broad input on the bank’s activities and to draft a new charter (ustav). An Imperial Manifesto of 14 November 1894, issued in conjunction with Nicholas II’s marriage, influenced the process by increasing the bank’s available capital with a percentage of each year’s redemption operation receipts so that it might purchase land outright for resale to land-hungry peasants.58 In this way, Nicholas II’s scenario of power perpetuated the idea of the state as the allotter of land. This windfall meant that the reformed charter of 1895 allowed the bank to purchase land from its own capital for resale to peasants and to make loans at a reduced interest rate and substantially reduced down payment. All of this transformed the bank

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into a powerful engine for transferring land from noble to peasant hands.59 Allocation of redemption operation funds, the finance ministry noted, also freed the bank from sole reliance on capital markets for funds, thereby reducing competition with bonds financing other state projects.60 The bank’s ability to purchase land from its own capital for resale (besides facilitating purchases by mutual agreement of the purchaser and seller, which was its main role) became a powerful tool in the Stolypin process. Those drafting the new charter needed to balance measures that increased peasant landholding with those that decreased peasant defaults. The previous monetary limits on Land Bank loans had failed on both counts. In addition, given that the Land Bank was a state credit operation, access to it could not be limited to the most needy or most well-off.61 Privileging the most needy risked default; privileging the most well-off risked facilitating the accumulation of too much land by the borrower, and thus allowing him to exploit the needy. The committee ultimately concluded that the Land Bank’s application of a labour norm was the best way to evaluate the creditworthiness of the needy so as to facilitate their acquisition of land through the bank while at the same time guaranteeing that it could not be used to facilitate speculation. For land purchases, “the greatest limit” of Land Bank assistance should be the opportunity and need for the application of only [the purchaser’s] personal labor to the land purchased. When, however, the amount of land purchased is such that it, together with the [purchaser’s] allotment land or previously purchased property, cannot be worked by the labor power of the farmer himself and his family, then such purchases should be recognized as beyond the Peasant Bank’s sphere of activity.62 In other words, the bank should not lend money for land purchases beyond what land the household could work with its own labour; this would ensure that the borrower could not borrow more than he could repay from the land he held or use it to exploit his neighbours. This norm would be similar to the one applied in 1861, but more precisely calculated and, of course, not labelled as such lest the bank’s work lead peasants to conclude that they were getting a supplemental allotment. Furthermore, application of the norm would represent good stewardship – the state’s fair distribution of a limited resource.63

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In this way the “labour norm” – more precisely, an assessment of the trudosposobnost’ or rabotosposobnost’ of the peasant and his household – served two masters. This idea persisted as the project went through ministerial review, appearing in multiple drafts until it emerged in the final revised charter as article 54. For fiduciary and moral reasons, the Land Bank’s activities were intended to foster a rural economy of smallholders; the size of individual units was to be determined in terms of the application of labour to land under existing forms of husbandry in such a way that peasant landholders would hold land sufficient to occupy their household’s labour power as much as possible and no more. Given that regional variations in agricultural conditions and forms of husbandry translated into different norms, the charter stipulated that the agriculture, interior, and finance ministries would collect data jointly to determine the size of the norms for each province. The liberal world view (N.N. Kutler was the main advocate in the discussions about the use of the labour norm) and the world of bureaucratic opeka found common ground in the labour norm, although tensions between these two conceptions of norms would persist throughout the Land Bank’s existence.64 Over the next four years the Land Bank collected data from its local branches, other organs of local administration, and the zemstvos, asking them to carry out most of the work of deriving norms for the maximum amount of ploughland per soul that could be worked by a peasant householder and his family. Respondents considered everything from recent grain prices to the number of days required for each component of the agricultural cycle for key cereals (manuring where necessary, ploughing, sowing, and harvesting), including the number of days likely to be lost due to weather and holidays and the varied labour demands for each part of the process. Much of the local information submitted came from zemstvo statistical bureaux and published studies of the rural economy.65 The Land Bank reviewed local authorities’ recommendations to derive a list of norms for each region of the empire, each province in each region, and (in most cases) each district or parts of each district. In 1900 it published the list of the maximum amount of land that peasants could acquire with Land Bank assistance, with a review mandated after three years.66 This maximum factored in allotment and previously purchased land already held by the purchaser. In the review launched in 1903–04, most local Land Bank branches reported that the norms were working well, with minor problems in

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some areas, such as Samara, where the only purchasers who approached the maximum were migrants from other parts of the empire. These purchasers tended to have more land than they could work, yet purchases by indigenous Samarans tended to be well below the norm. The Samara governor demanded smaller norms as a means to compel peasants to intensify their husbandry; so did the Aleksinsk district zemstvo (Tula province), but neither was heeded.67 When it came to “the question of whether or not the [Land] Bank should assist relatively well-off peasants in the purchase of land with the goal of creating a small-holder economy of the farmer type” by applying norms higher than those allowed under article 54, the majority of the review committee, as reported to Finance Minister Kokovtsov in 1904, confirmed that article 54’s labour norm was a sound basis for dispensing land credit, rejecting the idea that the bank should facilitate landholding beyond its presently stated limits.68 In the interest of increasing peasant access to land, and limiting the chances of borrower default, the 1895 charter also sought to ensure that purchase prices reflected the actual income-generating potential of the mortgaged property. Land prices had skyrocketed since the Emancipation, driven by steady peasant demand and willingness to pay prices beyond the land’s income-generating capacity. A review of past defaults indicated that many of these occurred when purchasers walked away from their mortgages to rent land that was better, cheaper, or more conveniently located. As such, with some reservations, the bank charter reviewers judged it important to establish norms for property values to ensure that the bank was not making loans greater than the land’s value as determined by capitalization of the income from peasant production of specified cereals.69 To that end, the bank also established land value norms and on 12 June 1896 issued a set of rules to be followed when appraising property for purchase.70 The rules demanded a high level of sophistication when it came to conducting the appraisals. The process entailed a rigorous evaluation of property values based on multiple measures, including, average local market prices, average local rents and the capitalized income value of the land under appraisal. These rules, which were approved by the finance minister, were similar to the guidelines handed down for zemstvo tax assessment in 1893.71 Given the Land Bank’s concern that peasants not default, and that borrowers not buy land for more than it was worth in terms of its ability to generate income, and knowing that peasants were already buying and renting land at

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uneconomic prices, the appraisal rules contained a healthy dose of skepticism when it came to assigning property values on the basis of comparative sale prices or capitalization of rents alone. Where possible, the conclusions obtained by one method were to be checked against conclusions based on the other method (pt. 6). In all cases, the appraiser was to calculate the average income of the land being purchased on the basis of its exploitation by peasant labour and inventory (pt. 20). In the end, the capitalized income value generally prevailed (to the great dismay of noble sellers).The nature of the tiller mattered as much as the land itself.72 Local Land Bank branches carried out these appraisals faithfully, and the Bank Council in Saint Petersburg reviewed their calculations before approving loans. In this way, for its own fiscal reasons, the state privileged peasant buyers/ borrowers over noble sellers, such that the nobility soon viewed the bank as less of a godsend and more of a parasite. This was the system in place when, in line with the Krivoshein memo and amidst the turmoil of 1905, new statutes expanded the means by which the Land Bank could serve as a lever for moving peasants towards the state’s new vision of the village. Although committed to the sanctity of private property, the main thrust of reform maintained a commitment to providing peasants with more land.73 Contrary to Macey’s limitation of this activity to the “first phase” of the reforms, such activity was ongoing.74 The Imperial Manifesto of 3 November 1905, “On improving the wellbeing and easing the condition of the peasant population,” announced the phased end of the redemption system and eliminated restrictions on the amount of land the bank could purchase with its own capital for resale or rental to land-hungry peasants.75 Under the terms of the decrees of 12 and 27 August, 1906 the Peasant Land Bank became the instrument of the emperor’s desire to increase peasant landholding in the form of private property. To that end, the bank was assigned the task of selling or renting udel and state lands released by Nicholas II and the government to alleviate land hunger. A decree of 19 September 1906 sweetened the deal and aimed to demonstrate the throne’s deep concern by turning over tracts of the emperor’s personal lands in the Altai region for resale by the bank. A decree of 14 October 1906 lowered interest rates on Land Bank loans to 4.5 percent, well below market rates.76 Additional directives in 1907 ordered the bank to liquidate its portfolio of properties to peasants in need (more on this below). 77 In the Stolypin period, one of the bank’s primary

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assignments thus remained allotting additional land to peasants with allotments less than the 1861 norm. These extraordinarily advantageous terms already situated implementation of the decree of 9 November 1906 within an existing pattern of agrarian reform, especially as the emphasis (particularly but not exclusively c. 1905–7), was on getting land into the hands of “land-hungry” peasant households or those possessing “insufficient” allotments.78 Serving the landless and the land-hungry remained a key public metric for demonstrating the reforms’ success. Closer examination of the rules governing the Land Bank’s activities indicates that its implementation of the Stolypin statutes was less radical than generally believed and more in line with the precedent of ensuring peasants access to “sufficient allotments” established by the Emancipation. One of the main changes in the bank’s procedures involved reducing borrowing requirements in order to encourage separation from the commune by making access to credit easier. From its inception the bank had struggled with the issue of borrowing requirements. Requiring too large a down payment would disqualify households most in need of assistance and privilege those perceived as village exploiters (the kulak or miroed) able to meet the down payment. Yet at the same time, setting the requirements too low would not only benefit potential village exploiters but also place the bank’s capital at risk by encouraging those with dim economic prospects to borrow what they could not repay. In addition, officials feared that setting the required down payment too low might increase peasant demand for land so much that land prices would skyrocket. The Valuev Commission had proposed a 50 percent down payment requirement. The bank began by asking for a more modest 10 percent down payment for individual households and 50 percent for communes and co-ops, but by 1894, on the eve of its refurbishment, peasant defaults and the bank’s capital shortage had pushed down payments to a 37 percent minimum for individual households.79 Up until this time, officials had preferred making loans to communes. Mutual responsibility made communes better credit risks on some levels; they were also the most ready buyers and were, officials believed, best situated to allot land to needy households. Interest rates for a fifty-five-year loan had averaged 7.5 to 8.5 percent (higher than that charged nobles by the Noble Land Bank, but in line with the fact that perhaps peasants were a greater credit risk). Emphasis on individual land purchases after the decree of 9 November 1906 changed this, but in most

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respects the bank continued to operate by the same charter issued in 1895 with some modifications in 1913. Key aspects of these rules, including lowered borrowing requirements, remained little altered through 1917. Encouraging peasants to use the Land Bank to solve their own land hunger and to free themselves (at least on paper) from some of the economic constraints of communal land tenure, and getting them to develop an appreciation of the benefits of property ownership, was a strategy with some merit, for we now know from studies of the redemption system that making payments on land changed peasant attitudes towards it.80 There is even evidence that peasants were willing to buy back lands they considered to have been “cut off” as part of the emancipation process. For example, a petition from peasants in the village of Lazirevki (Vladimir province) to the tsar submitted in April 1906 through the local land settlement commission, after describing the post-emancipation cut-offs, their desperate need for land, and the rapacious rents demanded by local nobles, requested that “You, Great Sovereign” attend to “our peasant needs” and “realize for us your Tsar’s kind favor in the increase of our landholding by means of a purchase price defined by law, because the honest purchase of land by us is [currently] not possible, since the owners take advantage of our poverty and demand from us a price for land offered for sale that does not correspond to its value.” In this and other instances, the Bank had to inform peasants that it could not compel local nobles to sell their property.81 There are also indications that peasants already understood and accepted the bank’s norms, as evidenced by a 1908 telegram from Samara peasant Lev Kudriashev to the finance minister noting that households of all estates, except Jews, should be able to purchase allotment land up to the fifty to sixty desiatina maximum (he also noted that he was a member of the local branch of the Union of Russian People, aka the Black Hundreds).82 The redemption system had done a good job of priming the pump for subsequent reforms, from the poorest villages of Vladimir to the most conservative peasant households in the lower Volga steppe, who turned to the state as the allotter of land and were willing to pay for it. At the same time, there was nothing in the lowered borrowing requirements consistent with any definition of “strong,” or “strong of character.” Nor was there was anything in the decrees or circulars that provided a litmus test for determining who should be allowed to borrow beyond (a) the borrower’s desire to make a purchase, (b) the

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borrower’s desire to consolidate and/or separate his allotment land, or (c) the usual criteria defining borrowers’ creditworthiness (i.e., the labour power of the household in comparison to landholding and local husbandry practices and grain prices). Indeed, lowering requirements for borrowing from the Land Bank and other parts of the expanded credit system encouraged everyone and anyone to separate. Officials assumed that the “weak of character” would opt to remain in the commune rather than separate, but there was no guarantee that this was the case. Heads of household looking to put one over on the rest of the family might separate for all the wrong reasons, and the widespread controversy that separation created within both households and villages is well documented by Gaudin. In short, there was little to guarantee that the peasant producers that Stolypin was betting on were the ones who would receive assistance other than their existing poverty or economic success – either their land hunger (making them targets for assistance) or their creditworthiness (making them potential exploiters). This was more of a wager on the limited cultural and economic change that consolidation and separation might create rather than a bet on peasants of any particular character. Norms and their premise – that peasants should have a “sufficient” allotment – permeated the entire reform process, whether it was the norms of article 54 or the modified norms based on the needs of the “average peasant household” adopted for the distribution of udel, Crown, state and Land Bank lands after 1906. The decree of 27 August 1906 on the liquidation of state land in European Russia to satisfy peasant land hunger is especially noteworthy in this regard. The law specified that the maximum peasant landholding resulting from the sale of state land could not exceed the norms established by district land settlement commissions, which in turn were guided initially by the Land Bank norms and the maximum local allotments of the emancipation statute.83 Furthermore, subsequent discussions on how best to apply the statute focused almost exclusively on the question of alleviating land hunger, particularly among those peasant households that had taken a one-quarter allotment in 1861 – the darstvenniki – and those of the meshchane soslovie who lived like peasants (many of whom were former serfs who had registered as meshchane after 1861 to avoid redemption payments). This had been a popular option among peasants in the middle Volga region.84 One of the announced intents of the Stolypin reforms had been to develop in peasants a sense of individual responsibility for their actions. This

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ran head-on into the traditional view that peasants were too childlike to be responsible for their actions. Thus, land-hungry darstvenniki and meshchane – the least creditworthy or “strong” on paper, whatever household labour power they had – were to receive priority in the purchase of these lands to the extent allowed by the norms, even though they or their ancestors had made a calculated move to take the quarter allotment or leave the peasant estate after 1861, because their land hunger now put them in poor position to take advantage of other land organization assistance.85 Given the extent of need and the relative shortage of land, discussion about meeting darstvenniki needs from the sale of state lands in European Russia revealed a growing tension between the Land Bank’s norms and the conception of norms among G U Z iZ officials. That tension had emerged earlier, during the review of bank norms in 1903–04.86 Materials from that review reappeared in the work of the committee discussing assistance to darstvenniki, eventually chaired by the director of the Department of State Properties, A.A. Rittikh. Despite general acceptance of norms, the bank norms made some officials nervous, for application of the labour norm to all households deemed land-hungry would quickly exhaust the supply of available land without meeting the needs of all those found wanting according to the family inventories conducted by local land settlement commissions.87 The discussion materials included a report by A.A. Kofoed, the guru of the khutor initiative. Kofoed recognized the importance of labour norms but also the problematic nature of those norms based on current extensive husbandry methods. Thus the recommendations he submitted in a report on land norms argued for norms of no more than ten desiatinas per couple with children; the wishful thinking was that this would push adult sons to leave their parental home and establish their own homesteads. Rittikh went along with this, noting that increasing the norms for khutors and otrub parcels would simply encourage peasants to retain old methods of husbandry rather than adopt modern ones.88 Oddly enough, this was one of the few times this concern arose in any of the discussions. Rittikh’s committee on alleviating the plight of the darstvenniki by selling them state land through the Land Bank began, on the basis of article 28 of the instructions to local land settlement commissions, by soliciting the commissions’ assessments of need. Some of these commissions recommended that norms be calculated on the basis of the traditional male soul; others that this be done on basis of adults

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of both sexes (with some suggesting variations that included a special norm for women); still others proposed a norm for the household as a unit. Some suggested the maximum emancipation norm for the area, others the average amount of land held by all peasants in the area. One suggested simply dividing the land available for each land settlement commission to distribute equally among needy households, and another a norm of distribution based on the annual budget of a peasant family. In the end, rather than a labour norm, Rittikh’s committee favoured a consumption norm.89 Given the consensus that the bank norm “exceeds what is needed to support an existing average peasant household,” the committee set about “establishing the limits of peasant landholding which, from one side, would ensure the satisfaction of the most pressing needs of the average peasant family, and on the other, would provide the opportunity to satisfy the land needs of the greatest number of householders in need of land,” and instructed local land settlement commissions to determine the need of a basic peasant family by compiling budget data based on an elaborate budget survey.90 This, unlike the bank norms, would ensure that the norms applied did not “significantly exceed the amount [of land] necessary for supporting the existence of an average peasant household.” The easiest means to do this until the local commissions had better data was to apply a norm of three times the maximum per soul emancipation norm. The bank and GUZiZ continued to replicate tables of these norms for local use.91 Given limited resources, sufficiency concerns shifted away from employing the purchaser’s full family labour power towards ensuring a subsistence niche, thereby pushing towards villages and homesteads of average peasant households as measured in terms of land. Stolypin households would thus become normal households in a statistical sense. As Land Bank work in other areas required more coordination with G U Z iZ , the bank applied some version of these norms or those of article 54. By 1911, as the bank’s charter came under review, both bank and GUZiZ officials had come to realize there were other benefits to the “average peasant family” consumption norm as well – namely, its use would streamline the provision of credit across ministerial jurisdictions and, most importantly, provide a basis for a revitalized rural credit system that facilitated increased productivity. The new charter that appeared in 1912 retained article 54 (now appearing as article 63), but it also formalized the inclusion of the “average peasant family” land commission norms for cases where the bank served

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as the seller. In essence, discussion shifted from occupying peasant labour to enhancing well-being, with a nadel that met average consumption needs serving as a safety net. The goal, however, remained the same: that households have sufficient (i.e., neither too much nor too little) land.92 As Macey noted, work to create a special statute concerning the darstvenniki came to naught.93 Subsequent legislation and instructions, however, incorporated many of its findings. In a circular issued on 19 May 1912, the Land Bank was allowed, applying a consumption norm, to loan darstvenniki and meshchane whose lifestyle “did not differ from that of peasants” the money to purchase additional land up to a local consumption norm, with the poorest peasants eligible to borrow 95 percent of the purchase price if they agreed to settle on the parcel as a khutor or take it as an otrub. Because of their dire circumstances, even individuals purchasing non-consolidated (inter-stripped) parcels in single ownership could borrow up to 90 percent of the purchase price. Communes and co-ops could borrow at 60 percent of the purchase price for ploughland or 75 percent for the purchase of other types of arable land in which they were deficient. Local land settlement commissions, working in tandem with the bank, were to consider during the loan approval process the amount of land the purchaser already held, whether he intended to live on the purchased parcel, and the degree to which the purchased parcel corresponded to his economic needs.94 A willingness to settle on the parcel evidently demonstrated sufficient strength of character to justify making a wager on purchasers who, from the standpoint of credit risk, merited a higher down payment and interest rate. The weak – landless and land-hungry darstvenniki and others – were thus privileged on the basis of being willing to take a risk the state promoted. These rules applied to bank sales of udel, Crown, and state land, as well as to the liquidation of the bank’s own land portfolio. The persistence of the state’s traditional concern about sufficiency – how much land peasants did or did not have – is striking and appears plainly in the 1906 statute establishing the Land Bank’s partner in its activities, the local land settlement commissions. The decree set as those commissions’ first task the compilation of an inventory of peasant landholdings (articles 4–6), with an eye to determining the region’s average peasant landholding (article 7), as well as state and udel lands available for distribution (Article 8). The articles that followed detailed how the bank was to help the commissions distribute

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available land through peasant purchases, based on established land norms (articles 28 and 34.2).95 An obsession with the quantity of land that peasants held even guided access to bank credit for the purchase of improved implements. G U Z iZ rules for issuing loans to peasants for the purchase of improved implements required a down payment of 10 to 50 percent of the cost of those implements; also, those loans were restricted to peasants holding less land than the article 54 norms.96 One could argue that land-hungry peasants needed more access than other households to improved implements for intensifying production. But again, despite the atmosphere of change that encouraged agrarian progress, the rules of implementation remained rooted in the past practices of agrarian reform, which emphasized household “sufficiency” as defined in terms of the amount of land held. In this there was, ironically, common ground with Duma projects that the government had dismissed as too radical, such as the “Project of the 104” (like the bank charter, also largely penned by Kutler), which contained language similar to that of article 54 and its specified maximum peasant land allotments.97 Although hardly a disinterested party, the United Nobility (which viewed the Land Bank as a threat to noble landholding) listed among its many complaints about the bank the fact that article 54 impeded the establishment of stable peasant property owners. In other words, it complained that the reforms’ preoccupation with ensuring “sufficient” allotments for all households was impeding the enculturation of strong property interests among peasant separators that would create a bulwark against land seizures.98 To “outside observers,” the bank as an instrument of reform was too preoccupied with limiting household economies rather than encouraging those households to reach their full potential. Article 56 of the 14 June 1910 statute seemed to provide the opportunity for expanded peasant landholding demanded by the United Nobility, for it allowed peasants to accumulate up to six times the maximum emancipation allotment (this limit was supposed to safeguard against speculation). At the same time, without the assistance of the bank, and under the close watch of local land organization commissions, there was little chance that any separator could accumulate six times the emancipation norm. In any case, even this act of quantifying limits pointed to an ongoing obsession with the amount of land peasants held – that it be neither too much nor too little, but rather “just right” or “sufficient.” Subsequent legislation confirmed and reinforced this principle. Land

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settlement commissions established by the Land Settlement Statute of 29 May 1911 were told to collaborate with zemstvos and other local organizations to compile a list of peasant land needs, targeting those in the worst condition for preferential help to purchase additional land. “Eligible peasants were those whose basic income came from agriculture and who possessed their own inventory, but members of other soslovie, including even nobles, whose principle source of income derived from personal agricultural labour were also eligible.” To prevent them (or anyone else seeking assistance from the bank) from accumulating surplus land, peasants were required to sell land that exceeded the area’s allotment norm (when their allotment plus purchases exceeded that norm) within three years. Total landholding for owners of consolidated plots, formally agreed by the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and G U ZiZ on 11 April 1912, would correspond to a norm equal to the consumption needs of an average family (as opposed to a norm per soul).99 The bank became one of the institutional arbiters of a new mid-sized rural economy of average smallholders. Selling Bank Land, Norming Peasant Agriculture Local Land Bank branches generally did a faithful job of executing bank rules made in Saint Petersburg. The rules benefited peasant purchasers more than noble sellers and positioned the bank less as a credit institution and more as an instrument of land reform. Peasants could acquire land with bank assistance in one of two ways: by securing a bank loan for the purchase of land directly from an individual seller, or by purchasing bank land. Throughout both processes, bank rules and their implementation by local and central bank officials ensured that peasant borrowers benefited, owing to both the altruism of local officials and the bank’s concern that peasants not default. As with the Emancipation, the state’s concern about its own interests benefited peasants more than nobles. Once the purchaser – individual, co-op, or commune – and seller agreed to terms, and they were certified by a local notary (who also certified the deposit of any down payment), the purchaser was in a position to request a loan from the bank. In addition to a copy of the notarized agreement, the local bank branch council collected information from the township (volost’) needed to complete a family list (semeinyi spisok) for the purchaser (in some cases, the volost’ administration

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submitted a completed form). The request for a loan triggered an appraisal of the property by a member of the bank branch council, who was usually a local person and often a local landowner deemed “familiar” with local agricultural conditions and husbandry. The appraisal form was reviewed and either approved or denied by the bank branch council and, if approved, by the bank council in Saint Petersburg. The appraisal form illustrates the application of the rules and the intersection between the bank’s fiscal concerns and peasant household sufficiency. By the time of the Stolypin reforms, the appraisal and other forms had achieved a certain level of standardization.100 The first section of the appraisal, as one might expect, covered a description of the property – its size, location, disposition (single parcel or inter-stripped pieces), arable type, and soil quality, as well as the amount of income it generated for the seller. The next section was an assessment of the value of the land, with a view to determining whether the price (and hence the amount being loaned) was within the parameters of the “normal land value” for the district. This included, as noted above, not only appraisal methods familiar to us today (comparative sales and capitalization of rents), but also an attempt to determine value by calculating annual income for the given arable and soil conditions under peasant cultivation and with local average harvests and grain prices. The bank privileged the latter. The scribes of the bank council in Saint Petersburg often checked this math (in the margins or on the back of the form). At one level, this was due diligence on the part of bank officials. Ensuring that the price peasants paid was no greater than the income generated by the purchased land made default less probable. At the same time, this policy and practice benefited peasants more than noble sellers. Peasant borrowers’ interests were bank interests. In this sense, the bank’s activities were similar to what those borrowing to purchase a home today experience. The other sections of the appraisal form – information about the purchaser and the appraiser’s conclusions – reflected a concern with peasant well-being as well as broader questions about the rural economy that are foreign to our contemporary experience. The section containing information on the purchaser, the family list, seems innocuous enough from our perspective; it listed the names and ages of all household members, the amount of allotment and previously purchased land held, and an account of assets in the form of draft and other livestock. But from the perspective of those compiling the list

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or doing the appraisal, this accounting of the purchaser’s family and inventory mimicked the same information collected and compiled by the estate bailiff, including a listing of the number of male workers and the total land held per soul. This information allowed the appraiser to comment on and certify two things indicating the extent to which the process of facilitating peasant purchase aligned with established concerns about sufficiency. First, the appraiser was asked to comment on whether the purchase of this particular piece of land would be economically beneficial to the buyer – whether it would improve his household’s standard of living. Appraisers more often than not remarked that the purchase would be especially useful for the buyer was landless or land-hungry and the additional land would improve the household’s standard of living. For example, the 9 July 1907 resolution of the Khar’kiv bank branch council, echoing the conclusions of the appraiser, noted the following: members of the purchasing Ptushkinskoe rural society were “poor and extremely land hungry,” as its 123 male souls held collectively a mere nineteen desiatinas of allotment land or 0.15 desiatinas per soul. The appraiser recommended that, in light of this land hunger, he “would find it just to loan the Society 17,000 rubles or 100%” of the appraised value of the land. The local land settlement commission agreed with the appraiser, calling the sale “advisable and highly desirable” in light of the purchasers’ level of poverty.101 The bank council in Saint Petersburg agreed, but with a number of stipulations stemming from the fact that even after the purchase, households would still hold a mere 1.54 desiatinas per male soul, which was barely more than half the locale’s decreed allotment of three desiatinas per male soul, putting loan repayment in doubt. The bank approved the 55.5 year mortgage loan only on these two conditions: (a) that the money peasants had already paid go towards a 10 percent down payment, and (b) that the local Land Bank branch convince the seller to reduce the sale price by 2,297 rubles. The loan went through a few months later at the reduced purchase price.102 Bank interests benefited peasant purchasers, perpetuating the idea that peasants required sufficient land to improve their lives and that the perceived ills of the redemption system must be avoided even if it meant intervening in a private sale. Second, the rules required appraisers and the Land Bank’s branch council to certify that the sale did not leave the purchaser with total landholdings greater than what was allowed by article 54 of the bank charter and, after 14 June 1910, article 56 of the land settlement

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statute. In doing do, the bank branch also confirmed that the purchaser intended to work the land exclusively with the labour and inventory of his own family. Thus, the Pskov bank council rejected a loan application in 1906 because the purchaser was “not land-hungry” (i.e., had a normal quantity of land already), but it approved one in 1911 because, even though the parcel being purchased was distant from the buyer’s current place of settlement, he was land-hungry and his purchase was still within the confines of the norm. Another approval from 1911 indicated that in peasant-to-peasant transactions, the bank branch and council also considered whether the seller would be left with sufficient land to maintain his existence after selling his consolidated allotment land.103 Finally, the bank council rejected a 1913 loan application from Tambov, despite local approval, because although the purchase fell within the norm, the purchaser stood to inherit substantially more land from the seller (his father) and would subsequently hold land well above any established norm.104 This final example, besides demonstrating how seriously the bank took its norms (it was even willing to project their application into the future), reminds us that, unless they sought to borrow money for land purchases, enterprising peasants could evade the norms. The seller in this case had accumulated more than 106 desiatinas of land in Tambov’s Kozlovsk district, as well as a house in town abutting his consolidated property. Yet despite his father’s display of such strong affinity to property and consolidated landholding, the attempt to sell 25 desiatinas to the son triggered the application of the norms as well as traditional fears that, on coming into his inheritance, the son would have more land than could be worked with his own household labour and inventory. Concern to increase peasant landholding, but not beyond a certain point, thus did much to define who Stolypin’s “strong” peasants were in a material sense. As we shall see below, the process of liquidating the Land Bank’s accumulated land portfolio fine-tuned that definition. The Land Bank had a difficult time enforcing the level of responsible property ownership that one might expect from the “strong of character.” Loan defaults highlighted the tensions between the central Land Bank and local branches. These tensions arose from how the bank was viewed: Was it a credit institution rooted in the principle of property, or was it an instrument of land reform? The rationale for employing the bank as an engine of reform was that doing so would inculcate a sense of personal responsibility for repaying loans.

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Officials believed that making payments and enforcing defaults (through repossession) would encourage the sort of sober attitude towards property that communal tenure undermined. In Saint Petersburg in 1909, the issue of defaults provoked a clear response from bank director S.S. Khripunov. That response made a rare explicit reference to “the strong.”105 Khripunov noted that the bank was not a charity and that land hunger alone did not define loan eligibility. Furthermore, in accordance with this, the Bank must make a careful review in each individual case amongst those purchasers in need of land of the most strongly tied to the land, devoted to work, knowledgeable in the economy and, in good faith, to the performance of obligations, avoiding in all circumstances deals with persons that do not satisfy these requirements. This is the basis of the Bank’s mediating activities to promote the compensatory expansion of peasant land ownership and its fundamental difference from the free and equal distribution of land by soul. This same requirement is vigorously demanded by the vital interests of the national economy and the State, which requires that the reserve of Bank land be transferred mainly to strong hands that are used to difficult and creative prosperity, such that the funds spent for its [the land’s] acquisition are repaid by the bidders and that their collection does not become an irretrievable burden on the state treasury.106 Making loans and selling land to buyers who “are negligent, economically weak and knowingly defective in [making] payments” not only squandered state funds but also undermined the growth of the national economy. In light of this, instances in which local bank branches resold repossessed land to the defaulters themselves were “all the more unacceptable and unallowable.”107 As the director reminded his branch managers: Loans from the Peasant Bank are the most preferential land credit in the world. Its exclusive privilege is manifested, first of all, in the very size of the loan, which is often given for over 90% of the appraised value of the mortgaged land. The peasant, having only strong hands and a tendency to work, can become, with the help of the Bank, the owner of property for a few thousand

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rubles, having spent from his own means an extremely insignificant amount. Equally advantageous are the payment amounts, as well as other conditions for the fulfillment of obligations … to the Bank. Hence it is clear that these Bank borrowers [defaulters], having led their property to the point of auction … thereby proved either their negligence or their economic infirmity and therefore [selling them back the land] would be tantamount to establishing precisely the unacceptable and intolerable selection of the worst buyers … with all the harmful economic, financial and moral consequences attendant to it.108 Peasants were already getting a great deal. This was even more reason to hold them accountable. Failure to do so contradicted state goals and undermined the moral foundations of property. The fact that local managers needed to be reminded of this indicates that in the trenches, Land Bank branches, land settlement committees, and other local authorities were loath to follow through on defaults that deprived delinquent buyers of land, even if it meant reselling the land at auction to the defaulters themselves. Peasant access to land appeared to matter more than enforcing standards of individual responsibility. Repossessing land posed a number of sociopolitical and economic risks, and evidence indicates that local Land Bank branches had qualms about doing it. In the first place, it seems that most peasants paid if they could, and the size of the defaults in monetary terms was relatively small. The arrears on the 220 loans in default to the Saint Petersburg branch of the bank in first half of 1914 totalled less than 5,000 rubles, with the individual amounts ranging from two kopeks to 475 rubles. In most cases, the social costs of repossession were greater than the social and monetary benefits to be gained from putting defaulted parcels on the block, especially as most of the parcels were small and woven into the fabric of existing peasant landholdings. In many cases the peasants had been renting the parcels for years prior to their purchase. In other words, these were not separate parcels easily taken back and sold to an outsider. Cognizant of this, the bank’s branch council resolved not to proceed with repossession and auction of parcels with insignificant arrears, which it defined as 10 percent or less of the half-yearly payment. This automatically removed sixtyfour defaults from the list. In addition, between the time the list was

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compiled and the bank council’s meeting, seventeen of the delinquencies were settled, either by payment or by sale to another party. The council scheduled the remaining 139 for auction in November. In cases of default, local bank branches generally acted leniently, in line with a commitment to peasant landholding, despite pressures to privilege the “strong.” Furthermore, as the bank director in Saint Petersburg reminded local managers at the end of November 1914, auctions of repossessed land should take care that lands were resold only to those intending to work it with their own labour.109 Bank Land as Blank Slate: Liquidating Bank Land, Making Stolypin’s Peasants The Land Bank’s ownership of a sizeable land portfolio presented a unique opportunity to reformers after 1906. In most of rural Russia, inter-stripped open fields presented officials with land tenure nightmares requiring substantial negotiation and surveying in order to realize a vision of peasants as owners of consolidated plots of ploughland (never mind homesteads). By contrast, the nearly 10 million hectares of land set for distribution through the bank and local land settlement commissions presented reformers with a blank slate. That land could be quickly surveyed, developed, and settled as khutors or otrubs with minimal fuss. This was especially true of the more than 2 million desiatinas owned by the bank itself as a result of purchases from its own capital since 1905 alone. It was on these lands, through the process of liquidating the bank’s land portfolio, that reformers had the best opportunity to create the peasants they wanted: individual owners of consolidated plots farming a sufficient amount of land without having to resort to hired labour. The liquidation process and its results can tell us what Stolypin peasants were supposed to look like in a material sense. That picture in turn can tell us the benefits of land consolidation for peasants mired in the deleterious influences of communal tenure. Acting in many ways like a modern real estate developer creating and populating suburban housing developments, the bank and local land settlement commissions surveyed, improved, marketed, and sold opportunities for land-hungry peasants to purchase a normed and surveyed piece of the rural Russian dream, either as homesteaders or as members of a newly created nucleated village of peasants holding ploughland otrubs and sharing other arable in common. Through the bank, the landless and land-hungry could realize

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their true selves as the salt of the Russian earth while representing the state’s commitment to providing peasants with the land they need to flex their economic muscle. If we are to believe an official history of the liquidation system, reformers envisioned and intended all of this from the beginning. That is, the purpose of the liquidation was the “planting and development of petty property owning in conditions of individual property ownership,” such that the owner could apply his “independent labor” on a surveyed plot with permanent boundaries in order to meet the needs of the land-hungry. This would demonstrate the benefits of the decree of 9 November 1906 by creating “examples of economies of the new type” among the peasantry.110 It is easy to take at face value the assertion that the liquidation system was premeditated, as we can find corroboration for the idea of intentionality in the plans for resettling peasants from densely populated core provinces to Turkestan and Siberia. Krivoshein’s memo expressed this level of imagination. He and Stolypin waxed poetic about such opportunities on multiple occasions, including in the report on their 1910 inspection tour of western Siberia and the Volga, where they noted that reducing the land held by early settlers and nomads to the established norm would expand the reserve available for new settlers, especially in popular areas such as the lands Nicholas II released in the Altai region.111 Such intentionality is also in line with Macey’s observations regarding the reformers’ pragmatism. Thus even if the liquidation process and the subsequent elevation of the Land Bank and local land settlement commissions to the role of real estate developers had already been in the works in the mind of Krivoshein, who was the bank director when the system was launched, it was a convergence of multiple events that forced the government to rush towards realizing that vision. The foremost development in this regard was the rising number of rural and urban disturbances, which compelled the government to at least look as if it was doing something to alleviate the rural crisis and place land in the hands of land-hungry peasants. Those same disturbances increased the number of landowners interested in selling to the Land Bank. In line with these issues, the manifesto of 3 November 1905 directed the bank to step up its purchases of private land for resale to landhungry peasants. The bank took this work seriously enough to offer local zemstvos a 0.25 percent finder’s fee for helping identify lands for purchase and resale.112 At the same time, however, the manifesto

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announced the end of the redemption system, thereby eliminating the bank’s chief source of capital available for purchases. The manifesto also authorized the bank to replace this lost capital by selling bonds on the market; however, the appetite for those bonds on the home and foreign markets was meager, besides representing unwanted competition for other state paper.113 This situation worsened after the decree of 14 October 1906 lowered interest rates on bank loans to 4.5 percent. This was well below the 6 percent return the market demanded for bonds, which effectively closed off the market as a source of capital. The 3 million rubles in state funds allocated in the same decree as compensation hardly made up the difference. Thus, just as one liquidity crisis in the wake of the Crimean War shaped the Emancipation, another – created by the state’s own attempts to appear responsive to rural demands – shaped the initial stages of Stolypin’s attempt to complete what reformers portrayed as the Emancipation’s original goal: the eventual replacement of the commune with individual household tenure.114 Anxious that the Land Bank continue buying private land for resale, lest speculators win the day and exacerbate existing problems, the government took a number of steps to solve the bank’s liquidity crisis. The first involved a series of memos from the bank and the interior ministry to bank branch managers, zemstvos, and marshals of nobility. These memos emphasized the importance of the bank’s work; asked the recipients to use their influence on sellers to stem attempted price gouging, which threatened to undermine the idea of private property in peasant minds; and reminded them that sale prices should be determined by capitalizing average net income under peasant cultivation. These pleas fell on deaf ears and indeed elicited many bitter complaints. But concerns that peasants not pay too much and not perceive themselves as being gouged led to efforts by the bank to cap land prices at pre-revolutionary levels.115 The government lifted its next ploy from the emancipation playbook, issuing a statute on 21 March 1906 stipulating that henceforth the bank would no longer pay sellers in cash but rather in 5 percent bank bonds. A law of 26 April 1906 and a directive from the throne on 30 August 1906 attempted to make this a little more palatable to sellers by authorizing the bank to assume the mortgages held by the noble or private banks on land it was purchasing. Like the Emancipation, this worked to the benefit of the bank, the state, and the peasantry but to the disadvantage of noble sellers who, in need of cash, sold their bonds on the

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market at a discount. By the end of 1906, 5 percent bonds were trading at 78 rubles per 100 rubles of value; 6 percent bonds were doing slightly better at 86–88 rubles per 100 rubles of value.116 The end of the bank’s cash purchases cemented the nobility’s view of the bank as a predator that intended to wipe out noble landholding. Some nobles were so upset that they refused to help the bank or the land settlement commissions identify land-hungry peasants and land available for bank purchase.117 By early 1906, those in the upper echelons of state authority realized that the bank’s liquidity crisis was going to require more attention. Early talks at a meeting held in June 1906 to discuss strengthening the activities of the Land Bank – chaired by Goremykin and attended by Stolypin and his deputy Gurko, finance minister Kokovtsov and his deputy A.I. Putilov (the director of the Peasant and Noble Banks), G U Z iZ director A.S. Stishinskii and his deputy Krivoshein, justice minster I.G. Shcheglovitov, comptroller P.Kh. Shvanebakh, and two other bank officials – focused on schemes to increase bank activity to assist the land-hungry by seeking alternative sources of capital through obligatory bond purchases by the State Bank and state savings banks (which had already been happening), as well as by ministerial pension funds.118 Ultimately, however, the urgent desire for the state to be seen as doing something to put land in peasant hands (by making good on the manifesto of 3 November 1905) and the emerging discrepancy between the amount of land the bank was buying (more than 2 million desiatinas since November 1905) and the amount sold (only 170,119 desiatinas) convinced the government that the best solution to the capital crunch was to liquidate the bank’s growing land portfolio. Liquidation attempts started slowly, in part because peasants were hesitant to purchase land (or let neighbours purchase land) that they expected to receive as an additional allotment gratis at any possible moment. By 1907, the change in focus and administration, the continuing bank capital crisis, and the paltry rental return on bank-owned land (a negligible 0.15 percent of its value) had drawn instructions from the Council of Ministers in the form of “special minutes” dated 13 June 1907 (approved by the emperor on 20 June) to hurry the process of liquidating the bank’s land portfolio.119 To expedite matters, the Council of Ministers commissioned three (and later two more) temporary branches of the governing council of the Peasant Land Bank and gave them the authority to work with local land

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settlement commissions in twenty-two provinces to identify buyers and liquidate the bank’s portfolio with complete authority on the spot. In other words, sales and everything associated with them no longer (with a few exceptions) had to be approved by the bank council in Saint Petersburg, but could be handled by these plenipotentiaries in situ and as they arose. Each temporary branch had three members (one each from the bank council, GU ZiZ, and the interior ministry), and each member was assigned several provinces containing bank land subject to liquidation. The Council of Ministers was especially concerned that the liquidation process not give peasants the sense that they were being given an additional allotment, that peasants make a down payment for each purchase, and that sales, based on local conditions and the circumstances of the property being sold, give preference to peasants seeking to buy land in individual tenure (khutors or otrubs) over co-ops and communes.120 The bank council’s temporary branches were charged with liquidating, in partnership with local land settlement commissions, not only lands purchased by the Land Bank with its own capital, but also state, udel, and Crown lands that had been turned over for sale by the bank according to the rules set out by the Committee on Land Settlement Affairs in a circular of 12 June 1907.121 That circular represented a review of information requested from the local land settlement commissions under article 28 of the “Instruction” (nakaz) on the local commissions, which required them to submit their own assessments regarding a number of issues, including land norms, as well as a liquidation plan for the state, udel and bank lands within their districts. The committee allowed commissions to increase or decrease established norms by as much as one third. Given the short timeline, response was weak. Of the 184 commissions, only 38 submitted information on establishing local norms and only 11 submitted liquidation plans. Significantly, none of the submitted information suggested dispensing with norms, although, as the circular noted, there was wide variance in how local commissions sought to define those norms in terms of the unit to which the norm applied (male soul, souls of both sexes, family or household), as well as in terms of how to calculate them. Not surprisingly, few commissions followed the directions completely. Several proposed the maximum 1861 allotment as a norm, others the average amount of land held per peasant in the district, and others still a labour norm. Many took into account how much land there

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actually was for distribution. Some calculated these norms exclusively on the basis of average peasant harvest figures, and some on average harvests for the district as a whole; and in what seemed particularly baffling to the land settlement affairs committee, some added or subtracted 1 to 1.5 desiatinas from a calculated norm without any sort of explanation. In several cases commissions from abutting districts in the same province with like soil and other farming conditions submitted norms that differed by a factor of two. The liquidation plans were even less satisfactory. The underlying assumption of the circular and these opening remarks was that the locals were floundering and in need of guidance.122 The report from the Novouzensk commission (Samara province) came into the Land Settlement Affairs Committee after it had already issued its circular of instructions. It demonstrates, among other things, that transition from the commune system required a new way of thinking even for those outside the peasant soslovie. The Novouzensk commission recognized that it would be difficult to create otrubs for each family individually, given the variation in family size. It thus proposed three norms for otrub parcels based on soil quality that differed by one third plus or minus from the current twelve-desiatina norm. Up to this point, the plan sounded reasonable, as did the vision of measuring out the land into equal parcels based on families of five male souls. Each parcel could be farmed by one family with five souls, by five families with one soul, or by some other combination of families of differing sizes to equal the magic number of five. Families with more than five souls that did not wish to divide would be eligible to purchase an additional parcel in partnership with one or more other families that would bring the total number of souls up to ten. In essence, the local commission seemed to understand that the land was to be sold as consolidated parcels of relatively equal size based on soil and other conditions. The commission also recognized that the problem was calculating on the basis of souls, and was troubled that doing so would likely cause some large families to divide unnecessarily, thus sapping the household’s labour supply and requiring even more land for resale and resettlement. It seems that the principle of individual land tenure had eluded it. Perhaps the response from GUZiZ referencing circulars establishing temporary household norms of three times the maximum 1861 allotment relieved the commission’s worries.123 The text of the circular of June 12 reads more like minutes from the meeting than as a set of directives. As such, in terms of what norms

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to apply when parcelling out and selling the 10 million desiatinas of land being made available to address the needs of the land-hungry, there was understandable confusion, especially as article 29 of the Nakaz to the local land settlement commissions had already stipulated use of the Land Bank norm. The circular notes that despite the not insignificant size of the reserve being sold, available land was still limited. As such, the committee sought norms that would meet the “actual needs of the purchaser” rather than occupying his full labour potential.124 The committee believed that this dictated a norm equivalent to the consumption needs of the “average peasant family” in each given locale. Given that determining these norms required substantial preparatory work, the committee chose to use three times the maximum allotment norm of 1861 as a temporary measure based on a belief that after nearly fifty years they still reflected “an amount of land sufficient for supplying the average family the food, shelter and clothing it needs” and that would also enable it to make its payments. This had been verified by the bank itself in some instances, as well as in the norms’ application to parcels for migrants in Samara and Orenburg as stipulated by a law on migration of 7 June 1904. If the norms worked in the southern steppe, the committee saw no problem with generalizing them to other provinces. Furthermore, as the average family in the fifty provinces of the empire had 2.8 male workers, rounding the norm up to three times the maximum soul allotment from 1861 worked well.125 Local commissions could make adjustments to this by altering the allotment by one third or by allowing larger families to purchase additional contiguous parcels. Finally, in one of the few nods to the potential benefits of intensive cultivation amidst a discussion of norms ultimately based on peasant husbandry in open fields, the circular noted that, on the basis of “general khutor rules,” khutor parcels should be smaller in order to achieve the best “economic results,” given that the more developed form of land tenure would lead to greater productivity.126 In any case, the norms were set at this level so that “the land, from one side, would not be concentrated in large sizes in the hands of individual purchasers [and] from the other that it would not be dissipated by being sold as many small parcels.”127 This motivation seemed well understood in the provinces. At the same time, without summarizing the main directives in bullet points and despite the fact that the circular appended the table of maximum household norms, confusion reigned in the early stages of the liquidation project, even among the representatives of the

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temporary branches of the bank council. Several of these councils were perfectly happy to demand that the local land settlement commissions apply the ideal norm of the consumption needs of the average peasant family despite the temporary norms included in the guiding circular, or use the emancipation or article 54 norms. Armed with the circular, and having been assigned the task of liquidating land in a way that put it in the hands of the needy by means that best corresponded to local economic conditions and the goals of the government’s reform program, the representatives of the temporary branches of the bank council rode a circuit of district and provincial capitals in their assigned areas, reviewing completed liquidation plans and lists of potential local peasant purchasers, spurring laggard commissions to action, cancelling agreed sales that contradicted land settlement goals, rounding up surveyors and hydrologists to parcel out properties and locate roads and wells, and engaging private l­iquidators (paid five to forty kopeks per desiatina of land sold and five rubles per sale) to assist in locating potential buyers, both on location and in other provinces via ad campaigns in local newspapers.128 At least one independent “guide” to assist peasants in this process appeared in the pages of the serial Russkoe chtenie; it explained not only the assistance available but also how norms were applied in the process.129 As locals were initially reluctant to purchase what they expected would be allotted them for free, officials recruited migrants from densely populated provinces (Kiev, Podolsk, Poltava, and Volynsk were the legally specified targets) for areas with a surplus of available land such as Saratov and Samara. The plat book maps of beautifully parcelled-out properties and lists of owners that appear as illustrations of their intent and mechanics are largely a product of this process.130 The initial liquidations left much for officials in Saint Petersburg to desire. For example, the first sales of land in most of the provinces covered by the First Temporary Branch of the Bank Council reported in September 1907 amounted to less than one fifth of the land available for sale. Furthermore, of the 106,701 desiatinas sold, only about 18,000 went as khutors or otrubs; the vast majority of sales (69,026 desiatinas) were to large co-ops.131 The temporary branch chair noted that most of these sales had been agreed to prior to his arrival and constituted, given their geography, the best use of the land. Sales to communes and co-ops against the intention of the liquidation project often occurred because not every temporary branch member

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or local land settlement commission was willing to to put in the time required to improve the merchandise to meet the goals of land settlement (i.e., survey, put in roads, locate or improve water supplies, lay out new villages around otrubs for settlement).132 Local inertia and opinion also weighed on the liquidators. By August 1907 only about 15 percent of the land up for liquidation in Saratov, Tambov, Poltava, Voronezh, and Chernigov had been sold (92,284 out of 606,414 desiatinas), in part because the pressure to liquidate it as otrubs and khutors did not correspond to “the wishes and demands of the local peasants” or in many cases “with the economic conditions of the properties themselves.”133 These reports elicited multiple reminders and rebukes from the centre as the initial results came in over the telegraph.134 Nonetheless, even the need to take into account local particularisms that rendered sales to a commune or co-op as the best use of the land did not dampen the spirit for engineering “strong peasant landholding on the basis of individual property,” property defined in terms of norms ideally reflective of the average peasant family’s consumption needs.135 After the initial round of liquidations, pressed by the more active and committed heads of the temporary branches of the bank council, particularly A.A. Rittikh, the project turned into a vibrant act of real estate development in the name of creating the peasants the state wanted. Rittikh was appalled by the local land settlement commissions’ lack of initiative and by the poor quality of their liquidation plans. In his first report as chair of the Third Temporary Branch he noted that if the government was serious about liquidating the land in a manner that promoted its goals, the local Land Bank and land commission practice of selling small parcels here and there according to customer demand was counterproductive. Rather than creating parcels to meet demand as it arose, Rittikh – setting a precedent for the remainder of the liquidation process – instructed land settlement commissions to divide the available land into equal parcels as required by the needs of proper land organization, “parcels sufficient for the conduct of an independent peasant economy,” deviating from established sizes only when confronted by natural constraints such as waterways or soil quality, and facilitating required basic hydrologic and access improvements by adding the cost to the purchase price. If no local buyers could be found after the survey work and other improvements were completed, the land should be offered to outsiders. Rittikh noted that after the sale of two or

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three parcels to outsiders, local people were generally willing to jump in and buy up the rest. Rittikh’s comments provided the clarity missing in the circular of 12 June 1907. Most of his recommendations and procedures, as well the “average peasant family” consumption norm, were incorporated into a new circular guiding liquidation issued on 19 February 1908.136 As a result, by the time of his second inspection tour, 78 percent of the land had been planned out and most was under contract for purchase. Moreover, 80 percent of that land would soon be liquidated as khutors or otrubs “in agreement with the established norm.”137 In accordance with the rules, purchasers who relocated to khutors at their own expense received loans for 100 percent of the purchase price; the remainder made down payments of 5 to 10 percent. Those unable to make the down payment, or who could not immediately relocate, rented the land as part of a “rent-to-own” program for one to three years. This included those relocating to new otrub settlements who were in the process of selling their allotment land to come up with their down payment.138 Existing manor houses, outbuildings, orchards, and parks were to be sold to local zemstvos for a nominal price and were included in the plans for new otrub settlements as schools or other service buildings.139 The land settlement commissions managed to sell on their own about 58 percent of the total sold; outside liquidators sold 26 percent; the local Land Bank branch sold the remainder.140 Peasants from targeted densely populated provinces received discounted rail travel to view bank properties for purchase.141 The liquidation system employed 904 surveyors (Bank, G U ZiZ , and provincial) in 1907, 1,100 in 1908, and 1,007 in 1909, as well as numerous hydrologists, as part of the government’s effort to alleviate the bank’s capital shortage while at the same time laying the groundwork for a better peasant economy populated by the “strong” peasants it desired.142 What sort of peasants populated these model settlements of khutors or otrubs arranged around newly platted out settlements? Who were the model strong Stolypin peasants shining as a beacon for neighbours and urban society to see, admire, and emulate? According to the official history of the liquidation system, given the Land Bank’s task of liquidating its land portfolio in a manner that would contribute to the creation of “simple individual properties,” the bank (the author downplays the local land commissions) also had to consider the character of the borrowers and future owners: “Only

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one strongly tied to the land, accustomed to labor, the frugal and economic farmer could adjust to the new orders of land distribution and secure his own prosperity.” Yet the remainder of this homage to the strong went on to acknowledge that, despite their valiant character, not all of these peasants had their own means to purchase these lands, which necessitated “rent to own” arrangements; and that the majority of sales during 1907 went to collective purchasers.143 Those purchasers were not always the envisioned Calvinist elect; the “strong” were not necessarily leading lives of shining economic success. Throughout the liquidation process, peasants who already had sufficient access to land or who appeared strong were not the focus of the state’s attention. Instead, the main beneficiaries were the landless, the land-hungry, and, in the end, the average peasant household. It was they who were the objects of the wager on the strong. The emphasis on providing peasants sufficient access to land extended into the explanatory notes to the Land Bank’s annual reports during this period. Besides figures on the amount of bank land sold in different forms of tenure, those notes reported the number of sales and amount of land sold to the landless and land-hungry, noting in particular that such purchasers made up the majority of those purchasing land in individual tenure (either otrub or khutor).144 The official laudatory history of the liquidation process contained similar numbers, as displayed in Table 5.1. Given that these figures were aggregates for the empire as a whole, it is difficult to make solid judgments regarding who benefited the most beyond noting that in most regions, five desiatinas of ploughland in each of three fields (the fifteen-desiatina norm) had long been considered a complete economy in an open field system. Using this as a point of comparison, the vast majority of liquidated land clearly went to meet the needs of the land-hungry. Purchase by landless peasants alone accounted for more than one fifth of liquidated land, two thirds of which was purchased as parcels in individual tenure. The focus of the project was thus on elevating those in need to a norm rather than investing in those already getting by (as measured by landholding). As the Land Bank noted in its review of the liquidation process, input from the temporary branches, land settlement commissions, and zemstvos emphasized the importance of establishing on purchased land “average households, primarily from the number of land hungry and landless peasants who have not severed their ties with the village and agricultural labor.”145

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Table 5.1 Figures for 1908–1909 on the distribution of land held by purchasers of bank land prior to purchase (missing data on 5,364 households)* Number of purchasers by type of land tenure Land held by purchasers prior to purchase

Individual householders Co-ops Communes Total

As % total purchasers

Landless

14,565

7,693

1,199

23,457

22.1

< 1.5 des.

11,230

4,833

1,664

17,727

16.7

1.5–3 des.

10,048

6,012

4,070

20,130

18.9

3–6 des.

9,018

8,942

5,811

23,771

22.4

6–9 des.

3,321

4,921

2,465

10,707

10.1

9–15 des.

2,052

3,452

2,246

7,750

7.3

> 15 des.

734

1,270

756

2,760

2.5

*Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, 35. Note that this was distribution of ploughland only.

As Rittikh and Krivoshein reported after a 1910 inspection tour of the lower Volga, “the move to individual tenure” was “especially strong in the black earth steppe areas among land hungry peasants and darstvenniki, and has generally been resisted by peasants with lots of land and livestock.”146 As noted by the 1910 publications detailing the liquidation of the Kozlovsko-Vorotynskoe, Petropavlovskoe, and Plotitsynskoe properties as khutors and otrub settlements in Saratov’s Serdobsk district, the purchasers were “of average well-being” (Kozlovsko-Vorotynskoe purchasers) or “of average or below average” condition (Plotitsynskoe purchasers). Regarding Petropavlovskoe purchasers, the compilers of the brochure indicated that of the sixty-two purchasers who bought one or more (depending on family size) otrub parcels of fourteen to eighteen desiatinas (depending on soil quality), more than half had been landless or had held less than 1.5 desiatinas prior to their purchase. In all three cases, the majority of the purchasers had relocated to the newly platted khutors and otrub settlements from local villages. Sales of the Plotitsynskoe property included a large minority of migrants from Kiev province (25 percent of the sales).147 These model Stolypin peasants were those operating average or impoverished household economies who had been lifted up by the agrarian reform – a trend that appeared to satisfy the state and justify its actions.

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Rittikh (among others) had a different conception of the peasants who should be selected to farm the model rural economy being constructed out of the liquidation project. Noting that the dissolution of noble estates (the source of much of the land being liquidated) had dissipated the cultural strength of the agrarian economy, Rittikh suggested that some existing economically well-off peasants – the ones typically referred to as “kulaks” and by other derogatory names, who “in the majority of cases represent in themselves a simple type of strong good masters” – might eventually replace the departing nobles by forming a contingent of “Russian farmers” holding fifty to one hundred desiatinas of land. Why limit how much land anyone could buy? Doing so only demonized those rich peasants who, by accumulating wealth, had demonstrated that they were the very sort of economically “strong” peasants the state needed. Shouldn’t such proven economic entities be allowed to accumulate as much land as they could afford, not simply as much as they could work?148 This was one of the few suggestions in Rittikh’s report that never got any traction. Liquidation in strategically critical areas in the northwest and Polish provinces, where the state was keen to increase the number and economic vitality of Russian and Orthodox peasants, was an exception. Here, liquidators shifted after two years to prioritizing buyers with cash and inventory on hand.149 There is some indication that Rittikh may have been right. A review of the liquidation process two years out asked specifically for information about the resale of the liquidated lands. In many cases, resale was the result of crop failure and the inability to make payments and survive. Some resales represented savvy business decisions by peasant purchasers that bordered on the speculation the government had sought to avoid (e.g., in Warsaw province). In other cases, the purchaser’s family outgrew the property (e.g., in Vil’no province). For Samara province (which had the highest level of resale, at nearly 5,000 desiatinas) as well as for Saratov, the biggest cause of resale, outside of crop failure, was failure to come up with the required 5 percent down payment by the end of the threeyear rent-to-own period.150 The government’s wager on converting the landless and land-hungry into solid average peasants was, in at least in some cases, a losing bet. To publicize its success, officials put Stolypin peasants on display in a number of ways during the celebration of the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. The Saratov branch of the Peasant Land Bank

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published a glossy booklet for its booth at the Serdobsk District Zemstvo Agricultural and Crafts Exhibition to show those peasants off to visitors and superiors. The booklet contained a table (appearing here as Table 5.2) illustrating the peasant transition from poverty (most purchasers had been landless or land-hungry) to a solid existence, from land-hungry to Stolypin strong. Having been provided with sufficient allotments through purchase, these peasant households were prospering and indeed better off than their communal neighbours by various indicators: the average number of horses held by these peasant households exceeded that of communal peasants by one horse, and their annual net income from each otrub parcel reached 660 rubles. Their economic lives had achieved sufficiency. GUZiZ exceeded the Saratov bank branch’s efforts to celebrate the Romanovs, staging an agriculture competition and publishing a multivolume series of contest winners’ achievements, including photographs of the winners and their exemplary economies. Of the 1,382 entries, G U Z iZ awarded 144 first-prize winners a purse of 300 rubles and 162 second-prize winners a purse of 200 rubles. Of the contest winners in European Russia, 196 were farming reorganized allotment land, 49 land purchased through the Peasant Bank, 3 land purchased privately, and 5 rented state land. Women ran two of the winning households. G U Z iZ presented the contest winners to the public in these publications to better acquaint readers with the fruits of programs designed to increase the income of smallholding economies. Each winner’s story told the tale of a peasant family that, by virtue of the improvement in their landholding and organization – access to sufficient land held as otrub or khutor – had been able to improve their lives and income, gradually incorporating modern methods of husbandry by attending local courses or through other forms of agronomic assistance. Most importantly, the winners demonstrated not only success but also sufficiency as “peasant labor economies,” and were doing so through their own family labour. These Stolypin peasants, the strong, were no longer impoverished, yet neither were they village exploiters. They were happily in the middle, secured by norms applied adeptly to order the village of the future.

C o n c l u s ion George Yaney’s “urge to mobilize” was an urge to normalize, a quest to establish the same principles of sufficiency that had guided policy

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Table 5.2 Changes in landholding in Serdobsk district, Saratov province, as a result of Peasant Land Bank sales* Number of landholders before purchase

Number of landholders after purchase

Landless

507 or 21.1%

0

< 1.5 des.

346 or 14.4%

0

1.5–3 des.

452 or 18.8%

0

3–6 des.

563 or 23.4 %

0

6–9 des.

335 or 13.9%

4 or 0%

9–15 des.

163 or 6.8%

191 or 7.9%

15–25 des.

38 or 1.6%

1547 or 64.5%

1

663 or 27.6%

2405 or 100%

2405 or 100%

Amount of land

25 or more des. TOTA L

* From Serdobskaia Uezdnaia Zemskaia Sel’sko-Khoziaistvennaia i Kustarnaia Vystavka. Otdel Saratovskago Otdeleniia Krest’ianskago Pozemel’nago Banka. 1913, 28, 35 in RGIA f. 592, op. 1, d. 519, l. 141, 144–5.

towards the peasantry for more than a century. The “liking for squares” associated with the Stolypin reforms entailed more than engineering land resources into consolidated plots with surveyed boundaries to make rural Russia more visible from a state perspective, and tapping the supposed inherent monarchism of the peasantry by planting firmly within it the stolid mindset of property ownership. As seen in the process of liquidating land under the Peasant Land Bank’s purview, the social engineering aspects of the project extended to norming the size of the peasant economy as well, creating a rural economy of peasant households centred on the “average” family economy of a given locale and located in newly arranged rural developments of homesteads and/or new nucleated settlements surrounded by otrub parcels and sharing other resources in common. The normed land allotment reflected long-held expectations about what the peasant economy had been in the past and what it could be in the future. The wager on the strong was a wager on history, but in an even riskier sense, it was a wager on the norm, a wager on the average, a wager that a middle peasant family (measured in terms of sufficient access to land) farming a consolidated plot of land with its own family labour could provide the agricultural productivity and political stability required to definitively answer the empire’s agrarian question. These

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were the peasants the state sought to create, largely out of the same landless and land-hungry peasants perceived as constituting a threat to order. Thus, the goal was to create the peasants the state wanted while at the same time meeting the needs of the landless and landhungry (and the demands of their advocates) by facilitating their acquisition of land from the bank on the state’s terms. The “strong” were not those who had demonstrated superior economic ability, but those in need who might have the potential to make due as middle peasants. The Stolypin project was a bet that households adequately endowed with the right amount of land would be both economically viable and politically stable. Given the commune’s defenders on both ends of the political spectrum, perhaps the most radical thing that officials did – like members of the editing commissions before them – was find this middle ground. The Land Bank provided a mechanism for the state to carry out a compensated and non-compulsory alienation of noble land for redistribution to land-hungry peasants on its own terms. The main beneficiaries of this were not the noble sellers, but largely the peasant purchasers, for whom the bank guaranteed a purchase price dictated by the land’s productivity under peasant husbandry rather than the raging prices of the local land market. The reforms still embraced the same state commitment to providing peasants access to sufficient land, as well as the same moral economy of sufficiency measured in terms of keeping the household’s available labour supply occupied or meeting the consumption needs of the average peasant household in any given locale. This was even the case for individuals who had chosen to opt out of allotments in 1861. Suggestions inside and outside of government that limiting peasant landholding by norm was restraining economic development went unheeded. In the emancipation process the state had supplanted the serf-owner, taking on or reassigning his economic and administrative obligations; now, through the application of norms, the Stolypin process was supplanting the commune as a guarantee of a new sufficiency. Policy aimed at constructing a peasant agrarian economy that, as in the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” would be “just right.” This “Goldilocks” principle was rooted in the Emancipation, continued through subsequent legislation aimed at regulating peasant economic life, and reached its apogee with the implementation rules of the Stolypin project itself. Notwithstanding the rhetoric, the strong and sober were not to become too strong, and the peasantry as a soslovie were still to have guaranteed access to

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land. A sufficient nadel was the first step towards thinking in terms of productivity while at the same time retaining a social safety net. It was also a moral and civic entitlement. In their efforts to provide sufficiency by applying norms, the Stolypin reforms followed the established trajectory of agrarian reform. The application of norms also became a means for bringing about social justice, presaging their application to land and other items during and beyond 1917.

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6 Land Norms as Social Justice in Revolution, Civil War, and Beyond

Historians have disagreed in their evaluations of the success of Stolypin’s reform project. The state’s own metrics changed over time, remaining consistent only in their inclusion of the number of landless and land-hungry served, as well as the number of households completing certain stages of the consolidation process. Based on various measures, by time the First World War broke out roughly two thirds of peasants owned land on an individual basis and around 10 percent had completed the process of consolidating their strips into khutor or otrub holdings (although it is unclear how many of these consolidations were actually relocations to purchased land). Nearly 40 percent of all households had applied for state assistance with some aspect of land reorganization by 1914 – an indication that the reforms had succeeded in convincing peasants that consolidation, not additional allotments, was the best way forward. Notwithstanding ongoing resistance to the resettlement of outsiders on Land Bank land in Samara and elsewhere, officials had some cause to believe that peasants were responding favourably to the reform and that the reform’s momentum would continue, even though the finance ministry remained intransigent when it came to incurring state debt to provide peasants with credit for improvements or allowing them to secure credit by mortgaging their allotments freely.1 Again, the state’s fiscal needs prevailed, and those required land allotments’ guarantee of sufficiency. Nonetheless, looking back from the perspective of August 1914, with their hands on the numbers from the annual reports of the Peasant Land Bank and the Main Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture (GUZ iZ ), and with pictures arrayed before them of successful peasant farmers from the tercentenary contest, officials saw

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evidence that the agrarian question had been solved. It is easy to see why they though so – who doesn’t want to believe their own numbers? On top of this, some of the government’s most vocal opponents, including agrarian professionals, had either made their peace with the reform or been sufficiently distracted by one or another pressing issue to at least give the appearance of de facto support for the new rural normal.2 Yet after the autocracy collapsed in February 1917, it became clear that despite perceived gains in addressing land hunger and changing peasant attitudes towards property and traditional husbandry, Stolypin’s solution to the agrarian question had done little to blunt peasants’ and others’ belief that those who worked the land with their own labour were entitled to a land allotment from the state. The tendency towards, and preference for, state solutions – gosudarstvennost’ or “state-mindedness” – rooted in eighteenth-century cameralism and its notion of “public property” and the commonweal grew stronger over the course of the nineteenth century as the state positioned itself (with much of educated society’s implicit or explicit blessing) as the only entity that could preserve Russia’s strength and stability amidst a sea of parochial interests in a manner that protected vulnerable peasants from the predations of speculators and socialists.3 As we have seen, statistics and history had established precedent, reinforced expectations, and provided metrics for defining the state’s moral obligations and measuring its success. Thus, even after the turn to consolidated individual peasant property, the normed land allotment remained a key technocratic tool for pursuing and protecting the state’s fiscal interests, besides objectifying its moral commitment to the peasantry. Moreover, the war transformed this nadel into a civic entitlement above and beyond the general scope of the state’s established moral obligations. Furthermore, as a civic entitlement, land – like bread and fuel under wartime constraints – demanded the fairness and administrative rationality that norms offered. So we should not be surprised that many of those with expert knowledge of the peasant economy – Peshekhonov, Groman, Chaianov, and so on – engaged directly in the process of norming the wartime economy.4 The government reinforced the status of the nadel as a civic entitlement by creating an atmosphere of normed entitlements connected to wartime sacrifice – from stipends paid to soldiers’ wives (soldatki), to land rewards for St George’s Cross recipients, to decrees that deprived enemy aliens of land and stipulated its sale to peasants through the Land Bank. As Colleen Moore has demonstrated, rumours

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that the government would reward wartime service with land abounded among peasants in the trenches and in the rear as they interpreted wartime decrees and experiences in the context of their own expectations. When the peasant army began to melt away in the summer and fall of 1917, the desire to secure land motivated desertion, in tandem with the horrors of war.5 The idea of property – even in its restricted sense – had failed to provide a unifying principle across the political spectrum that transcended the idea of the nadel. A well-established land allotment mentalité was central to a moral approach to agrarian reform that by 1917 had taken strong hold among conservatives, liberals, socialists, and the objects of reform – peasants – alike. The normed nadel stood ready to hand as a measure of social justice. This mindset persisted throughout revolution and civil war, reflecting a consensus that the agrarian future rested, at least for the moment, on the peasantry. Anyone claiming exercise of state authority was going to have to ensure peasants sufficient allotments. This was not an exercise in “administrative utopia,” nor was it a statist attempt “to impose social change on a people through administrative means,”6 nor was it simply a reflection of the radicalization of 1917 such that everything had to “be socialist.”7 Rather, the sufficient nadel, properly allotted by norm, loomed as a restoration of the promise of 1861 that peasants, their advocates, and society as a whole expected to be kept based on established tradition. The old regime’s nadel, the product of servile life, persisted in the post-autocratic world as an expression of rational resource management and as an approach to meting out social justice. Allotment norms as a measure of social justice provided a technocratic (and thus supposedly value-neutral) solution to the land question rooted in earlier attempts at reform that met diverse political needs in a fragmented sociopolitical world.

T h e M a in L a n d C ommi ttee a n d A l l o t m e n t by Norm We should not be surprised that the Stolypin reforms failed to have a long-term impact on attitudes towards agrarian reform and property. In many ways they were as much of a hothouse hybrid as the constitutional autocracy within which they came to be. That peasant property was not property in the same civil sense as non-peasant property was not quite as blatant an oxymoron as “constitutional autocracy,”

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but it came close.8 The First World War shattered the hothouse glass, demonstrating that, for all its beauty in the eyes of some creators and supporters, the attempt to save autocracy by grafting onto it the branch of representative institutions had weakened rather than strengthened an autocracy that was already withering under Russia’s efforts to maintain itself a modern great power. Indeed, the autocrat himself was withering, having been confronted by a mass politics that neither he nor others from his class could understand and by the same crises precipitated by total war that had erupted throughout the continent. Nicholas II’s abdication left the country with another unstable hybrid. The Provisional Government was an executive body of liberals dedicated to civil liberties, autocratic foreign policy, and management of the masses that had supplied the revolution’s force. In many ways the Petrograd Soviet, the autocracy’s other successor, found itself in a similar position, except that rather than worrying about its electoral legitimacy, the Soviet worried instead about its role in the historical moment. Pressed by an array of immediate popular demands, not the least of which were for food and fuel, both institutions were content to avoid taking steps to address such issues as the land question, believing that these matters could legitimately be addressed only by a body with greater authority: a Constituent Assembly, which had been promised in the near future. Land reform topped the list of expectations that the autocracy’s end bequeathed to the Provisional Government. By the middle of March 1917, prefacing all its acts with the phrase “pending the decision of the Constituent Assembly,” the Provisional Government had issued decrees nationalizing udel lands and the properties of the emperor himself. Two days later, on 19 March, the government announced the creation of land committees to deter arbitrary land seizures and to create an apparatus to prepare a land reform project for submission to the future Constituent Assembly. A Main Land Committee (Glavnyi Zemel’nyi Komitet; G ZK) under the agriculture ministry sat at the apex of a structure of (theoretically) subordinate land committees on the provincial, district, and township (volost’) levels.9 The GZ K brought together government and zemstvo experts as well as political activists engaged with the peasants and their economy. Several members, such as A.A. Kaufman, had experience in all three realms. Many members, including the chair, A.S. Posnikov, objected to the Stolypin reforms even while embracing their goal of increasing peasant productivity.10 In many ways the G Z K and the

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local committees mimicked (with the addition of township committees) the autocracy’s land settlement commissions, even down to the extent that they, too, were asked to assist in establishing local norms. All committees were to include local experts (zemstvo agronomists, statisticians, etc.) that the GZK deemed best situated to ascertain local conditions and to collect the necessary data for shaping agrarian reforms and applying them at the local level.11 The members of these land committees overlapped with non-governmental professional groups such as the League of Agrarian Reforms (Liga Agrarnykh Reform) and represented most political affiliations from centre-right to left. Many members were also active in the Petrograd and provincial peasant congresses that convened throughout 1917. These intersections were fraught with political tensions, but they also represented and transmitted a common knowledge base derived from academic and administrative field work with the peasant economy and from the preceding decade’s discussions of agrarian reform. Most members, such as N.P. Makarov and N.K. Volkov, had some sort of advanced training in agrarian economics. There existed a strong consensus, based on experience, that land norms represented the best means by which the agrarian fruits of revolution could be allotted to meet the peasantry’s needs, fulfill their revolutionary aspirations, and ensure a just land distribution. Revolution and the establishment of the GZK marked a triumph of the experts, who, freed from the constraints of the old regime, could now begin to position peasants in a single rural economy of smallholders.12 Everything they had spent their professional lives doing – from zemstvo statistical work to agronomy – had prepared them for this moment. As the Socialist Revolutionary (S R) N.Ia. Bykhovskii noted, allotment of land by norm was the first step towards modernizing the agrarian economy (intensification) and giving 10 million landless peasants access to land – the first step in developing the peasant labour economy as the foundation of Russia’s agricultural future. Land allotments, norms, agrarian improvement, and social justice all went hand in hand.13 In this time of war, revolution, a food supply crisis, an imploding economy, and an impatient population, the G ZK set about collecting and preparing the requisite land reform materials for consideration by the Constituent Assembly. A number of key issues confronted and divided GZK members. Would peasants become landowners or merely receive rights of use? If not the former, what about the fate of the Stolypin “separators”?14 On what terms should the alienation of

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private land take place? Who should be allotted land? Should it be anyone who desired to farm it with their own labour or, given limited resources, only those households currently engaged in farming?15 Despite differences, widespread consensus existed on a number of fronts. First, members saw themselves as experts charged with righting the mistakes of the 1861 emancipation – with correcting the perceived injustices of the past that had been demonstrated by statistical studies and popularized in journal publications since the 1870s but that the old regime had failed to ameliorate. Second, there was a consensus that, with the exception of model farms and specialized forms of husbandry, all land was now part of single national land fund for allotment to those who worked it. Lands held by various state institutions and private landholders alike would be subject to alienation and redistribution. By extension, most (like their predecessors) agreed that any “solution” to the land question must be a national one, albeit one that carefully considered local circumstances. Finally, they agreed that the best means of ensuring an equal and just redistribution of land throughout the country was by establishing land allotment norms that recognized the particularisms of local economies. Thus the G ZK set about preparing its reform proposal using long-established procedures (see previous chapters). It assigned key questions to subcommittees whose memberships overlapped deeply with one another and with the League of Agrarian Reforms. Mindful of the failings – real and imagined – of the Emancipation, mindful as well of the role that agricultural professionals had played in exposing those failings, and committed to creating a national program of land reform aimed at finding a just solution to the problem of insufficient allotments, the experts of 1917 worked in the shadow of 1861. They saw their work as a moral imperative. G ZK member N.P. Oganovskii had noted before the war that Ianson and others had demonstrated “that the greatest causes of the pauperization of the peasant consist in the insufficiency of land allotments, significantly reduced [urezannykh] by the emancipation.”16 Nothing could dissuade peasant advocates from this perspective. Aware that history would measure their achievements, Oganovskii and his peers did not want to find out twenty years later that their reform had resulted in an “insufficient allotments” redux. The shadow of 1861 appeared in other forms as well. As N. Ozeretskovskii noted: “The very name of these institutions [land committees] reminds us of the time of the reform of 1861 when prior to the emancipation of peasants were

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established … a Main Committee … and then 48 provincial committees.” From his perspective, pomeshchiki had populated these local committees in 1861 and the deficiencies of the Emancipation had been the result of their narrow class interests. “Different hands” would guide the work of the current committees, thus presenting an opportunity to redress these deficiencies in the interests of the people.17 Finally, memories of 1861 hovered over the process in other ways; for example, there was early consideration of introducing “peace arbitrators” (mirovyie posredniki) to perform the same role in regulating land relations as they had under the Emancipation; and there was brief consideration of compensating private owners for alienated land through a redemption system.18 As in 1861, some reformers questioned how alienation would affect state credit institutions, given that over half the land to be alienated as part of the proposed reform carried mortgages.19 The ghosts of the banking crises that had shaped the Emancipation and the Stolypin reforms still haunted the reform process. It might seem surprising that reformers framed their work in the context of the Emancipation, given the emphasis by the state and zemstvos on intensification as a solution to rural crisis. Yet as we have seen, reformers in and out of government recognized that intensification required land reform first, both in terms of reorganization and in terms of ensuring household access to sufficient land resources. The revolution had sharpened the focus on land reform because peasants now expected land and because it provided experts with the opportunity to create a better material basis for an improved rural economy by eliminating the last remaining constraints on conceptualizing all land as a public good. With few data and resources, the 1861 reformers had hoped to achieve little more than a perception among peasants of improved living conditions. This time, the experts charged with drafting the reform proposal were in a far better position from an information standpoint, and saw themselves as poised to establish the material basis for a new agrarian future. As N.Ia. Bykhovskii noted, given the historical moment and the “grandiose” extent of the territory, “the land reform must in and of itself be highly grandiose.” He was mindful of the reform’s national importance but also of the need to attend to the local.20 Like their predecessors, these reformers operated from the assumption that the state should ensure that allotments were sufficient for meeting household needs. They knew that, with the revolution swirling around them, they would be required as

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a matter of social justice to find means of allotting land that peasants would perceive as more accurate and more just than in 1861. What stands out in this process is that the experts refashioned the allotment of land by norm, making use of new information while attempting to incorporate measures of both consumption and labour use, and that they did so with little internal dissention. They were hoping to create a mechanism that would position Russia to develop a vibrant and productive national peasant economy. The main task of designing a way to allot the national land reserve fell to a GZK commission chaired by the S.L. Maslov. The commission heard reports by agrarian economists N.P. Makarov, B.V. Volkov, and B.D. Brutskus and debated these at three meetings in July and August 1917 as the country see-sawed between political extremes.21 The assembled experts were not constrained by the need to preserve noble landholdings (as had been the case in the past), but rather by deteriorating circumstances in the countryside and by the knowledge that available land resources would not allow them to allot land with any sort of arithmetic equality. In many ways the G Z K commission discussions reproduced the 1907 discussions conducted by the Land Settlement Committee. Makarov’s report became the principal basis for the commission’s resolutions, which were passed and submitted to the G Z K on 24 August. Makarov argued that the norms of 1861 would be inappropriate in 1917, even though they recognized key geographic variations, for by 1917 it was clear that not enough arable land existed to apply them.22 He then outlined the strengths and weaknesses of allotting land by a consumption (potrebitel’naia) norm and by a labour (trudovaia) norm. Allotting land according to a consumption norm (the amount of ploughland needed to meet the consumption needs of an average household, based on average area yields and market prices) would result in some households holding more land than they could work. Allotting land according to a labour norm (ensuring households access to the ploughland required to occupy its entire labour force during peak agricultural periods without recourse to hired labour) would introduce a number of additional variables such as the intensification of the household’s economic organization and variations in the agricultural calendar. Given regional variations, and given also that there was not enough land to allot households a full amount according to either of these norms, Makarov called for a combined consumption–labour norm (an average based on land held by groups of households in each region that met their

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consumption needs sufficiently and that employed their full labour force without recourse to hired labour) and that would include consideration of a norm for non-agricultural income (promysly). He proposed that the state resolve any remaining inequalities in land distribution through migration and the tax system. Lack of resources, in his view, also meant that only households currently engaged in farming should receive land (as opposed to more radical calls that all who wanted land should receive an allotment).23 Volkov agreed with Makarov’s conclusions, although he argued the case for the more radical Socialist Revolutionary position of a universal right to land and the elimination of the requirement for peasants to secure non-agricultural income.24 The report by economist Boris D. Brutskus spoke against Makarov’s proposals and offered a more reflective assessment of the situation. Brutskus argued that the massive project of calculating and applying norms was too complicated and divorced from current rural realities. Peasants were thinking only in local terms and would not tolerate the resettlement of outsiders that Makarov’s plan was proposing. Nor would they tolerate any reduction in the land they currently held on the basis of non-­ agricultural income, even if the Constituent Assembly established and sanctioned such norms. Brutskus urged a more realistic assessment of the peasant perspective. Given that peasants already farmed most of the available land, the simplest course would be to give the land to those tilling it. Brutskus lamented that allotting peasants land under current circumstances would reduce grain production and reverse recent agronomic gains by encouraging extensive cultivation.25 In the discussion of the reports, only Brutskus and A.Ia. Piletskii flatly spoke out against norms. Most found something to quibble about in Makarov’s report but accepted norms as the best and most rational means of carrying out land redistribution. Maslov criticized Brutskus’s proposal for offering little beyond the failed allotment process of 1861 (i.e., for going with what was expedient rather than determining norms scientifically). A.A. Kaufman – who had experience in land settlement in Siberia from an academic and ministerial perspective – attempted to synthesize the two positions, calling for norms derived from “real life” that could eventually be verified.26 The agrarian economist A.N. Chelintsev hinted that he agreed with Brutskus; he objected mainly to provisions whereby use of hired labour would serve as an indicator that landholding exceeded household labour capacity. He also thought that Brutskus gave peasants

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too little credit for engaging in improved tillage after an allotment process.27 Most disagreements focused not on the use of norms (or even how they should be calculated), but rather on the questions of who should establish them (should it be national or local institutions?), to what territorial units they should be applied, the extent to which non-agricultural income should be factored into the equation, and whether migration might be used to facilitate land equalization.28 Those disagreeing with the idea of norms did not utterly deny their usefulness or think them unjust. Brutskus saw norms as futile, but he also admitted they would be useful when distributing lands not already under peasant cultivation. The main objection to the use of norms was actually an accurate assessment of current events. As N.P. Oganovskii noted, norms were expected by many but might not be in tune with political realities or with the peasants themselves. Better to simply let peasants till what they were tilling, allot that small portion outside of this by some sort of norm, and then get on with the business of encouraging intensification.29 Despite these concerns, the commission approved and submitted to the G ZK final resolutions that called for the national land reserve to be allocated according to land norms “based on the land utilization of the average local consumer-labor holding as determined (based on local conditions) by an adequate satisfaction of needs, the utilization of a family’s labor force for agricultural work, and the absence of regularly hired agricultural workers.” Also, in areas where non-­ agricultural income played an important economic role, “the effect of these earnings should be taken into consideration in the land allotment process, except in those cases where the scarcity of land fails to provide sufficiently high and stable incomes without such employment.”30 The commission was content with the idea that the amount of land allotted to the toiler should never fall below the subsistence level, nor should it exceed the level beyond which the household would require hired labour. This amounted to the same Goldilocks principle (i.e., the same guarantee of sufficiency) seen in the emancipation legislation and in reform proposals from the Stolypin period: enough land to keep peasant households in the “middle.” Professionals running local land committees reached conclusions that supported the GZ K ’s wager on the middle, confirming the difficulties of land reform and presaging the export of class struggle to the village and the means by which the land would be provided according to norm after October. The experienced zemstvo statistician and

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SR K.Ia. Vorob’ev (1866–1930) found himself in Simbirsk in 1917 chairing the Provincial Land Committee. Writing at the end of August 1917, he noted that despite previous state efforts to increase peasant landholdings (and evidently despite state attempts to limit the ability of rich peasants to exploit their neighbours), nearly 47 percent of peasant households in Simbirsk, based on zemstvo household inventories of 285,225 households conducted in 1910–11, held less than the ten desiatinas of ploughland required to satisfy the “average household’s” need for grain without resorting to purchases. This meant that “a little less than half of the individual peasant economies” in the province “are in the category of either absolutely landless [6.6%] or unconditionally land hungry [40.3%].” Another third of the population had access to land that barely met this minimum. In terms of sown area rather than allotment size, two-thirds of peasant households were land-hungry.31 Given that Simbirsk was, by his calculation, already densely populated, allotment by a labour norm was not possible despite its desirability. Application of a labour norm would leave the province more than one million desiatinas short of meeting the local population’s needs. However, using a norm based on the consumption needs of the average peasant family would satisfy all 1.7 ­million Simbirsk peasants and leave 227,532 desiatinas for experimental fields, model farms, pedigreed livestock farms, and other matters of state importance. This would require dispossessing not only private (i.e., non-allotment) lands, but also those of other peasants labelled by locals as “collectors of land” – fellow peasants who, despite state efforts to limit speculation, had purchased the allotments of the poor in order to rent them out.32 In the provinces as well as in Petersburg, a wager on the middle – on the consumption needs of the average peasant household – appeared to be the safest bet.

T h e P e asa n t ry a n d Land Norms Peasants had become used to looking to the state for solutions to their land needs since at least the Emancipation, and recent studies have tied their turn to violence in 1905–07 (which became a precedent for the seizure of estates in 1917) to state failure, particularly the Duma’s promise to meet their needs.33 Petitions for additional allotments of ploughland or some other type of arable persisted throughout 1917. But the agriculture ministry chose to delay decision on all but a few of these petitions pending comprehensive land reform by the

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Constituent Assembly. This only heightened the frustration among the peasantry, who were acculturated to using official processes; this in turn contributed to their transformation from petitioners to activists.34 Having been mobilized by the war, the legacy of 1905, and their participation in GUZiZ land settlement commission work, peasants soon enough grasped that they enjoyed increased autonomy in this new world in which the state’s inability to respond to petitions existed side by side with an inability to coerce.35 Peasant congresses viewed land reform as an intentional state reversal of the cut-offs (otrezki) of 1861, which would be an act of social justice that removed from owners “the part of land not worked by the owner’s own labour.”36 Of course, determining peasant voice can be difficult, but based on the resolutions of local peasant congresses and township land committees, peasants shared the G Z K ’s conceptualization of allotment norms as a mechanism of reform, expression of social justice, and corrective to the “insufficient allotments” of 1861, even if they differed on the question of whether the reform should aim primarily at local rather than national needs, and even if they shaped allotment norms to correspond with their local sense of need, lore, and justice.37 Local land committees based their actions on two sources of information, reflecting the bifurcation of authority after February between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. They submitted numerous requests for GZ K publications, particularly pamphlets on land distribution. More than 120 pages of correspondence with local land committees and other institutions in G ZK records are requests for its publications related to the establishment of local land committees and land norms – particularly reports on the latter by Makarov, Kaufman, and Chelintsev.38 Resolutions on the land question by national and local peasant congresses and soviets provided local committees with a second source of information. Peasant congresses, although populated by peasant deputies, tended to be driven by political activists seeking to woo peasant constituents and establish their land reform credentials.39 In the absence of clear direction, even local Provisional Government officials took their cues from these congresses and became dismayed as a split in the dominant S R party disrupted the semblance of stability provided by the First All-Russian Peasant Congress’s resolutions.40 The main thrust of the peasant congress resolutions, encapsulated in the First Congress’s May 1917 “Model Mandate” (based on a synthesis of 242 local mandates presented by deputies) called for the abolition of private property in land, its

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recognition as national property (consistent with past state hesitancy to privatize anything considered necessary for supporting the commonweal41), and the alienation of all land and inventory in private and state hands for distribution to, and use by, all desiring to work it with their own family labour (with the question of redemption to be decided by the Constituent Assembly). The distribution of alienated land among the labouring population was to be conducted on the basis of equality and in accordance with local conditions based on a labour or consumption norm, with periodic repartitions connected to the growth of the population under the guidance of both central and local institutions of self-governance, including the commune.42 Given that all of this was driven by socialist agitators and the commune, separators (especially those who were outsiders) didn’t stand a chance, even though their parcels reflected the same norms as were likely to be applied to a division of private property. V.A. Kosinskii, a Chuprov-trained economist, observing the peasant congress in his native Chernigov, noted the trepidation among some peasants the day after the congress closed as they came to realize the implications of its resolutions. Peasants in their villages had already purchased most of the noble land in the area such that many households already owned fifteen, twenty-five, or even up to forty desiatinas of land. As they slowly realized that the congress had best represented the interests of the landless, they wondered what would happen to them. Kosinskii noted that his eavesdropping revealed a portent of things to come: those without were going to take from those who had, regardless of their social estate (soslovie).43 Provincial peasant congress resolutions informed national ones, which transmitted them back to the provinces in an amalgamated form. The provincial land committees drew inspiration from both. There was often personnel overlap between the congresses and the land committees. The chair of the Mogilev Provincial Land Committee was an active participant in the province’s peasant congresses.44 Provincial and district land committees populated by (in addition to Provisional Government officials) zemstvo professionals and peasant activists diligently sought both to carry out the G Z K ’s information requests and to regulate land use in a manner conducive to grain production. The Samara provincial land committee illustrates this well. It managed land relations with “Temporary Rules of Land Use in Samara Province Prior to the Constituent Assembly,” which had been passed by the Second Samara Provincial Peasant Congress, which

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had agreed in its mid-July meeting to publish and distribute copies of the rules and to draft resolutions about their implementation. At the same time, the committee passed resolutions aimed at fulfilling G Z K requests.45 To the extent that the Samara provincial land committee’s actions were perhaps atypical, the difference stemmed from the fact that it had an exceptionally competent agricultural statistician in place who, having studied the question of land norms for more than ten years, presented a detailed report on norms for the committee’s consideration. Grigorii I. Baskin, working from the ideas of economist S.N. Iuzhakov, reached a similar conclusion as the G ZK: neither a labour norm nor a consumption norm on its own adequately accounted for all peasant households’ ability to use their available labour supply to meet their needs, and moreover, neither norm on its own could equitably achieve a desired increase in households’ well-being.46 Baskin suggested that while typical indicators such as the number of adult male workers and draft animals were important, the transition of many peasant households from a “natural economy” to a monetized one meant that any analysis aimed at determining norms reflective of both labour and consumption needed to consider distance to markets (and hence actual market participation) as a key analytical indicator. Baskin’s report also raised the issue of non-agricultural employment and the role such income should play in determining the allotment norm for each locale.47 Accepting his analysis, the provincial committee required district and township committees to obtain answers to questions beyond those posed by the GZK for deriving and applying a norm-based land reform. The questions amounted to a public opinion survey of attitudes towards key questions associated with land reform raised by Baskin’s report – particularly those questions that were aimed at determining who should get land (adult males only? absentees? newcomers? settled wage labourers?), whether or not those with non-agricultural income should be allotted land, attitudes towards the commune and communal reorganization, attitudes towards Stolypin separators, and opinions on the size of consumption and labour land allotment norms.48 Unfortunately, we do not have the responses to these questions from Samara’s district and township land committees. We do, however, have the resolutions of township and district land committees from other provinces, which reveal the extent to which peasants expected and defined allotment by norm. Peasants dominated the township

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committees. In Vologda province, the Golovets township land committee, meeting at the end of June, called for the transfer of all land to the labouring peasantry and for continued state developmental assistance for the township’s agricultural economy, which was to include supplying households with the implements needed for farming and forestry. The township committee also called on the state to use its authority to transfer forests suitable for clearing as hayfields in neighbouring Razgorts township to Golovets township, as Razgorts, according to its assessment, already had adequate hayfields and as the desired forests were located too far from Razgorts to do the inhabitants any good.49 Similarly, the Semeikov township land committee requested agronomic assistance in its resolutions, called for each peasant to have at least six desiatinas of land in one spot; also, given that the district’s poor soil quality required “more agronomic cultivation,” it asked the state to provide agricultural implements at reduced prices.50 In essence, committee resolutions asked the state to continue its project of reordering the countryside and to provide funds for improving husbandry. This latter aspect of the Stolypin reforms seems to have rooted well. Besides expecting state assistance in creating a new agrarian order, the township committees turned to allotment norms as the proper means for allotting land, expressing these sometimes as labour norms and sometimes with no stated rationale at all. Thus Vologda’s Veprev township land committee resolved that all land belongs to the labouring peasantry as a whole according to a norm of cultivation from the general state land fond no greater than 7 ½ des. per good, strong worker able to cultivate the following: 3 ½ desiatinas of arable land, based on 28 working days in a month, ½ desiatina sown in winter crops, ½ desiatina in spring crops and ½ desiatina of fallow; besides this it is necessary to have a reserve of ½ desiatina per person and 1½ desiatinas of pastureland. This is all based on extended ­experience from a purely practical point of view. In addition, all require access for purposes of heating and building repairs to a necessary amount of either communal or state forest reserves.51 Vologda’s Sychev township land committee issued similar resolutions, calling for land from the state land fund to be allotted according to a “norm of cultivation [po norme obrabotki].”52 In Poltava the Mashev

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township land committee, facing a flood of returning soldiers, resolved on 23 July to temporarily prioritize soldiers in the allotment process (whether out of patriotism or fear is not known) by establishing a “norm of [land] rental per household” of up to six desiatinas depending on that household’s ability to work the land with its own labour. In Riazan’ the Andreev township land committee, reflecting the ongoing debate in all of the township’s communal assemblies, resolved that the “labor norm for the alienation of land” should be applied equally to all farmers, including nobles opting to participate under these terms.53 In other words, even prior to the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land, peasants were applying the language of norms to the division of the available land fund. That fund included the uncultivated lands they had already seized on the basis of their interpretations of Provisional Government decrees on alleviating food and fodder shortages.54 Although justified in legal terms, the seizures and the application of norms were not part of a national plan, but simply a means of absorbing what land existed.55

L a n d N o r m s a n d t h e Red Reparti ti on The Bolsheviks inherited the “land norm” idea (and the professional staff of the G Z K and the agriculture ministry), although for Lenin and his colleagues, land norms corresponded more to the needs of the moment than to their vision of an agrarian future of large-scale agriculture.56 A decade earlier, Lenin had viewed the “norm” idea as evidence of a Kadet desire to preserve a pomeshchik economy behind a veil of reform and Populist timidity.57 All of this changed in October 1917: the new regime nationalized all lands and now required a means to distribute them. Despite their own plans and their suspicion of peasants, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to make land norms their own, especially given their alliance with the Left S Rs, their reliance on existing professionals, and the reality of events in the countryside. The Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies Decree on Land of 26 October 1917 specified land reform terms that, except for blatantly abolishing private property in land, bore a striking resemblance to pre-October proposals, including aspects of the plans floated in advance of the Stolypin reforms. “Highly cultured” estates such as gardens, nurseries, and orchards were to be kept intact as state property, as were pedigreed livestock herds. Those capable of working land were to receive equal use rights based on local land use

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conditions and either labour or consumption norms. State-sponsored migration by volunteers or discredited commune members (e.g., deserters) would eventually alleviate land shortages in the most densely populated regions. By December there were decrees creating the machinery for land distribution: a main land committee supervising local committees charged with inventorying and distributing local resources to qualified recipients.58 The state was to serve as the primary agent for transforming the national economy and, through the local soviets, as overseer of the process of meting out social justice. Social justice would entail a grand reconciliation of the sins of 1861, symbolized by issuance of the Basic Law on the Socialization of Land on the anniversary of the Emancipation (19 February 1918). The new statute, which aimed to control spontaneous land seizures to ensure that land redistributions corresponded to state and peasant needs, reflected experts’ realization that recent events had increased the complexities of implementation. Despite attempts by the centre to gather information and manage the process, including sending surveyors and other professionals out to villages, the actions of local communes prevailed.59 As the food situation deteriorated and urbandwellers and demobilizing soldiers flooded villages, achieving equal land distributions that respected the labour principle and that improved households’ well-being made balancing labour and consumption norms more difficult and more important. Deciding what unit to use for determining norms was a challenge. “Revisional souls” were now obsolete, having been tossed into history’s dustbin by the revolution. Balancing allotment by “eaters” with the labour norm idea that land belonged to those who worked it themselves remained the administrators’ chief difficulty. The “labour norm” idea, with its emphasis on the “labouring peasantry” or the “labour economy,” clashed even more with a hungry population’s need for allotment norms based on consumption. Labour norms also proved problematic because they tended to favour large families, who were perceived as class enemies (kulaks). In practice, the right to eat outweighed the labour norm; thus the application of some sort of consumption norm – in some ways the most radical alternative – prevailed.60 In the aggregate, the amount of land gained by any one household was negligible, except in the steppe provinces. On average, peasants gained barely an acre of land.61 Elites consistently failed to understand the value of even the smallest additional parcel to a peasant household’s sense of security. At the same time (and despite jockeying within

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villages by households seeking to maximize their eligibility for additional land), over the course of 1918–20 landless and land-hungry peasants were able to improve their positions. As Atkinson put it (referring to the process of territorial consolidation under Ivan III), the Bolshevik state’s “regathering of the lands” led to a substantial levelling of rural society. In this sense, allotment according to norm had served the interests of social justice in that it addressed the chief complaints of peasants and their advocates. Bolshevik policy increasingly aimed towards an Aristotelian mean in land relations, despite rhetoric privileging poor households over others. “The distribution of land between laborers,” Article 12 stated, “must be carried out on equalizing-labor bases such that the consumption-labor norm pertaining in a given region to the historically formed system of land use does not exceed the labor capacity [trudosposobnosti] … of each individual household and, at the same time, would provide the possibility of a comfortable [bezbednogo] existence to the farmer’s family.”62 Aiming towards the middle, the instructions for determining norms specified guidelines for determining average production figures for all types of arable in a given region and average peasant landholding (including use of purchased and rented lands prior to 1917).63 They also marked a milestone in rural studies, in that experts finally agreed which household members should be counted as unable to work, and what portion of a worker women and older children would count as in labour norm calculations.64 Like the instructions to the Stolypin land settlement commissions, the Bolshevik instructions granted exceptions allowing allotments of land beyond the norm for households overburdened by non-workers, holding poor-quality existing allotments, or receiving poor-quality additional allotments. The Bolsheviks’ Basic Law paid a lot of attention to local particularisms despite their universalizing ideology. This reflected that law’s SR origins and the input of experts, who were anxious to ensure that redistributions reflected variations in soil quality and other factors at the local level. Perhaps they also realized that township committees were already in charge. In a few places, district officials created special organizations to establish norms – with or without the assistance of local experts. For example, Stavropol’ district established a special commission of representatives for this work, while Petrograd province invited communal representatives to serve as permanent members of the land department for determining the allotment norm. As we might

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expect, the local implementation of specialists’ meticulously crafted guidelines often fell apart due to the complexity of trying to adapt norms established for the “average” or “typical” family to different combinations of workers and “eaters” in individual households. According to one study, 108 of 132 districts simply used “eater” as the primary unit of land distribution. The labour norm tended to prevail in areas bordering European Russia. The central provinces claimed to be dividing land by “eater” but often simply followed the provisional land division made prior to the calculation and assignment of norms, which local officials viewed as in the interests of the poor. Local perceptions of who was in need often drove the process. In several cases, local peasants resisted the application of labour norms over consumption norms, believing that labour norms favoured kulak households. As such, consumption norms alone often prevailed.65 At the same time, evidence indicates that when peasant communities imposed their own divisions, they sought out state bodies to provide their decisions with legitimacy.66 Of the local particularisms experts considered, soil variations in provinces and districts were the most important. This complicated the allotment process, leading to the establishment of separate allotment norms for different soil categories. Before 1917, the use of soil data caused a certain amount of turmoil in zemstvo circles. Zemstvo statisticians factored soil quality into assessments but resisted the idea that this factor always outweighed social factors when land values were computed.67 Now that all land belonged to peasants, however, arguments about the particularisms of peasant husbandry were moot and soil quality became the primary factor in equitable distributions. Although some areas, such as Nizhnii-Novgorod province, attempted to make use of existing soil data, many local committees simply divided land into “black soil,” “transitional,” and “non-black soil” or “good,” “average,” and “poor” sectors, placing township land into each category based on ten-year harvest averages. Most instructions simply mentioned considering soil quality in calculations without specifying how; in most cases this resulted in considering soil quality just as communes did in their repartitions.68 At the end of the day, the most important factor affecting allotment norm size after October (as peasants had already realized over the summer of 1917) was simply the amount of land available for redistribution. Often, boards merely divided the amount of available land by the number of people or “eaters” employed in farming, making

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the norm essentially an arithmetic factor of the quantity of land and the density of the population. The norms established in many local statutes were reduced owing to a lack of available land, or at least available land near enough to needy households to be useful. In these cases land was often allotted in much the way it had been during the Emancipation – according to existing average allotment size. In some cases, officials remained in the same difficult position as their imperial predecessors in that population density rendered an equal redistribution on any basis nonsensical for all households would then be deprived of a sufficient allotment.69 Even if applying norms in the field proved difficult or impractical, however, the norms and instructions reflected the aims of the experts who had devised them. The concepts of “sufficiency” and the labour household prevailed, pointing not just to an equitable distribution of the new national land fund but also to a distribution designed to bolster the land-short at the expense of those who, by the rules, had too much. As noted by G Z K member P.N. Pershin, who chronicled these events after the Bolshevik coup, “norms of land use played a necessary role [in land redistribution] to the extent that they conveyed the interests of the poor and middle peasantry, supplying it with favorable conditions for the conduct of an economy and, along with the prohibition on hired labor, depriving the kulak strata of the village of agro-economic primacy.”70 Whatever the norms and however they were applied, their use strengthened the ranks of peasant households in the middle.71 As the Bolsheviks attempted to coalesce as a state with the capacity to extend its authority, land allotment norms represented the rational implementation of a class-based system of social justice (even if they did not benefit those identified as “poor” exclusively), although that system was often supplanted by material realities, local officials, and the peasants themselves.

L a n d N o r m s a n d the Whi tes That White governments turned to land norms and a commitment to labouring households (at least on paper) testifies to the deep penetration of the idea of norms into all levels of imperial society, a penetration facilitated by the fact that the White movement too had inherited its share of agrarian experts and technocrats from the old regime.72 When the generals bothered with such issues, White reform proposals all endorsed a transfer of land allotments and attached property rights

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to the labouring peasantry according to some concept of allotment norms. Noble property owners could find in norms a guarantee that they would at least retain some of their land – more if they could prove that theirs was an intensively farmed property or one employing a special form of husbandry. White leaders hoped that peasants would interpret their norms and property guarantees as an improvement over Bolshevik decrees. By 1918, however, compensation was a non-starter for most peasants, especially as Bolshevik land policies legitimated existing land seizures up to a given norm without requiring compensation to former owners. Norms were a convenient tool for White leaders when it came to walking the fine line between their noble officers and the peasants who fed them, but the White leadership’s inability to move beyond the idea of compensation doomed their reforms and any chance of peasant support. In Siberia, 1919 decrees by Admiral A.V. Kolchak guaranteed sowers a right to harvest the lands they had planted, even if such lands were subsequently returned to the owners, and offered the possibility of acquiring full property rights over sown lands for labouring peasant households.73 Kolchak (like other White commanders) apparently favoured a program of “khutorization.” The land decrees’ emphasis on “working peasant households” reflected the belief that there should be a connection between land allotments and the ability to work them without hired labour. In the Don Territory, Cossack resentment over the state’s award of land to Cossack bureaucrats in lieu of salary and hostility towards land speculators led to near unanimous support for seizing private lands for redistribution when the Krug for the Salvation of the Don met in July and August 1918.74 The resultant land reform law set norms for private property at thirty to fifty desiatinas, with land above this norm to be alienated and allotted to land-short Cossacks and native peasants free of charge. Owners would be compensated for buildings and improvements but not for the land itself. As with other White land reform programs, the need for grain and revenue distorted policy implementation. In the Don, free distribution turned into leasing in kind, and some parcels actually went up for auction, undermining the authorities’ credibility.75 The Volunteer Army’s land policies illustrate the White predicament and the use of land norms in the south. With a constitution focused on private property and the rule of law, and a governing council that never discussed land reform, it would seem that peasants had little chance of acquiring additional land.76 The influence of former landowners

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and those opposed to expropriation of any sort was strong among White leaders’ inner circles. At the same time, there is evidence that this should be interpreted less as an inherent antipathy to land reform and more as simply a statement of what the Kadet authors of the Volunteer Army’s constitution valued most: the rule of law and the primacy of the Constituent Assembly in addressing reform issues.77 White proposals, in the south and elsewhere, aimed essentially at a “consolidation of the average [household] economy” as the basis for a stable and productive countryside – a wager on the middle peasant, who would have enough to maintain a stable economic life but not enough to potentially exploit neighbours.78 General Anton I. Denikin’s attempts to gain peasant support through land reform aimed to fulfill the aspirations of landowners, peasants, and procurement officers alike – a balancing act bequeathed to his successors. Land norms provided a mechanism that met this need. Denikin’s attempts to secure support for land reform, while they came to naught, embodied the key ideas ultimately incorporated into his successor’s decrees. According to Denikin, land reform should safeguard the interests of the working population by strengthening small- and medium-sized holdings at the expense of the state and large landowners while preserving owners’ property rights. District committees should determine the size of maximum holdings and subject lands in excess of the maximum to compensated forcible alienation. Highly productive estates, forests, land unsuitable for cultivation, and Cossack lands remained inviolable (something that worked against winning support from peasants, who were envious of large Cossack landholdings). All landowners should receive state aid to stimulate production. In essence, Denikin was prepared to allot land according to availability and norms under some system of landowner compensation.79 By 1920, defeats and the reality of peasant land seizures had forced even opponents of land reform outside of a Constituent Assembly, including General P.N. Wrangel and former agriculture minister A.V. Krivoshein, to admit that the land question required action. Wrangel appointed a committee under Senator G.V. Glinka to devise a reform project.80 Glinka was well-suited to oversee this, given his ministerial experience in implementing the Stolypin reforms.81 On 20 April, Wrangel sent a memorandum to the committee outlining his expectations, which bore much resemblance to Denikin’s earlier proposal. It affirmed his commitment to private property and demanded that land “belong to those who work it” and not “be subject to renting or

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speculation.” Furthermore, “depending on the availability of land, on density of population, and on the prevailing type of agriculture, norms should be established” that reflected provincial and district circumstances. Lands exceeding these norms would be subject to alienation (except for intensively cultivated estates and special farms). Those receiving land would be responsible for compensating its former owners.82 The committee’s initial work disappointed Wrangel. A subsequent revision became the basis for two orders in 1920 that largely followed his original instructions but contained stronger language related to compensation and defined procedures for local committees to determine land values.83 Wrangel’s land policy, according to Senator Glinka and as manifested in the 1920 Order on Land (Prikaz o zemle), proceeded from the right of private property in land “as the singular foundational basis of a proper state land structure.” This was the main difference between Wrangel’s policy and that of the Bolsheviks. Referencing Peter the Great, however, Glinka noted that this foundational principle was subject to modification by the state, which was to be the final arbiter of land tenure and which possessed the power of eminent domain to advance its interests.84 At the same time, Glinka acknowledged the right of all current farmers “to a defined quantity of land” (as established by the Emancipation). The state’s role, and the aim of the Order on Land, was to balance these two ideas to benefit the common good. Alienation with compensation had been a firm principle of the legal system since 1861. The application of free labour to property had been a central tenet of the Emancipation, and the same was now embedded in the Order on Land. If this was socialism, Glinka argued – taking a swipe at critics on the right – then it was socialism from the throne. The project’s aim in breaking up large estates was not to introduce a new idea into the countryside but to continue the process begun by the Emancipation (which was well in line with conceptions of property as a public good). Glinka contrasted this approach, rooted in the Emancipation’s nadel and redemption process, with the socialists’ promises of land to anyone on the basis of some future land order. Wrangel, Glinka argued, was offering something real and based on precedent.85 Thus, a type of eminent domain rooted in Russia’s past and the expansion of private property ownership oddly went hand-in-hand in Wrangel’s order. The state would remain the arbiter of property rights and the allotter of land. This is also apparent in its redemption process where, in contrast to the

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Emancipation’s redemption system, the real benefits of redemption would go to the peasant payers in order to reinforce the value of property ownership within the framework of a moral economy approach: peasants were to pay one-fifth of the average harvest yielded by the land being redeemed over twenty-five years, thus making the state and the new property owners partners in the assumption of agrarian risk.86 Besides committing the state to expanding property ownership and compensating former owners, Wrangel’s order differed from the GZK and Bolshevik approaches in two other ways. First, Wrangel believed that any allotment of land was a local affair for local people. There was no single solution to the land question on an all-Russian scale, so the details of land reform in each locale were best left to local institutions such as the township (“peasant”) and district zemstvos.87 This represented a more decentralized approach to the land question than that of the GZ K and the Bolsheviks. Second, although the issue of allotting land to anyone who desired it divided the G ZK membership, in the end the SR s’ belief in allotting land to all who wanted it and who could till it with their own hands prevailed and found its way into the Bolshevik land decrees. Wrangel adamantly opposed this, not only on the basis of practicality and rural stability, but also based on the deeply rooted value of a connection to land and place. Only farmers already in situ and engaged in farming should receive land. The “socialist” plan to relocate peasants from one place to another was “incompatible with the basic freedom to establish an economic life that belongs to everyone.”88 According to Glinka, this distinguished Wrangel’s project from that of the Bolsheviks. Second, Wrangel’s order took great care to distinguish itself from those of the Bolsheviks and other socialists with regard to land norms. The GZK and Bolshevik projects’ use of norms aimed at guaranteeing peasants a subsistence niche: labour and consumption norms aimed to provide households with the minimum land allotment required to apply the household’s labour and meet its consumption needs. These norms were based on the idea of correcting “insufficient” allotments by making them “sufficient.” Wrangel’s order emphasized allotting local land to local farmers, guaranteeing them “not an amount of land calculated according to some sort of utopian provisioning or consumption norm that one might desire, but only that [amount of land] which one has the ability to manage, that is to cultivate.”89 The order’s conception of norms stemmed from an idea of maximum

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allotments rooted in past tsarist discussions of agrarian reform, harkening back to Gurko’s vision of using maximums to break up the empire’s large estates in order to increase peasant land allotments. It made use of the Land Bank’s labour norms, emphasizing the maximum amount of land for a given region that an average family could work with its own labour.90 As Glinka noted, “It may be bad or good, but all land management practices proceed from the fact and only from the fact of farming itself, and from the practical size of land use, which should not leave land un-worked and should not be outside the closest connection to the landholder himself.”91 Although Glinka and the order both took pains to avoid using the same language of norms found in the work of the G Z K and in the Bolshevik land decrees, at the end of the day the transfer of land to the labouring population (here more broadly defined) according to a household’s ability to live on it and work it was, for all intents and purposes, a White labour norm. We generally pass over Wrangel’s Order on Land as a curiosity – another case of White leaders doing too little too late. Naturally, it differed in key ways from the GZ K projects and the Bolshevik land decrees, which envisioned single national plans of reform (albeit with mechanisms that provided for local input and implementation). The Wrangel order placed more emphasis on the local than the G Z K intended for local land committees. Wrangel’s township (“peasant”) zemstvo was assigned a role in the land reform process that the GZK’s local land committees had essentially seized (much to many G Z K members’ dismay) – a seizure that the Bolsheviks then legitimated and subordinated to local soviets. Furthermore, in line with its emphasis on the local, the Wrangel order limited land allotment to local inhabitants already farming in the area. This was a departure from G Z K and Bolshevik plans to eventually move people from land-poor to land-rich regions as well as a departure from the plans of more radical GZK members and Bolsheviks to allot land to all who wanted to farm it with their own labour. The most profound difference, of course, was that the Whites insisted on allotting land as private property (as opposed to allotting land for use only). The Whites claimed that their redemption program was weighted in favour of peasants rather than former owners. Even though their proposed redemption system bore a striking resemblance to the future N E P tax-in-kind, and even though there were peasant communities willing to pay a “fair price” for the land, by the summer of 1917 redemption on any

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basis was a dead issue. Finally, Wrangel’s order linked itself to the Emancipation, proceeding from the premise that the state had a right to allot land as it saw fit and from landownership maximums based on existing institutional norms. In the end, Wrangel’s Order on Land could claim it had much the same roots as the programs of the G ZK, the Bolsheviks, and the peasants themselves.

C o n c l u s i on Thus, in the midst of revolution and civil war the normed land allotment continued to dominate conceptions of reform and social justice, pointing towards a moral economy of average peasant families. Rather than being yet another example of the Provisional Government’s failure, the work of the GZK perpetuated the language and framework of the allotment norm. It defined the terms and process of land reform as well as the pursuit of social justice for a wide array of sociopolitical actors (at least on paper). All parties viewed land reform as reflecting the state’s obligation to allot land. In one way or another, all saw land reform as a moral obligation to correctly implement the promises of 1861 for the labouring peasantry. Russians were sharply divided on a host of social and political issues, but land norms were not one of them; norms were widely seen as an available and acceptable mechanism for ensuring the just distribution of available land. Norms thus provided a common interpretive framework for all parties in 1917, one that reflected an agrarian consensus that had developed over the preceding decade as well as the technocratic statist perspective of the experts who had been propelled into the position of policy-makers by war and revolution. For experts, norms, besides being fair and objective, represented a guarantee that the state’s distribution of land would have some chance of advancing the prewar agenda for agricultural development. Managed extensification by norm could ensure just land distribution and fulfill the state’s moral obligations; it could also pave the way for continuing the technical improvements initiated over the preceding decade by the state, zemstvos, and agrarian professionals. In addition, the transformation of the nadel into a civic entitlement by war and revolution made the need for an objective means of allotment more acute. In one sense, the revolution opened new doors for agrarian professionals, policy-makers, and the objects of their work – peasants – by deciding once and for all that Russia’s agrarian future, at least for the

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time being, was to rest mainly on the household economies of peasant smallholders provided with normed land allotments and agronomic assistance. The key to Russia’s agrarian future – be it imperial, Soviet, or something in between – was not to be a two-tiered economy (peasant and pomeshchik) but rather (for the time being) a rural economy in which farmers would be provided with sufficient access to land as a first step towards increasing productivity through improved husbandry. Peasant household economies damaged by the “cut-offs” of 1861 could now be healed, and all farmers, by a combination of means, could now be given the means to become legitimate actors in the new national economy. In essence, this was a revolutionary attempt to norm the social structure of the countryside as a whole by privileging a nostalgic connection between the farmer and the soil that could only be found among those households having enough land to meet their consumption needs and/or occupy their complete labour forces – no more and no less. The main beneficiaries of this vision of the agrarian future were poor and average peasant families. The wager on the middle peasant continued, especially as Russia’s food needs demanded producers who could harvest surpluses. According to experts in the G Z K and the League of Agrarian Reforms such as Professor A.A. Rybnikov, the experience of Western Europe had demonstrated the efficacy of mid-sized farms as engines of rural economic development.92 By 1919, Lenin was arguing to the Eighth Party Congress that the seredniak had become a key potential ally in guaranteeing the revolution’s survival and feeding the population. Indeed, the seredniak would become even more crucial as the regime’s provisioning woes continued. Although highly opportunistic on this point, Stalin noted in 1933 that “the multi-million mass poor peasants … have now become middle peasants in the collective farms.”93 Even in the collectivized village, the seredniak stood as an ideal achievement. For the retreating Whites, farms of middling size based on maximums provided some faint hope that former noble landowners might have some place in the new agrarian order. In this way, land norms pointed towards a just solution to the land question that would create a unified agrarian economy poised for development, allowing the state to fulfill the moral promise of 1861. The middle peasant remained just right. Yet in the end, differing conceptions of this moral commitment – the specifics of local conditions and politics – overrode the theoretical objectivity of norms, especially as the need to feed Russia’s people came to dominate state and local agendas and as peasants’ impatience

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combined with a sense of agency to advance parochial interests at the expense of national ones. Thus, for the Bolsheviks, land allotment norms were useful only inasmuch as they provided a convenient mechanism for ensuring a just division of the spoils that would advantage potential village allies and facilitate grain production. For the Whites, land norms perpetuated a statist approach to agrarian reform that provided political cover from both the right and the left for leaders who had belatedly realized that land reform was a political necessity. Peasants accepted the concept of allotment by norm, adapting it to fit their local needs as well as their ideas about what constituted “sufficient,” but they did so with little regard to how local land resources might fit into a national program of land reform. Norms as tied to local notions of “sufficiency” and local assessments of resources could prevent neither economic chaos nor violent land seizures (“black repartition” – chernyi peredel), especially the latter, which was long dreaded by some and desired by others. Ironically, the division of remaining private and state land by the peasantry unleashed the peasants’ sense of property ownership that Stolypin desired and that the Bolsheviks despised. At the same time, norms became a universal part of Soviet life, particularly in areas such as housing, where a balance needed to be struck between civic entitlement and shortage. Professor Max Joseph von Pettenkofer’s internationally recognized minimum sanitary standard of nine square metres of dwelling space was an urban counterpart to Kofoed’s optimal khutor acreage and the Bolshevik land decree’s labour/consumption norms.94 In the near term, the normed nadel survived the Soviet state’s brutal attempts to transcend the notion of independent peasant households farming normed allotments. In the midst of collectivization, the nadel emerged in the form of a “private” plot that was normed and codified in the Kholkhoz (Collective Farm) Charter of 1935, its size determined by Stalin.95 The state, pursuing its own needs, remained the allotter of land (with collectivization being the state’s most violent expression this principle), but also remained tied to the nadel in order to provide some level of rural stability and sufficiency for peasants themselves and for the country as a whole.

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C o n c l u s ion

The Legacy of Serfdom and Persistence of the Sufficient Nadel

In 1886, Tolstoy wrote a short story titled “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” That question addressed an issue that had become acute in the wake of the serf emancipation. The end of that story provides a rather simple answer: all the main character ultimately needs is enough land for his grave, enough space to rest his bones. The actual answer to that question was more complex. Outside of fiction, the empire’s longevity hinged on addressing the issue of peasant access to land in the empire’s European core, on solving the “agrarian question” so as to increase peasant productivity while maintaining rural political stability and support for the regime. Statistics – the modern world’s technocratic problem-solving tool – provided a path forward, a means of managing and improving peasants and their economy. But they did not necessarily bring about the desired outcome, which was a transformation of peasant husbandry and land tenure relations to reflect the modern world of individual property and intensification. Instead of transcending a key category of serfdom and peasant particularism – the nadel – numbers normalized that category. Officials attempted to move beyond the nadel and its implications. Experts critical of the regime also recognized the limits of extensification. In the end, the rationality of norms prevailed among both groups and the population as a whole, rooted in the old regime’s conceptions of the peasantry and its economic needs, reinforcing those needs and encouraging an expansion of tillage instead of intensive husbandry. Norms converted the old regime’s nadel of serfdom into a modern normed entitlement that reflected the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry. In this sense, the normed nadel represented a new moral economy of a Bismarckian sort, a proto–welfare state program

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whereby the government organized aspects of the economy in the name of sociopolitical and economic stability. A normed nadel was one of the first entitlements offered by the new Soviet state. The modern entitlement, the human right to subsistence, was thus a product of the servile past. To meet their fiscal needs and pursue order and stability, states create structures and identities that will long endure. The nadel with all its social and political implications was one such structure. The early modern Russian state, like its counterparts throughout Europe, realized by the beginning of the eighteenth century that to meet its needs for revenue and recruits, the peasantry would have to reproduce. This populationism was embedded in a cameralist world view that propelled Peter I and his successors to make real their claims to autocratic authority in the name of the commonweal. Russia’s Enlightenment was predominantly a Continental one that looked to the state as a guarantor of the common good. To this end, the state implemented policies intended to ensure that peasants had sufficient resources to meet their state and other obligations and that encouraged serf-owners to do the same. To ensure this sufficiency for the state and udel peasants under its direct control, the state attempted to provide peasants with access to sufficient inputs, particularly land, and to align obligations with peasant income. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the government implemented these policies – including the first attempts to specify allotment norms – in a series of reforms that established the state as an allotter of land and that formed a basis for perceiving this as a moral obligation. Land norms based on lore became land norms based on statistics – albeit statistics that even the state officials who collected them found suspect. The serf emancipation of 1861 extended this precedent to the entire peasantry and linked it to the moral claims of autocracy and to the autocrat himself. In this way, policies enacted to meet state needs transformed the relationship between the state and the peasantry into a system of perceived mutual obligations, a moral economy of a new sort in which sustenance became a civic entitlement as well as a moral obligation that subjects expected the state to make good on. In Russia there developed a right (at least on paper) to subsist, long before the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights made it a global ideal.1 Where peasants were concerned, Kotsonis’s “states of obligation” and the prospect of stability and development required a state of sufficiency grounded in a concept of property as a public good.2

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Historians and peasant advocates rooted this relationship in the past, portraying early modern cameralist policies concerned with the state’s fiscal health as a modern concern for justice. The nadel, in this sense, became an invented tradition, a seemingly long-established custom, one that harkened back to a simpler time for those confronting change and modernization and especially for the self-appointed advocates for the peasantry who hoped to nurture a system of mass politics. Statistics measured and reinforced the validity of the nadel as a category. The link between precedent and rationally transparent statistical measurement strengthened the latter’s appeal among an increasingly statistics-conscious population both in and out of government, especially among those who were convinced that numbers, if collected properly, could yield the level of rational understanding and insight required to manage and improve the rural economy. Indeed, educated society’s “trust in numbers,” as Porter termed it, did much to shape public perceptions of reform and the agrarian future.3 For educated society, the fact that a guarantee of “sufficient” access to land could be measured and mapped was a powerful idea that made debates on the agrarian question more troubling as it increasingly appeared that the state had failed to deliver on the promises made in its own statutes. In the end, this was the state’s greatest failing in the eyes of most educated subjects. It also reflected a challenge that the government directed significant energy, if not resources, to overcome. In measuring the peasant economy, statisticians encapsulated in their categories all of the standard presuppositions about peasants and property within the imperial space. Peasants were inherently agricultural creatures in need of protection and development. As such, their success and the regime’s political and economic stability required peasants to have access to sufficient land as well as protection from external (market) and internal (kulak) exploiters. The emancipation statute attempted to ensure this by applying land allotment norms and through reliance on the repartitional land commune. The success and longevity of the nadel and land norms stemmed in part from the fact that they rested on widely held assumptions underpinning state and elite conceptions of the peasantry (despite evidence to the contrary), and in part from the fact that they could be measured and were adaptable to a variety of political purposes. Yet the same numbers and norms that promised stability locked reformers into a measurement of peasant well-being rooted in the past, based on quantity of production inputs rather than quantity of goods produced

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(productivity). Even a nadel normed according to modern measurements remained a category loaded with traditional ideas. Measured in terms of inputs such as land – in terms of whether peasant households held allotments less than or greater than emancipation norms, Land Bank norms, or even the holdings of an average peasant family – most peasant households always appeared impoverished, and policies to address those households’ needs remained tied to the nadel. Even as reformers pushed for intensification to increase productivity as a solution to the agrarian question, the state’s obligation to allot sufficient land remained a given, a crucial starting point beyond which it was difficult to conceive of improved peasant husbandry. At the same time that modern statistical studies of the peasantry and its economy strengthened the vitality of the old regime’s nadel as a category of measurement, they raised questions about the peasantry’s “traditional” communal nature and required those charged with solving the agrarian question to contemplate what a normal peasant economy might be. Doing so shifted attention to the peasant household as the primary productive unit and to the peasant household economy as a distinct type that, if properly understood, might serve as the basis for the empire’s agrarian future. Zemstvo statisticians and their supporters in the academy, although fully aware of the deficiencies of peasant husbandry, normalized the household economy. In doing so they positioned it for development as a valid path towards the agrarian future. Defining the normal peasant household was instrumental to this process. Here again, in the midst of the broader debate over how to develop the empire’s economy, numbers pointed towards a normal peasant household that met existing conceptions of what the peasant economy should be: a household economy primarily engaged in agriculture cultivating a sufficient allotment exclusively with its own labour, be it an average peasant household (srednii krest’ianskii dvor) or the household of the middle peasant (seredniak). The average or middle peasant household became the Aristotelian ideal across the political spectrum because it exemplified what elites thought the peasant economy could and should be and, as such, would provide the social and political stability needed for the state to pursue other matters crucial to its survival as a great power. As provincial and metropolitan society began to discuss land reform at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, reformers themselves operated on the assumption that this middle peasant – the one who could provide for himself without recourse to hiring himself

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out or hiring others in – was the goal of reform. Achieving that goal would provide economic and political security for the state. Furthermore, it was the state’s moral responsibility to make this happen. For Populists, the middle peasant was the moral compass of the village, and even for Marxists and liberals envisioning a much different future, the seredniak or average peasant family was at least sufficiently normal to serve as a point of reference. For Stolypin and his technocrats, the normal or average household was an ideal category that met critics’ demands that the state provide peasants sufficient land as well as state concerns about preserving noble property, the limitations of land available for distribution, and the need to protect peasants from exploitation by kulaks and the market. The normed nadel provided a material basis for creating normal households to solve the agrarian question once and for all. Purposeful state action could gradually create peasant (and noble) farms that were “just right” – farms of a middling size that met household needs without exploiting neighbours. Stolypin’s “wager on the strong” was thus a wager neither on property nor on property owners, nor was it even a bet on those of good character. It was, rather, a wager that normed sufficiency as represented by the middle peasant and bolstered by continued state protections would at some point lead to peasant self-sufficiency and perhaps even prosperity. The economic subordination of many peasant households to the commune began a journey towards subordination to the planning of the modern technocratic state. It was thought that the normed nadel would also provide a material basis for improving peasant husbandry by direct state (and expert) engagement with individual peasant households (though not necessarily individuals) through credit and technical assistance. The disintegration of the noble economy presented an opportunity to create a blank slate for this project, as well as to create Stolypin’s peasants through the development and sale of the Peasant Land Bank’s portfolio of state and private land. In essence, the state would apply the same approach to the empire’s core provinces as it had applied to its Siberian and Central Asian periphery, taking on the role of real estate developer and marketer. Reformers used the land to create the peasant economies it believed best suited state interests, and this meant allotments sufficient for peasant households to till with their own labour. Given the emphasis on getting peasants access to sufficient land, the Stolypin reforms were aligned with previous reform efforts to improve peasant economic life while protecting peasants from market predation. Banks

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took care to protect the interests of peasant borrowers because those interests aligned with the state’s interest in social stability as well as with the state’s traditional belief that peasants required tutelage and protection. Article 54 and variations on its theme captured this in measurable form, as did bank appraisal rules that benefited the bank and peasants more than noble sellers (and the market). The fall of the autocracy in February 1917 empowered a wide spectrum of agrarian experts to develop land reform proposals that would embody equality and social justice. Land allotment norms stood ready to hand to meet their technical concerns and needs. At the same time, doing so in the midst of war, revolution, and heightened expectations proved impossible as events outpaced academic discussion. After October, the Bolsheviks’ own need to feed an army and urban population soon pushed their definitions of rural friend and foe towards the middle. The poor peasant (bedniak) was a natural class ally, a rural proletarian, but he could barely feed himself, let alone others. The kulak remained a natural exploiter and thus an enemy of his neighbours and the revolution. Only the seredniak could produce the surplus needed to feed urban workers and earn investment funds through grain exports without exploiting his neighbours. This was, of course, a fanciful view of the peasant household economy as a static entity. The seredniak of today could easily appear as tomorrow’s kulak, especially as observers still tended to use inputs as the outward markers of status. At the same time, this reliance on the middle, on the normal, was in line with the modern basis for all of these views: norms. Educated society’s faith in land norms persisted despite the dramatic changes that were taking place in this period, for a number of reasons. The precedent of norms was well-established, and furthermore, from a purely practical standpoint, norms were an attractive tool for anyone trying to understand and react to a problem. This was especially true for bureaucrats trying to understand complicated issues in an immense and diverse empire. Land norms were well within the established tradition of what Scott termed “seeing like a state,” and like other norms and concerns with normality, they were key representations of modernity.4 After 1917, norms were also a logical response to the general consensus that it was up to the state, no matter who was in charge, to solve the agrarian question in a manner perceived as equitable and that offered some guarantee that households would receive sufficient resources, to which they were entitled. The normed nadel

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may have started as a Muscovite means for managing servitors and serfs, but by 1917 it was an entitlement well in line with the modern conceptions of rights that would emerge in the new Soviet constitution and the European welfare state. Norms were a modern measure that could embody earlier conceptions of economic relationships for the purpose of social and political stability in line with the Bismarckian model that late-imperial reformers and technocrats admired; they also reflected the hyper-rationality with which the Bolsheviks approached administration (at least until reality demanded pragmatism). Finally, besides being useful, adaptable, and representative of certain assumptions about state responsibilities and peasant identity, land norms remained a part of the agrarian reform discourse because of a persistent state interest in “normalizing” the countryside, both in terms of land access and in terms of shaping rural society to achieve a happy medium defined as households with adequate resources to meet their consumption needs and occupy their labour capacity without exploiting others or resorting to non-agricultural labour. As the Bolsheviks set out to “build socialism,” inventing, teaching, and applying norms as cultural values for the New Soviet Man and Woman soon existed alongside norms as economic measures.5 Cognizance of class struggle required ever more vigilant efforts to define the kulak through enumeration despite the pitfalls of doing so.6 The legacy of land norms is palpable to this day. Ironically, in a twenty-first-century Russia where billionaires control vast swaths of the economy, landownership remains limited by norms. Psychological resistance to the buying and selling of land continues to exist in administrative circles and among the rural population, as do fears that land will fall into the hands of a few private or corporate interests. The national average for individual landholding remains small at around 10 hectares, which is roughly the size of an average peasant farm. It took more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Russian federal government to pass a law allowing private land transactions, thereby legalizing the right of alienation that is a hallmark of private property ownership in Western legal systems. At the same time, the 2002 Law on Agricultural Land Transactions restricts land transactions (and hence ownership) in a number of ways. The state retains right of first refusal on all land transactions, a sort of eminent domain, which means that in theory, all land is still state land. Furthermore, just as norms (based on local conditions and husbandry) limited bank land purchases at the beginning of the

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twentieth century, the 2002 statute allowed regional governments to impose limits on how much agricultural land a single purchaser could own – generally around 10 percent of a district’s arable.7 Furthermore, at least one recent survey of rural inhabitants indicates that a majority of both land sellers and land buyers believe there should be some restrictions on landownership.8 The idea that land is a public good that should not be an object of speculation remains strong, as does the idea of local limitations to ownership. One early observer of Putin’s Russia suggested that land reform would be his most lasting and positive legacy. Recent attempts to encourage settlement of the Far East, particularly by refugees from fighting in eastern Ukraine, culminated in a Homestead Act in 2016.9 Under its terms, anyone may claim up to 2.5 acres of land in designated areas of the Far East gratis, as long as they can demonstrate a plan for its use and improvement. This 2.5-acre nadel is hardly a basis for commercial farming but nonetheless has eased land access. Agriculture seems to be improving despite restrictions on purchasing more commercially viable acreages. Over the last decade, Russia again has become a major exporter of wheat, even while increasing its reliance on imports to meet consumer demand for goods other than bread.10 At the same time, millions of hectares of arable land remain uncultivated owing to ownership restrictions and a shortage of rural credit. Those with capital, foreign and domestic, seem poised to plant their surplus funds in land. One recent report indicates that while the 2002 statute restrictions on landownership are regularly applied to typical farmers’ transactions, they are usually ignored for land purchases by Russia’s elite.11 The agrarian question has been solved on some levels, but the predations of capital feared by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers are likely more real today than ever before. The normed nadel that was strong enough to block those predations more than a century ago is now a shadow of its former self that can, at best, slow them down.

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Notes

I nt roduct i o n   1 On alternative conceptions of property and the quest for a common good see Pravilova, A Public Empire.  2 Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. For a concise summary of Gerschenkron’s hypothesis, see Gregory, “Some Empirical Comments.” Shanin examines the impact of this process of “catch-up” economic development on the peasantry from the perspective of Russia’s position on Europe’s economic periphery. See Shanin, Russia as a Developing Society.   3 Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society.”  4 Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime.  5 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking.   6 Khristoforov, “Sud’ba reformy.”  7 Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, 264. Indeed, embedded in the public mind as firmly as the soslovie (estate) paradigm. See Freeze, “The Soslovie Paradigm and Russian Social History.”   8 This trajectory to markets is suggested by the title of Carol Leonard’s recent work on agrarian reform, which inverts the title of Friedrich Hayek’s famous condemnation of centrally planned economies, The Road to Serfdom. See Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia.  9 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia; Bartlett, “The Question of Serfdom”; Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie; Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, and Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii. 10 Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva; Pintner, Economic Policy under Nicholas I.

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11 Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava and Provedenie v zhizn krest’ianskoi reformy; Nechkina, Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia v Rossii; Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy; Chernukha, Krest’ianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii; Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry; Field, The End of Serfdom; Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava; Wildman, The Defining Moment; the many works of Hoch, Essays in Russian Social and Economic History; Dolbilov, “Zemel’naia sobstvennost’ i osvobozhdenie krest’ian”; Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs; Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy. 12 Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” which summarizes the debate; Mironov, “The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia”; Darrow, “Statistics and ‘Sufficiency.’” 13 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia. 14 Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize; Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune; Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia; Avrekh, P.A. Stolypin i sudby reform; Waldron, Between Two Revolutions; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia; and Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime. For a summary of the most recent work, see Rogalina, “Stolypinskaia agrarnaia reforma.” 15 Stanziani, L’économie en revolution; Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward; Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West; Lih, “Experts and Peasants” and “Experts and Peasants: An Exchange”; Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform; Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war. 16 Frierson, Peasant Icons. See also the Kingston-Mann, Kotsonis, and Stanziani cited above, as well as Darrow, “From Commune to Household,” and Stanziani, “European Statistics, Russian Numbers.” 17 Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd” and “The Moral Economy Reviewed”; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Scott’s work owes no small debt to Alexander Chayanov’s analysis of the “natural” economy of the Russian peasant. See Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy. For critics of its application to Russia see Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom; Wegren, The Moral Economy Reconsidered; Smith, “’Moral Economy’ and Peasant Revolution in Russia.” Gaudin’s and Retish’s works provide cause to question the traditional interpretation of a single peasantry motivated solely by survival and collective interests as objectified by the commune. See Gaudin, Ruling Peasants; Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War. 18 For “custom” see Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd.” For invented tradition, see the essays in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition.

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Notes to pages 8–20

253

19 See Pravilova, A Public Empire. 20 On numbers in Russian history see the recent “Critical Forum on Statistics” in Slavic Review 76, no. 1 (Spring 2017), particularly the pieces by Stanziani (“European Statistics, Russian Numbers, and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”) and Kotsonis (“Read Zamiatin, But Not to Correct His Math”). 21 See, for example, one recent optimist’s view: Mironov, Blagosostoianie naselenie i revoliutsiia. The latter is an expanded and revised version of his Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii. For an interesting discussion of Mironov’s theses by the Kritika editors, Koenker, Rosenberg, and Mironov himself, see “Ex tempore: Did the Working Class Matter in 1917?” 22 Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward. 23 Rosenberg, “On Cannon Fodder and Straw Men,” 390. 24 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Scott, Seeing Like a State. 25 Yaney suggested that an information deficit and bureaucratic inefficiency doomed state reform attempts, which he characterized as “an urge to mobilize” between 1861 and the end the Civil War. I’m arguing, rather, that the ultimate source of society’s insistence on extensification (as opposed to intensification) as agrarian reform was fuelled by expectations of what a state armed with an increasing volume of statistical information could provide. 26 On the application of norms on the imperial periphery see, for example, Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field; and Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire. 27 On Policey and its relation to Russia, see Rustemeyer, “Systems and Senses” (quote from 569). 28 Kotsonis, States of Obligation. 29 Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Tretii sozyv. Sessiia vtoraia 1908–1909 gg. Stenograficheskie otchety. Chast’ I, 2281, 2284. 30 Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm”; Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Wellbeing.

C ha p t e r o n e  1 Pelenski, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus’; Pelenski, Russia and Kazan; Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime.   2 Hellie, “Warfare, Changing Military Technology,” 77; Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy.   3 One Russian desiatina equalled 1.092 hectares or 2.7 acres.

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Notes to pages 20–4

  4 Such holdings were average for the time, and grew steadily. In the same period, peasant plots averaged between 15 and 30 desiatinas. See Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy, 85, 150; Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 179–80.  5 Vernadsky, A History of Russia, vol. 4, 115–16.   6 Hellie, “Warfare, Changing Military Technology,” 77; Dunning, “Does Jack Goldstone’s Model,” 586.   7 Kivelson, “The Effects of Partible Inheritance,” 197–212; Kleimola, “Up Through Servitude,” 215.  8 Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change, 37, 50, 59–60.   9 The debacle of the first assault on Kazan’ (1549–50) did not please the tsar. Furthermore, of the 446 cavalrymen reviewed at Kashira in 1556, 63 percent had no weapons. See Ostrowski, “The Replacement of the Composite Reflex Bow,” 521–2. 10 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 178–9. 11 A chetvert (pl. chetverti) equalled 0.25 desiatinas. 12 Vernadsky, A History of Russia, vol. 5, pt. 1, 86; Leitsch, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 148–50. 13 Vernadsky, A History of Russia, vol. 5, pt. 1, 313; Torke, Die staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im Moskauer Reich. 14 A tiaglo was a labour unit, usually defined as a husband and wife labour team, that persisted as a unit for levying taxes and dues until the end of serfdom in 1861. See Pushkarev, comp. Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms, 157. 15 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 104; Eaton, “Cadastres and Censuses of Muscovy,” 56. See also the more extensive definition of sokha in Pushkarev, comp. Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms, 136–7. 16 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 230. 17 Ibid., 230–2; Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom. 18 See Pushkarev, comp. Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms, 8. The records were destroyed by fire in 1626, so the count was redone in 1627– 28 and 1631. 19 Eaton, “Cadastres and Censuses of Muscovy,” 62–5. 20 Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom, 85; Cherkasova, “O bor’be pomeshchikov za zemliu,” 49–53. 21 Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom, 84–6. 22 See, for example, “Instruktsiia dvoretskomu Ivanu Nemchinovu o upravlenii domu i dereven,” 11–42; Zabelin, “Bol’shoi boiarin v svoem votchinnom khoziaistve,” 5–49; Akty khoziaistva boiarina B. I Morozova, chast’ I, 148–52, 167, 179, and chast’ II, 63–72.

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23 Liseitsev, “Reconstructing the Late 16th- and 17th-Century Muscovite State Budget,” 21. 24 Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands. 25 On the connection between state-building and territory more generally see Giddens, A Contemporary Critique, vol. 2; and the Tilly essays in Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. On the spatial turn in Russian state thought in this period see Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands; Shaw, “’A Strong and Prosperous Condition’”; Sunderland, “Imperial Space.” 26 Chernikov, “Noble Landownership in 18th-Century Russia,” 279. Gains in reducing the fragmentation of estates through primogeniture were lost to increasing land sales. See Kivelson, “The Effects of Partible Inheritance.” 27 Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change, 223. 28 Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 164; Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great, 25. 29 Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism, 128–30, 143. 30 Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State; Peterson, Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judicial Reforms, 277; Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 128; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 305­–9; Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 163, 385­–6. 31 From the Chief Magistracy regulation of 1721 in Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (PSZRI ), 1-oe sob., Vol. VI, No. 3708, 291– 309. Quoted in Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 387. 32 Ibid., 381–2. 33 Riley, Population Thought in the Age of Democratic Revolution; Blum, Strength in Numbers; Kuxhausen, From The Womb to the Body Politic. 34 Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 70–3; Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 529–30; Strangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population, 185–307. 35 Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 530. 36 Pososhkov, The Book of Poverty and Wealth, 317. 37 Ibid., 187, 206. 38 Ibid., 310; Raeff, “The Two Facets of the World of Ivan Pososhkov,” 313, 315. See also Kafengauz, I.T. Pososhkov. 39 Andrei Anikin, Russian Thinkers, 36. 40 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. IV, No. 1910, 192–5. Quoted in Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 386. 41 Ibid., 162. 42 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. V, No. 2789, 91–4; Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 162. Peter assumed no land purchases, which, as we know from Kivelson, made up for at least some of the declining size of estates.

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43 Pososhkov, The Book of Poverty and Wealth, 318; Peterson, Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judicial Reforms, 300; Chernikov, “Noble Landownership in 18th-Century Russia,” 297–8; Voldarskii, Dvorianskoe zemlevladenie v Rossii v XVII-pervoi polovine XIX v., 235–7. 44 Quoted in Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 161. 45 Quoted in ibid., 162. 46 PSZRI , Sob. 1-oe, Vol. VI, No. 3901, 503–10 (quote from 506, my emphasis). 47 Got’e, Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia v Rossii ot Petra I do Ekateriny II, Vol. I, 24. 48 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. VIII, No. 5789, 483–505 (see esp. 485–7). 49 Anisimov, “Iz istorii fiskal’noi politiki russkogo absolutizma,” 134. 50 Ibid., 139. Note that this represents a slight difference from the book. See Anisimov, Podatnaia reforma Petra Velikogo, 274–82. Both essentially confirm Miliukov’s conclusion that the total tax burden assessed peasants increased throughout Peter’s reign. See Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii, 478–9. For a concise summary of the issue see Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 80–2. 51 Mironov, “Consequences of the Price Revolution,” 457–78; Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer and the Knout, 328–32. 52 Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii, 473. 53 To get a sense of the quantity see Anisimov, “Iz istorii fiskal’noi politiki russkogo absolutizma,” 129–31. 54 Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 136–7. 55 Quoted in ibid., 139. 56 Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 64. 57 See Stanziani, “Free Labor–Forced Labor,” esp. 32–3; Tomaselli, “Moral Philosophy and Population Questions,” 7–29. 58 Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia, 126–7 (quote), 133. 59 Stanziani, “Free Labor–Forced Labor,” 36. 60 Lomonosov, “O razmnozhenii i sokhranenii Rossiiskago naroda,” 563–80; Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki v SSSR, Vol. I, 190–200. 61 Lomonosov, “O razmnozhenii i sokhranenii Rossiiskago naroda,” 580. 62 Bartlett, “Defenses of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” 68. 63 Bartlett, “The Question of Serfdom,” 148; Bartlett, “Serfdom and State Power in Imperial Russia,” 38; Drayton, Nature’s Government, 70–2. 64 From articles 244, 425, and 655 as quoted in Bartlett, “Serfdom and State Power in Imperial Russia,” 3. See also Dmytryshyn, “The Economic Content of the 1767 Nakaz of Catherine II,” 4. All emphases in original.

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65 Lords with estates in areas where the soil was rich and farming profitable generally demanded labour dues (barshchina or corvée) from their serfs. Those with estates in the north, where peasants earned a substantial living from crafts and trades, demanded dues in cash (obrok or quitrent). Some lords required a combination of the two. 66 From articles 269, 270, and 271. Quoted in Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 532. 67 Quoted in Beliavskii, Krest’ianskii vopros v Rossii nakanune vosstaniia E.I., 165. 68 See the complaints brought by odnodvortsy and others to the Legislative Commission in ibid. 69 On the foundling homes see Ransel, Mothers of Misery. 70 PRZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XXII, No. 16,002, 152–3; Pushkarev, Krest’ianskaia pozemel’no-peredel’naia obshchina v Rossii, 210. See also Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny II, Vol. I, 593–676; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, Vol. I, ch. 1. 71 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 82–6. 72 Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 531, 535–7; Bartlett, Human Capital; Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 75–9. 73 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XVI, No. 12,095, 648–55. 74 Pravitsl’stvuiushchii Senat, Istoriia Pravitel’stvuiushchago Senata, Vol. II, 677–8; PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XVI, No. 12,099, para. 4 (658–9). 75 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XIV, No. 10,237, ch. 23; Pushkarev, Krest’ianskaia pozemel’no-peredel’naia obshchina, 206. 76 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XVII, Nos. 12,488 and 12,570, 353–6, 560–80; Milov, Issledovanie ob ‘ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh, 11–12; Rudin, Mezhevoe zakondatel’stvo i deiatel’nost’ mezhevoi chasti v Rosssii; German, Istoriia Russkogo Mezhevaniia; Bartlett, “Defenses of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” 68n9. 77 Blum, “Land Tenure in the Austrian Monarchy before 1848,” 87–98; Dickson, “Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey,” 611–34; Gray, “Bringing the Law Back In,” 511–34. 78 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 81-82. 79 See Milov, Issledovanie ob ‘ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh, 37, 160–75. 80 Bartlett, “‘Land Without Freedom,’” 156 (my italics). 81 Khristoforov, “Blurred Lines,” 31–54. 82 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 81–2. 83 Milov, Issledovanie ob ‘ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh, 12–13. 84 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XIV, No. 10,237, 104–61; Pushkarev, Krest’ianskaia pozemel’no-peredel’naia obshchina v Rossii, 206.

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  85 Givens, “To Measure and to Encroach,” 536.   86 Ibid., 545–6 (my italics).  87 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 82.   88 From article 425. Quoted in Dmytryshyn, “The Economic Content of the 1767 Nakaz,” 4 (original emphasis).  89 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XXIV, no. 17,906 (5 April 1797).   90 Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov za stoletie ikh sushchestvovaniia, Vol. I, 9.   91 Ibid., Vol. II, 10.   92 Ibid., Vol. II, 10; Trifil’ev, Ocherki iz istorii krepostnogo prava v Rossii. As a review by V.I. Semevskii pointed out, the book had little to do with the legal aspects of serfdom under Paul, and was mainly a catalogue of the various disturbances that erupted in the first months of his reign. See Semevskii, “Novyi trud po istorii krest’ianskikh volnenii,” 126–31.  93 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XXIV, no. 17,906, article 116 (quote at 546).  94 Ibid.  95 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 495.   96 Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov, Vol. II, 14–16.   97 The few real success stories occurred in provinces with large stores of available land where, in the process of the General Land Survey, large tracts of land had been set aside for future settlement. See ibid., Vol. II, 27–8, 79–90; Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 73–5; Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov, Vol. II, 90–1, 143–6; Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 496–7.  98 Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 75; Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov, Vol. I, 663. L.A. Perovskii’s reforms contributed much to the greater than 450 percent increase in udel revenues between 1797 and the emancipation of udel peasants in 1865.   99 Pravitsl’stvuiushchii Senat, Istoriia Pravitel’stvuiushchago Senata, Vol. III, 488–9; PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XXXI, No. 24,922 (21 December 1811), 929–31. 100 Pushkarev, Krest’ianskaia pozemel’no-peredel’naia obshchina v Rossii, 210–13; Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy, 49–65. 101 PSZRI , 1-oe sob., Vol. XXXII, No. 25,737 (27 November 1814), 1090–1; PSZRI , 2-oe sob., Vol. II, No. 906 (15 February 1827), 183–4 (quote at 183). 102 Alison K. Smith, Recipes for Russia, 21–3. 103 Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 154. 104 Ibid., 156, 158–60; Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia, Vol. II, 18; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, Vol. I, 248–56.

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105 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatletnei deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, 1837–1887. Chast’ I, 28. 106 Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 160–1, quoting PSZRI , 2-oe sob., No. 10,834 (1837). 107 Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy.” See also Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, ch. 4. 108 Lincoln, Nicholas I; Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform; Veselovskii, “Vospominaniia K.S. Veselovskago”; Fon-Bradke, “Avtobiograficheskie zapiski Egora Fedorovicha Fon-Bradke.” 109 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatletnei deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, 1837–1887. Chast’ II, Otdel II, 4. 110 Ibid., 9. 111 Ibid., 32. 112 Instruktsiia dlia otsenki zemel’ i promyslov gosudarstvennykh krest’ian, 25. 113 Ibid., 26. 114 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatletnei deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, Chast’ II, Otdel II, 47. 115 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 487. 116 Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 165, 171. In eleven provinces no progress was made. This affected 2,328,515 male souls and 11,895,425 desiatin. 117 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatletnei deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, 1837–1887. Chast’ III, 18–19 (my italics). 118 From articles 269, 270, and 271. Quoted in Jones, “Morals and Markets,” 532. 119 Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 127. 120 Daniel, “The Conflict Between Economic Vision and Reality,” 47. 121 In principle, at least. Lords, of course, earned considerable income from their serfs’ non-agricultural activities and investments. See Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom. 122 Daniel, “The Conflict Between Economic Vision and Reality,” 47; Bartlett, “Defenses of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” 72. 123 Bartlett, “Serfdom and State Power in Imperial Russia,” 45–6. 124 Bartlett, “‘Land Without Freedom,’” 156. 125 Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russia vers la fin du xviiie siecle. 126 Stanziani, “Free Labor–Forced Labor,” 37–8. 127 Rudolph, “Agriculture and Proto-Industrialization in Russia,” 55; Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, 33–5.

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128 Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russia, 335; Daniel, “The Conflict Between Economic Vision and Reality,” 64; Bartlett, “Serfdom and State Power in Imperial Russia,” 44; Confino, Systemes agraires et progres agricole. 129 Rudolph, “Agriculture and Proto-Industrialization in Russia,” 56. 130 Bolotov, “Nakaz upravitel’iu ili prikazchiku,” 211–13. For Rychkov see Struve, “Krepostnaia statistika,” 24–9. 131 Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, 118. 132 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, 443. 133 Czap, “The Perennial Multiple Family Household,” 5–26. Quoted in Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 311. See also Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, esp. 86–90, 123–32, and ch. 4. 134 Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 89; Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” esp. 193; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. 135 Domozhirov, “Istoriia krest’ianskago khoziaistva v odnom pomeshchuch’em imenii,” 1–27; Loshkarev, “Otchet o sostoianii i khod khoziaistva,” 144–91; Prasolov, “Prakticheskiia zamechaniia o nastoiashchem sostoianii khoziaistva,” 205–31. 136 “O dopolnitel’nykh pravilakh pereseleniia malozemel’nykh gosudarstvennykh poseleian v mnogozemel’nyia mesta,” xiv–xxii (quote at xv); PSZRI , 2-oe sob., Vol. XVIII, No. 16,718 (8 April 1843), 235–9.

C h a p t e r t wo    1 This idea was best articulated in the first half of the nineteenth century by M.M. Speranskii. See Raeff, Mikhail Speransky.   2 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking.   3 Custine, Empire of the Czar; Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia.   4 Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, ch. 25; Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 56–8; Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy, 30.   5 Ibid., 25; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, 25–9, 39.   6 Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy, 38, 54.   7 Zakharova, Aleksandr II i otmena krepostnogo prava; Khristoforov Sud”ba reformy, chpts. 1, 2; Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy, 42.   8 Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, Vol. I, 376–7; Field, The End of Serfdom, 351–6; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, 42–3 (quote).    9 Ibid., vol. 2, 39.   10 Many thanks to Professor Alexander Polunov for this Herzen reference.

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11 Ruud, Introduction to Sytin, My Life for the Book, xxvi. 12 The emancipation Manifesto appears in PSZRI 2-oe sob., T XXXVI No. 36,650 (1861), 130–4. For the rest of the statutes, see ibid., Nos. 36,650–36,675. For an English translation of all the statutes see Pollard, ed. and trans., The Laws of February 18–19, 1861. 13 Field, The End of Serfdom, 83–101, esp. 84; Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, 52–68. 14 Ibid. There were multiple commissions created to “edit” various types of information in the process of drawing up the emancipation. I use the singular “Editing Commission” for simplicity. 15 Pervoe izdanie materialov Redaktsionnoi Kommissii (hereafter PIMRK ), Chast’ I, 1. 16 PIMRK , Chast’ I (Prilozhenie k zhurnalu No. 2, 1859), 47. 17 The relevant pieces are all collected in Hoch, Essays in Russian Social and Economic History. Subsequent citations refer to this volume. 18 Hoch, “The Banking Crisis,” 163–98. 19 A view with which Alexander II and most of the key reformers, including N.A. Miliutin, were sympathetic. See Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy, 36; Khristoforov, Sud”ba reformy, ch. 2. 20 See Hoch, “The Great Reformers and the World They Did Not Know,” 285­–319. The term under-government is from Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia. 21 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 288. 22 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Dopolnitel’nyi doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia k No. 1”), 18–19; Chast’ IV (“Dopolnitel’nyi doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia k No. 1. Osnovanie i razmer nadela”), 3–12. 23 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Dopolnitel’nyi doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia k No. 1”), 19–20. 24 PIMRK , Chast’ IV (Zhurnal No. 79, 1859), 2. 25 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Dopolnitel’nyi doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia k No. 1), 22. 26 Ibid., 22–3. 27 Wildman, The Defining Moment. 28 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Dopolnitel’nyi doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia k No. 1), 31–3. The state set minimum and maximum allotment sizes by region (local boards assigned a specific size within this range). In non– black soil regions, maximum allotments ranged from three to seven desiatinas and minimums from 1 to 2.33 desiatinas per soul. In black soil regions allotments ranged from less than 1 to 6 desiatinas, and in steppe provinces (Samara, Saratov, Orenburg) from 6 to 12 desiatinas.

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Zaionchkovskii, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 83–7; Field, The End of Serfdom, 351–4; Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry, 321–4. 29 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Doklad Khoziaistvennago otdeleniia No. 3. Ugod’ia, postupaiushchiia v krest’ianskii nadel”), 10, 13–17, 21, 27–8, 32–44, 46–8. 30 McCaffrey, “Confronting Serfdom”; Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 301–4. 31 PSZRI , 2-oe sob., T. XXXVI, Nos. 36,662–36,665. 32 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 305. 33 Ibid., 308. 34 PIMRK , Chast’ II (“Doklad Khoziaistvennago Otdeleniia No. 8. O prave pol’zovaniia krest’ian otvodimym im nadelom”), 44–8; Chast’ XIII (Zhurnaly 128–30, 1860), 212. 35 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 317; Wildman, The Defining Moment. See also Burdina, Krest’iane-darstevnniki v Rossii. 36 PSZRI , 2-oe sob., T. XXXVI, No. 36,662, chast’ I-aia, 232. 37 Ibid., 237, and chast’ II-aia 32–43. 38 See Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire. 39 PSZRI , 2-oe sob., T. XXXVI, No. 36,662, chast’ I-aia, 235–6. A sazhen was equal to 7 feet or approximately 2.133 metres. 40 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 311–13. 41 See Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia. 42 PIMRK , Chast’ XIII (Zhurnaly Nos. 131 & 132, 1860), 2. 43 Ibid., 29. 44 Ibid., 30. 45 P. Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia 1861 goda, 231; Zaionchkovskii, The Abolition of Serfdom, 91–4; Hoch notes that the redemption process included a reserve fund. See “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 47. 46 Migulin, Vykupnye platezhi, 12, 14. “Revisional souls” were those males liable for paying the poll tax as enumerated under the final (10th) poll tax census (revision) of 1859. 47 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 39; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, chpt. 2. 48 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 40–70; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 105–14. 49 Kaufman, “The History and Development of Official Russian Statistics,” 471; Ianson, Teoriia statistiki, 72–7. On the International Statistical Congress, see Randeraad, “The International Statistical Congress.” 50 On Semenov’s early career see Lincoln, Petr Petrovich Semenov-TianShanskii, ch. 4; Kozlov and Kozlova, Petr Petrovich Semenov-TianShanskii, 73–85; and Memuary P.P. Semenova-Tian-Shanskago, Vols. III and IV.

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51 Tarasiuk, Pozemel’naia sobstvennost’ poreformennoi Rossii, 19-20. 52 Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiiskoi Imperii (hereafter SVRI), Vol. I, v. 53 Iubileinyi sbornik Tsentral’nago Statisticheskago Komiteta, IIIrd otd., 1–2. 54 On Ritter see Martin, All Possible Worlds, ch. 6. On Arsen’ev see SmithPeter, “Defining the Russian People,” 47–64. 55 Lincoln, Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, 66–9; Statistika pozemel’noi sobstvennosti (hereafter SPS ), vyp. I, III, VII; Echlin, “The Statistics of the Russian Peasantry,” 58. 56 SPS , vyp. V, lxii–lxiv; Veselovsky, “Land Tenure and the Distribution of Population,” 50-74. 57 SPS, vyp. I, iv–vi. 58 Ibid., xlvii–xlviii. 59 On “official populism” see Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 11–34. 60 See, for example, “Raspredelenie zemel’ po ugod’iam v evropeiskoi Rossii za 1881 god,” SVRI , III-aia Seriia, vyp. 4, esp. viii, xi, xiv; “Urozhai 1889 goda v 60 guberniiakh evropeiskoi Rossii,” Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, Vol. IX, esp. ii–iii. 61 Defined as a household economy that farmed with its own labour and inventory and consumed the majority of what it produced. 62 For the Valuev commission see Kommissiia dlia izsledovaniia polozheniia sel’skago khoziaistva i sel’skoi proizvoditel’nosti, Doklad Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi Kommissii dlia izsledovaniia nyneshnago polozheniia sel’skago khoziaistva i sel’skoi proizvoditel’nosti v Rossii (hereafter DVUK ); Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 36–43. 63 DVUK , Vol. I, 5. 64 On peasant migration to cities for seasonal work see Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics. 65 DVUK , Vol. 1, 7. 66 Ibid., 31. 67 Ibid., 32–3 (quote). 68 Ibid., 35–6. 69 “Great Reforms” refers to a series of state reform efforts that began in 1861 with the emancipation, concluded in 1874 with the law on universal military conscription, and included statutes reforming the court system as well as local and municipal administration. See Lincoln, The Great Reforms; Eklof, Bushnell, and Zakharova, eds. Russia’s Great Reforms. 70 Samarin’s critique originally appeared in the newspaper Rus’. See Samarin, “Teoriia o nedostatochnosti krest’ianskikh nadelov,” in Sobranie statei, rechei i dokladov, Vol. 1, 29­–95.

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71 Ianson, Opyt statisticheskago izsledovaniia, 2nd ed., x­–xi. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 72 Ibid., vii–viii (quote). 73 Ibid., xi. 74 Ibid., 5–10. 75 Ibid., 29–36, 38–43 (quote 34–5). 76 Ibid., 67–8. 77 Ibid., 71–2. 78 Ibid., 74. 79 Ibid., 73, 86 (quotes). 80 “Krest’iane,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, Vol. 33, 723–4 (quote); Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, repr, ed. Vol. 25, 150–5. 81 Samarin, “Teoriia o nedostatochnosti krest’ianskikh nadelov.” 82 Vilson, “Vykupnye za zemli platezhi krest’ian-sobstvennikov,” 317–18. 83 Khodskii, “Po voprosu o ponizhenii vykupnykh platezhei,” 395­–418, esp. 399, 412–13; Khodskii, Pozemel’nyi kredit, 141–2. 84 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll.9, 28; Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 216, 223. The commission reported the following provincial figures for accumulated redemption payment arrears as a percentage of required payments as of 1 January 1880: Smolensk, 204%; Novgorod, 154%; Chernigov, 152%; Olonets, 126%; Moscow, 92%; and Pskov, 90%. Two Chernigov districts reported arrears of 350% (Mglinsk) and 577% (Surazhsk). The average for the twenty-three provinces studied was 63.4% of total collections. By 1881 redemption payment arrears totalled more than 23 million rubles, despite periodic refinancing. 85 Gregory, Before Command, 38; Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism; Frierson, ed. and trans., Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt’s Letters from the Country; Darrow, “Statistics and ‘Sufficiency.’” 86 PSZRI , 2-oe Sob., No. 36,662, art. 185–6; No. 36,663, art. 191­–2; R GIA f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll.10, 29; Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 210–29; Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 44–5, 73; Ananicha, “K istorii otmeny podushnoi podati,” 183–5; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 257. 87 Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 221–2. Smolensk required the largest, and Perm’ the smallest – 24.9% (compare with Khodskii). Payments by district were more disjointed, particularly in Novgorod, Tver’, and Kostroma provinces. Here the commission estimated a need for 70–76% reductions. 88 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll. 46–8; Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 217, 219. 89 Ibid., 226–30; R G I A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 141, ll. 111, 186; d. 142, ll. 1–4, 15–20, 46–8, 139; d. 143, ll. 1–7. The state created zemstvos on the

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provincial and district level to manage many of the local affairs formerly charged to serf owners. There will be more about them in the next chapter.  90 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll. 201–19; Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 234. The majority argued that the emancipation simply converted personal serf obligations (lichnaia povinnost’ – obrok) to personal property (votchina – redemption payments). Equalizing taxes among categories of peasants referred to discrepancies between state peasant obrok taxes and former serfs’ higher redemption payments.  91 R GI A f. 1290, op., 2, d. 142, l. 220.   92 Ibid., ll. 220–2.   93 Ibid., ll. 227–8, 235–7; Kovan’ko, Reforma 19 fevralia, 234.  94 PSZRI , 3-oe Sobranie, Vol. I, No. 577, esp. art. 1.3, 5.  95 R GI A , f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll. 205–6, 215–21.   96 Ibid., ll. 225–6, 228.   97 Ibid., l. 233.  98 PSZRI , 3-oe Sobranie, Vol. I, No. 577, 375–6.  99 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 143, ll. 137, 321, 323. The category “temporarily obligated” referred to those peasants who had not yet reached agreement with their former lords on the terms of their land allotments and “gone on redemption” (i.e., started to redeem their plots) and thus still owed some sort of dues to their lords. 100 Ibid., ll. 137, 325; RG I A f. 12890, op. 2, d. 145, l. 74. 101 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 177, l. 9. 102 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 167, l. 8. 103 R GI A f. 573, op. 18, d. 27,681, l. 370. 104 Ibid., ll. 372–3. 105 Ibid., l. 373. 106 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 174, ll. 16(quote)–17. 107 R GI A f. 573, op. 18, d. 27,681, l. 508. 108 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 168, ll. 78–80. 109 Ibid., l. 157. 110 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 163, ll. 80, 160–1; R GIA f. 573, op. 18, d. 27,681, l. 400. 111 Ibid., l. 421; RG I A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 169, l. 29. 112 Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 45. 113 R GI A f. 1290, op. 2, d. 142, ll. 11–12, 148–9. 114 Indeed, the government was just beginning to figure out how to gather the information needed to do this for the more easily seeable urban and commercial population. See Kotsonis, States of Obligation. 115 Hoch, “Did Russia’s Serfs Really Pay Too Much for Too Little Land?”

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116 Vasil’chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledelie v Rossii i drugikh Evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, vol. 1, 100.

C h a p t e r t h re e   1 Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 206. See also Saunders, “The Political Ideas of Russian Historians”; essays in Sanders, ed., Historiography of Imperial Russia; and Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia.   2 See Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography.”   3 See Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov; Mohrenschildt, “Shchapov: Exponent of Regionalism.”   4 Semevskii, “Ne pora-li napisat’ istoriiu krest’ian v Rossii?”   5 Miliukov, “Iuridicheskaia shkola v russkoi istoriografii”; Hamburg, “Inventing the ‘State School’ of Historians.”   6 Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition; Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” 185–258.   7 Miliukov, “Iuridicheskaia shkola,” 80–92; Hamburg, “Inventing the ‘State School’ of Historians,” 112.   8 Turchinovich, Istoriia sel’skago khoziaistva Rossii, 1. Quoted in Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 193.   9 Turchinovoch, Istoriia sel’skago khoziaistva Rossii, 37–8.   10 Quoted in Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 197.   11 Ibid., 198.   12 Quoted in Saunders, “The Political Ideas of Russian Historians,” 760.   13 Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 208–9.   14 Ibid., 210–14.   15 Ibid., 217–18.   16 Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia, Vol. II, 46–57, 189, as well as the numerous letters and documents in Vol. IV. ZablotskiiDesiatovskii was a key participant in both Kiselev’s projects and the Editing Commissions.   17 “Ot redaktsii,” in Dzhivelegov, Mel’gunov, and Pichet, eds., Velikaia reforma, Vol. I, ix; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva. For more recent work on Kiselev, see Davydov, ‘Oppozitsiia ego velichestva’; and Orlik, Gosudarstvennye liudi Rossii.   18 Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, Istoricheskoe obozenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel’nosti Miniterstva Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, chast’ II, 5 (hereafter Istoricheskoe obozenie piatidesiailetnei deiatel’nosti MGI ).

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19 Istoricheskoe obozenie piatidesiailetnei deiatel’nosti MGI , chast’ II, 47. 20 Ibid., 47–8 (quote, original emphasis). Semenov and others would not have agreed. 21 Khodskii, “Ocherk razvitiia pozemel’noi otnoshenii,” kn. XI, 18–52, kn. XII, 1–37. 22 Ibid., 23. 23 Ibid., 24–27. 24 Ibid., 27–9. 25 Ibid., 31. 26 Ibid. I have been unable to locate the article he quotes: P.Sh., “Gosudarsvennye krest’iane,” Russkaia Rech’ (June 1879). 27 Khodskii, “Ocherk razvitiia pozemel’noi otnoshenii,” kn. XI, 33. 28 Ibid., 35–6. 29 Ibid., 38. 30 Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 199; Emmons, “Kliuchevskii’s Pupils.” On Samarin see Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia. 31 Byrnes, “Kliuchevskii’s View of the Flow of Russian History,” 251. 32 Kliuchevskii, “Pravo i fakt v istorii krest’ianskago voprosa,” 57. 33 Ibid., 58. 34 Kliuchevskii, “Proizkhozhdenie krepostnago prava v Rossii,” 126. 35 Dovnar-Zapolskii, Na zarie krest’ianskoi svobody; Diakonov, Akty, otnosiashchikhsia k istorii tiaglago naseleniia; S.B. Veselovskii, Soshnoe pis’mo. 36 I use the term “Populists” with hesitation. Like the term “state school” it was more a product of political circumstances than conscious self-definition (at least until the creation of the “Popular Socialists” after 1905). 37 Saunders, “The Political Ideas of Russian Historians,” 759–60. 38 Petrovich, “The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Historiography,” 195. 39 Ibid., 197. 40 Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia, 205. 41 Saunders, “The Political Ideas of Russian Historians,” 762. 42 Kliuchevskii, “Otzyv ob izsledovanii V.I. Semevskago,” 274–5. 43 See Snow, “The ‘Academic Troubles’.” 44 Semevskii, “Ne pora-li napisat’ istoriiu krest’ian v Rossii?” 45 See, for example, Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia. 46 Semevskii, Krestianskii vopros, Vol. I, 230–5. 47 Ibid., Vol. II, 28. 48 Snow, “The ‘Academic Troubles,’” 154–6. 49 The work of Ianson, Khodskii, and A.I. Chuprov defined the most immediate results of the emancipation according to the editors of Velikaia

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Notes to pages 106–11

reforma. See A.K. Dzhivelegov et al., eds. See also Velikaia reforma. Russkoe obshchestvo i krest’ianskii vopros v proshlom i nastoiashchem. Iubileinoe izdanie,Vol. I, x–xi. 50 Snow, “The ‘Academic Troubles,’”; Sanders, “The Third Opponent.” 51 Semevskii, “Ne pora-li napisat’ istoriiu krest’ian v Rossii,” 216. 52 Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, Vol. I, 33–4. 53 Ibid., XXVI, 31–2. 54 Ibid., 36, 69–70. 55 Ibid., 37–40. 56 Ibid., 43–4. The reference is to a collection of Pobedostsev’s essays published in 1876 (K.P. Pobedonostsev, Istoricheskiia izsledovaniia i stati, 94). For a discussion, see Byrnes, “Pobedonostsev and the Role of Change in History.” Pobedonostsev was a conservative jurist who tutored heirs to the throne and served as the administrative head of the Russian Orthodox Church – the Oberprokurator of the Holy Synod. 57 Semevskii, Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, Vol. I, 40–5. 58 Ibid., 46. 59 Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov; “Ot redaktsii,” in Velikaia reforma, Vol. I, ix. 60 Semevskii, “Novyi trud po istorii krest’ianskikh volnenii,” 127. 61 For Kliuchevskii see his Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii. Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, Vol. V, 174–7. 62 The editors specifically thanked Semevskii and Kliuchevskii. See “Ot redaktsii,” in Velikaia reforma, Vol. I, vi. 63 Got’e, “Krest’iane v XVII stoletii,” 28. 64 Bogoslovskii, “Pomor’e v XVII veke,” 38. 65 See, for example, Zharinov, “Krest’iane tserkovnykh votchin,” 148. 66 In addition to the works already cited see Vasilenko, “Prikreplenie krest’ian v Malorossii,” 120. 67 Struve, Krepostnoe khoziaistvo, 2–3. 68 Ibid., 16–17. 69 Shchepkin, “Ekonomicheskie poniatiia v Rossii v kontse XVIII v.”; Bruckner, “Kniaz’ M.M. Shcherbatov”; Miakotin, “Dvorianskii publitsist Ekaterinskoi epokhi:”; D’iakonov, “Vydaiushchiisia russkii publitsist XVIII veka”; I. Khrushchev and A. Voronov, eds., Sochineniia kniazia M.M. Shcherbatova. 70 Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstvo za sorok let; Schedewie, Selbstverwaltung und sozialer Wandel; Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province; Eklof and

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Saburova, A Generation of Revolutionaries; Emmons and Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia. 71 For more on this see Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers.” 72 On the counter-reform see Zakharova, Zemskaia kontrreforma 1890 g. See also Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers.” 73 Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province; Eklof and Saburova, A Generation of Revolutionaries. 74 Tverskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Tverskago gubernskago Zemstva, vol. 1, 187. 75 The fame of Moscow’s statistical bureau served as a stimulus for creating bureaux in other provinces in the 1880s. Either Orlov or one of his protégés founded the majority of these bureaus. See, for example, GA R F f. 102, 3-e D P , op. 78, chast’ 2, l. 38 in re Riazan’. The work of V.I. Pokrovskii in Tver’ also served as an example. See Tverkaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Otchet upolnomochennago po sel’skomu khoziaistvu, 2. 76 Svodnyi sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Samarskoi gubernii, Vol. VIII, i. 77 Russkiia vedomosti, no. 223 (1873), 2. 78 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, chs. 1–2; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, chs. 15–16. 79 Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons; Gleason, Young Russia; Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. 80 Haxthausen, Studies in the Interior of Russia. 81 Riasanovsky, Russia and the West; Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, esp. chs. 7, 10, 11; Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, 189–94. 82 Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control; Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom. 83 On the debate see Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii, 3–25; Vdovina, “Vopros o proiskhozhdenii krest’ianskoi obshchiny”; Zyrianov, Krestian’skaia obshchina evropeiskoi Rossii, introduction. 84 Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, 27; Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province. Publications of the 1870s comprise three-fourths of a list of these studies. See Ukazatel’ knig i statei o sel’skoi pozemel’noi obshchine. 85 Field, “Peasants and Propagandists.” 86 Zlatovratskii and Uspenskii were urban intellectuals, publicists who were sympathetic to the plight of the peasantry and who wrote works of fiction depicting their lives (based on conversations with them). See Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, 103; Semenkin, N.N. Zlatovratskii; Frierson, Peasant Icons, chs. 4, 5. For an extended interpretation of ­populism as a movement see Eklof and Saburova, A Genration of Revolutionaries.

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Notes to pages 115–20

 87 Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, 88–93.  88 Svavitskii, Zemskie podvornye perepisi, 42–4; Fortunatov, “Iz vospominanii o deiateliakh Moskovskoi zemskoi statistiki,” Vol. I, 237–8; Svavitskii, “Nikolai Alekseevich Kablukov,” IX; Kablukov, “V.I. Orlov, zemskii statistic”; Johnson, “Liberal Professionals and Professional Liberals.”   89 Saratovskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Saratovskoi gubernii, Vol. V, iii; On Kharizomenov see Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 1867–70; Pirumova, Zemskaia intelligentsia i ee rol’ v obshchestvennoi bor’be, 104–16.   90 See Kablukov’s introduction to Chuprov, Rechi i stat’i, Vol. 1, xxv, xxvi–xxvii.   91 See Kablukov’s “Avtobiografiia,” xvi–xvii.   92 Based on data from Pirumova, Zemskaia intelligentsia i ee rol’ v obshchestvennoi bor’be, 75; a study of statisticians conducted by the Department of State Police in the early 1880s (GA R F, f. 102, 3-e DP, op. 78 (1882), d. 625); and the large collection of biographical entries in Russkiia vedomosti. 1863-1913. Sbornik statei. Of the remainder, 14 studied at the Petrovskii Academy in Moscow and thus shared the same intellectual milieu.  93 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, ch. 6; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, chs. 15–16, 22; Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany; Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, 113–23; Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, ch. 2; Darrow, “From Commune to Household.”   94 Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika,” 1–8.  95 Svavitskii, Zemskie podvornye perepisi, 50–1.   96 On the conflict between state and local knowledge see Scott, Seeing Like a State, ch. 1.  97 Shcherbina, Svodnyi sbornik po 12-im uezdam Voronezhckoi gubernii; Veletskii, Zemakaia statistika.   98 Darrow, “From Commune to Household,” 797–802.   99 Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika,” 39–40. 100 Ibid., 36. 101 Ibid., 36–7. 102 Vasil’chikov, Sel’skii byt i sel’skoe khoziaistvo v Rossii. 103 Ibid., 29–42. 104 Ibid., 22. 105 Ibid., 27–8. 106 Ibid., 35, 46–7. 107 Ibid., 49.

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108 Ibid., 157. 109 Moskovskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 295, 319. 110 Ibid., 266–8; Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, 33, 72. 111 Ibid., 144–5. 112 See the introductory essays by Thorner and Kerblay in Thorner, Kerblay, and Smith, eds., A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy. 113 See, for example, Sypchenko, Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partiia. 114 Tverkaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Tverskoi gubernii, T. 1, 50–5. 115 Kaluzhskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Statisticheskoe opisanie Kaluzhskoi gubernii, esp. 330–68, 677–711. 116 Trudy kommissii po voprosu ob organizatsii zemsko-statisticheskikh otsenochnykh izsledovanii (9–20 fevrlia 1898 g.), 14. 117 Peshekhonov, Zemel’nye nuzhdi derevni, 3rd ed. (1906), 135–6. 118 Kurskoe gubernskoe zemstvo, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Kurskoi gubernii, Vypusk IV, vi. 119 Ibid., x. 120 Ibid., xxi. 121 Ibid., vi–vii. 122 Ibid., xviii–xix. 123 GA R F f. 102, 3-e DP, op. 78 (1882), d. 625, chast’ 2, l. 32. 124 Riazanskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Riazanskoi gubernii, Vol. II, vyp. I. Rannenburgskii uezd. 125 Riazanskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Doklady chlenov Riazanskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy o revizii uezdov, 450–1. 126 Darrow, “From Commune to Household.” 127 Dennison’s work on the serfs of the Sheremetev estates shows that many serfs supplemented their land allotments with rentals and purchases. See Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom. 128 See Peshekhonov, Zemel’nye nuzhdi derevni, 39–42, 135–6. 129 Fedyashin, Liberals under Autocracy. 130 Stanziani, L’économie en revolution; Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward; Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform. 131 Witte admired Chuprov’s work on railway statistics. 132 Chuprov and Posnikov, eds., Vliianie urozhaev. 133 On the “Great Depression” – especially its impact on the nobility – see Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 84–97. For evidence of its negligible effect on the economy as a whole see Gregory, Before Command.

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134 Chuprov and Posnikov, eds., Vliianie urozhaev, Vol. I, i–lxiii. See also the summary of Chuprov’s report to the Free Economic Society, much of which is printed as an extended quote in “O vliianie urozhaev i khlebnykh tsen na russkoe narodnoe khoziaistvo,” Novoe vremia No. 7548 (3 March 1897), 2. 135 Ibid., No. 7549 (4 March 1897), 3. 136 Chuprov, “O vliianie,” Novoe vremia No. 7548 (3 March 1897), 2, and No. 7549 (4 March 1897), 3. 137 In addition to the reports cited above see “O vliianie,” Novoe vremia No. 7550 (5 March 1897), 3, and No. 7551 (6 March 1897), 3. On Shcherbina’s budget study methods see Shcherbina, Krest’ianskie biudzhety. 138 Chuprov, “O vliianie urozhaev i khlebnykh tsen na russkoe narodnoe ­khoziaistvo,” Novoe vremia No. 7549 (4 March 1897), 3. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid.

Chapter four    1 On the quest for universal laws see Vucinich, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia. On the connection between this project and advocacy see Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers,” and “From Commune to Household.”   2 Shanin, The Awkward Class.   3 Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom.    4 Imperatorskoe Vol’noe Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo (hereafter V EO), Statisticheskaia kommissiia pri III-m Otdeleniem Imperatorskago Vol’nago Ekonomisheskago Obshchestva; Imperatorskoe Obshchestvo Russkikh Estestvoispytatelei i Vrachei (hereafter OREV ). Trudy podsektsii statistiki IX s”ezda russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei; Statisticheskoe Otdelenie Iuridicheskago Obshchestva, pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom Universitete (hereafter MIuO), Trudy Komissii po voprosu ob organizatsii zemsko-statisticheskikh otsenochnykh izsledovanii; V EO, Trudy kommissii po voprosam zemskoi statistiki; OREV , Trudy podsektsii statistiki XI s”ezda russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei v S.-Peterburge; OREV , Trudy podsektsii statistiki XII s”ezda russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei.   5 Stigler, The History of Statistics, 5, 7.    6 Quoted in Cole, “The Power of Large Numbers,” 44, 54. See also Beer, Renovating Russia.   7 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 85.

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  8 On issues of normality, deviance, and individual space see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness.  9 Frierson, Peasant Icons. 10 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 52–4; Stigler, The History of Statistics, 170–4; Cole, “The Power of Large Numbers,” 46–52. 11 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 135–7; Goldfrank, “Reappraising Le Play,” 130–51; Lazarsfeld, “Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology,” 277–333. 12 For a compendium of his Voronezh work see Shcherbina, Svodnyi sbornik po 12 uezdam Voronezhskoi gubernii; Shcherbina, Krest’ianskie biudzhety. On Shcherbina in Turkestan, see Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire. 13 On sampling, see Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 236–7. For state pressure on zemstvo statisticians see V.B. “Sud’ba zemskoi statistiki,” 383–7; Peshekhonov, “Krizis V zemskoi statistiki.” 14 Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism; Kingston-Mann, “Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation.” 15 Frierson, Peasant Icons, esp. 104–15. 16 On the image of the kulak see ibid., ch. 7. 17 See for example his “Ocherki derevenskogo nastroeniia.” In contrast to Uspenskii and others, Zlatovratskii attempted to find some good in all of this, at least an expression of the peasant’s new freedom. See Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, esp. 124–36; Frierson, Peasant Icons, ch. 4–5. 18 Among early observers of the peasant economy with a more lenient view of off-farm employment, A.N. Engel’gardt considered it a necessary evil, and suggested that the level of such employment might serve as a good indicator of the well-being of the household. See Engel’gardt, Iz derevni: 12 pisem, 375–8. 19 Further research revealed that, as most peasant horses were only used during sowing and harvest, owning a horse (and hence feeding it year-round) did not necessarily make good economic sense. See Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization, 153–8. 20 Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik, No. 240 (1881), 3. 21 Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik, No. 241 (1881), 2. 22 See Barykov, Polovtsov and Sokolovskii, eds. Sbornik materialov dlia izucheniia sel’skoi pozemel’noi obshchiny, 70–2. 23 See Bazilevich, Opyt podvorno-statisticheskago izsledovanniia Suprunovskoi volosti, 3–6. 24 Moskovskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, prilozhenie (appendix) 33 (original emphasis).

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Notes to pages 140–6

25 Chernigovskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Trudy statisticheskago otdeleniia pri Chernigovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi uprave, 119–48. 26 See Tverskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Tverskoi gubernii, 50–7. Tver’ and Moscow statisticians also turned to budget information, presenting a sample budget for a household that approximated the numerical averages for family composition and land tenure data. These budgets consisted of estimated average earnings and expenditures for the household economy. 27 Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism. See also Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, esp. ch. 5. 28 Karelin, Obshchinnoe zemlevladenie v Rossii, 150–1; Prugavin, Russkaia zemel’naia obshchina v trudakh eia mestnykh izsledovatelei, 34; Vorontsov, Itogi ekonomicheskogo izsledovaniia Rossii, 102. 29 V.I. Pokrovskii, O platezhnykh sredstvakh naseleniia Tverskoi gubernii, 79–81. 30 Tverskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Tverskoi gubernii, 50–5. 31 Pokrovskii, O platezhnykh sredstvakh naseleniia Tverskoi gubernii, 53–6. 32 Ibid., 150. 33 Moskovskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 157, 163. Bogorodskii district had the highest rate of repartitions (one every ten years) and Podol’skii the lowest (one every 14.9 years). 34 Ibid., 191, 208–9. 35 Ibid., 214–15, 266–8. 36 Prugavin, Russkaia zemel’naia obshchina. For an overview of the “obshchina debate” see Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii, 3–25; Vdovina, “Vopros o proiskhozhdenii krest’ianskoi obshchiny v russkoi dorevoliutsionnoi istoriografii”; Zyrianov, Krestian’skaia obshchina evropeiskoi Rossii, introduction. 37 Prugavin, Russkaia zemel’naia obshchina, 42–43, 69–74. 38 Ibid., 14. 39 Ibid., 33–6. 40 Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad”; Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, ch. 5. 41 Prugavin, Russkaia zemel’naia obshchina, 19–25. 42 Ibid., 257–66. Prugavin never squares this critique with his characterization of the commune as a collection of individuals. 43 Ibid., 291–5 (quote, 293). 44 Golovin, Sel’skaia obshchina v literature i deistvitel’nosti, esp. ch. 10. 45 Like Vorontsov, Fortunatov trained originally for the medical profession before shifting to statistics and eventually retiring as a professor at the Petrovskii Acaemy. See Fortunatov, “Avtobiografiia,” 183–5.

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46 V.V., Itogi ekonomicheskago izsledovaniia Rossii po dannym zemskoi statistiki. This was intended as the first in a multi-volume series. Subsequent volumes never appeared, although Chuprov claimed in his ­forward that a second volume on peasant rent outside the commune was already in preparation (iii). 47 V.V., Progressivnyia techeniia v krest’ianskom khoziaistva; KingstonMann, “Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation: A Preliminary Inquiry.” 48 See his Sud’by kapitalizma v Rossii as well as Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, 114­­–20, 128–31; and Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, 143. 49 V.V., Itogi ekonomicheskogo izsledovaniia Rossii, 41. See also 42–3. The early Bolshevik state’s agrarian policy also (eventually) relied upon this hypothetical unity of interests between the poor and the middle peasant. 50 Ibid., 134. 51 Ibid., 135, 138–9. 52 Ibid., 154–221, esp. 156, 176–7, 193–216. 53 Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism, 144–5. 54 In addition to previously cited works, see Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought (esp. chs. 3 and 4); and Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution. 55 I. Gurvich, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie russkoi derevni. (Published originally in English as Isaak A. Hourvich, “The Economics of the Russian Village.” All citations come from the Russian translation, which appeared in 1896.) 56 Ibid., 125–32. 57 Ibid., 139–43. 58 Ibid., 133–8. 59 Ibid., 145–48. 60 Lenin, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii. Protsess obrazovaniia rynka dlia krupnoi promyshlennosti. The following citations refer to the English translation in Volume 3 of V.I. Lenin: Collected Works, 21–607. 61 For example, Lenin noted that rich peasants (as defined by number of livestock) possessed the greatest number of improved implements and purchased land in Novouzensk district (Samara province); well-to-do peasants also rented a disproportionate share of total rented lands and hired a disproportionate amount of outside labour in Krasnoufimskii district (Perm’ province). See The Development of Capitalism in Russia, ch. 2, esp. 85–8, 106–9. 62 Ibid., 103 (original emphasis). 63 Ibid., 104.

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Notes to pages 151–5

64 The discussion related to V. Postnikov’s investigation of the Tauride and Kharkov peasantry in his Iuzhno-Russkoe krest’ianskoe khozizistvo. 65 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 79–82. Vorontsov’s comments appeared in Vestnik Evropy, kn. 7 (1884), 339–42. 66 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 82–3. 67 Ibid., 95 (original emphasis). 68 Ibid., 78–9. 69 Struve, Krepostnoe khoziaistvo; Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 201–7; Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West, 142–4; Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 54–5. 70 Bulgakov, Kapitalizm i zemledelie, Vol. II, 442–58; Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 55–9; Evtuhov, “Introduction,” in her edition of Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy, 5. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 12–15; Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy, ch. 7. 73 Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, 38–9. 74 A. Shlikevich, “Chto daiut i chto mogut dat’ podvornyia opisi,” 39–41, 59–60. For more on Shlikevich and combination tables see Darrow, “From Commune to Household,” 797–802. 75 On Groman see Jasny, The Soviet Economists of the Twenties, ch. 10. 76 Groman, “Ob osnovaniiakh gruppirovki krest’ianskikh khoziaistv.” See also Groman’s later work: Penzenskoe Gubernskoe Statisticheskoe Biuro, Itogi otsenochno-statisticheskogo issledovaniia Penzenskoi, esp. 41–7. 77 Groman, “Ob osnovaniiakh gruppirovki krest’ianskikh khoziaistv,” 79–83. 78 Baskin graduated from the Petrovskii Agricultural Academy (after two expulsions for political activities) and spent a number of years working as a zemstvo agronomist. After 1905 he affiliated with the Popular Socialist party and served as a member from Perm’ province in the ill-fated Second State Duma. Like Groman, he lived his final years in the camps. 79 On the differentiation debate see Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930, 280–8; Cox, Peasants, Class, and Capitalism; Heinzen, Inventing the Soviet Countryside, 152–8; Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, chs. 2 and 3. It is possible to follow the debate in the pages of the Soviet Agrarian Institute’s journal, Na agrarnom fronte. 80 Baskin, Sovremennaia differentsatsiia i sovremennye tipy krest’ianskogo khoziaistva, esp. 18, 40. See also Baskin’s work in OtsenochnoStatistichskoe Otdlenie Samarskogo Gubernskogo Zemstva, Podvornaia perepis’ krest’ianskikh khoziaistv Samarskoi gubernii. Stavropol’skii uezd. 81 Svavitskii, “Kombinatsionnye tablitsy, kak priem izucheniia tipov i faktorov krest’ianskogo khoziaistva v zemskikh podvornykh perepisiakh,” 456–7.

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 82 Postnikov, Iuzhno-Russkoe krest’ianskoe khozizistvo.   83 Ibid., 107–10.   84 Tul’skoe Gubernskoe Zemstvo. Otsenochnostatisticheskoe Otdelenie, Materialy dlia otsenki zemel’ Tul’skoi gubernii, 164. The problem of translating household groupings based on sown area into social-class groupings continued to trouble Khriashcheva, who became one of the leading figures in the interpretation of the so-called “dynamic studies.” She later attempted to solve some of the problems related to this translation, such as regional variation. See Khriashcheva, Gruppy i klassy v krest’ianstve, 90–1. For a further explication of Khriashcheva’s work in this area, see Cox, Peasants, Class and Capitalism, 49–53.  85 V E O , Trudy kommissii po voprosam zemskoi statistiki, 132–8.  86 Postnikov, Iuzhno-Russkoe krest’ianskoe khozizistvo, 351.   87 Shlikevich, “Chto daiut i chto mogut dat’ podvornie perepisi,” 52; Postnikov, Iuzhno-Russkoe krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 117, 162; For Peshekhonov, see his remarks in Trudy kommissii po voprosu ob organizatsii zemsko-statisticheskikh otsenochnykh izsledovanii, 11–16; Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 75.  88 Kosinskii, K agrarnomu voprosu, Vol. I, esp. 165–7; Chuprov, Mel’koe zemledelie i ego osnovanye nuzhdy; Kablukov, Ob usloviiakh razvitiia krest’ianskago khoziaistva.   89 Robbins, Jr., Famine in Russia, 1891–1892.   90 E.g., Engel’gardt, Iz derevni, 375–8; Tverskaia Gubernskaia Zemskaia Uprava, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Tverskoi gubernii, 55–8; Trirogov, Obshchina i podat’, 93–5; Vasil’chikov, Sel’skii byt i sel’skoe khoziaistvo v Rossii, 34–42.  91 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 94.  92 Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskago khoziaistva, iii–v.  93 PSZRI , 3-oe sob., T. VI, No. 3578, 116–17.  94 Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskago khoziaistva, 45–8, 50–1. Revisions counted adult males liable for poll taxes. Thus households were of secondary interest (i.e., mattered only in that the household ­facilitated counting). See Kabuzan, “Revizii,” and; Hoch and Augustine, “The Tax Censuses and the Decline of the Serf Population.”  95 Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskago khoziaistva, 51–7.   96 Ibid., 58–9, 61–6. The average number of workers per family also appeared to be stable. See 75–9.   97 Ibid., 69.   98 Ibid., 72–3.   99 Ibid., 73. 100 Ibid., 82–5.

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Notes to pages 162–8

101 Ibid., 87–8 (original emphasis). 102 Ibid., 91–3, 101–7. 103 Ibid., 90.

C ha p t e r f i ve   1 E.g., law regulating family divisions (1886), statute creating land captains (1889), statute preventing alienation of allotment land (1893). See PSZRI , 3-e sob., No. 3578, “O poriadke razresheniia semeinykh razdelov v sel’skikh obshchestvakh, v kotorykh sushchestvuet obshchinnoe pol’zovanie mirskoiu polevoiu zemleiu,” T. 6 (1886), 116–17; No. 6196, “Polozhenie o Zemskikh Uchastkovykh Nachal’nikov,” T. 9 (1889), 508– 35; No. 9754, “ob utverzhdenii pravil o peredelakh mirskoi zemli,” T. 13 (1893) 425–7; No. 10151, “ O nekotorykh merakh k preduprezhdeniiu otchuzhdeniia krest’ianskikh nadel’nykh zemel’,” T. 13, (1893), 653–4.   2 See Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia; Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize.   3 Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 74.   4 Dubrovskii, Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma; Karpov, Agrarnaia politika Stolypina; Sidel’nikov, Agrarnaia reforma Stolypina; Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaiai obshchina Evropeiskoi Rossii; Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime, 1; Pipes, Property and Freedom; Tokmakoff, “Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform”; Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia and “‘A Wager on History’”; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia; essays in Asiatkov, ed., Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii; and articles on Stolypin in Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 2 (2012).   5 See, e.g., Peshekhonov, Zemel’nye nuzhdi derevni, 39–42.   6 Veselovskii, Pichet, and Friche, eds., Materialy po istorii krest’ianskikh dvizhenii, vyp. 4, 43–4.   7 “Proeky zakona o merakh k rasshireniia i uluchsheniia krest’iankago ­zemlevladiia,” in ibid., 27–41; Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 131.   8 “Proeky zakona o merakh,” 31.   9 By this point, Kutler’s reform proposal had run afoul of the nobility’s advocates at court and in the government. Kutler was fired, and he turned his attention to Duma politics as a member of the Kadet party. For a summary of the parties’ platforms in relation to the agrarian question see Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 49–51; Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party; Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties; and several of the pieces in Haimson, ed.,

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Notes to pages 168–73

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The Politics of Rural Russia. For the experts and norms, see Dolgorukov and Petrunkevich, eds., Agrarnyi vopros, Vols. I and II. 10 Kaufman, “K voprosu o normakh dopolnitel’nago nadeleniia,” 261. 11 Ibid., 261–2. 12 P. Lokhtin, Bezzemel’nyi proletariat v Rossii, v–vi. Goremykin, Agrarnyi vopros also uses these figures. 13 Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Stenograficheskii Otchet (19.V.06), Vol. I, 478, 482–3, 487–96. 14 “Soveshchanie po agrarnomu voprosu 28–9 aprel’ia,” 307–8. 15 Manuilov, “Pozemel’nyi vopros v Rossii,” esp. 61­–72; A.A. Chuprov, “K voprosu o dopolnitel’nom nadelenii malozemel’nykh krest’ian,” 225–47. 16 Tugan-Baranovskii, Zemel’naia reforma, 183. 17 A.I. Chuprov, “K voprosu ob agrarnoi reforme,” 3. 18 Ibid., 5–9. 19 Ibid., 7. 20 Ibid., 13–20, 23, 27–9. 21 See Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 145; Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, 60–3. By this point, Witte had worn out the patience of the tsar and some of his colleagues on multiple fronts. 22 Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility; Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia 23 Gurko, Otryvochnyia mysli po agrarnomu voprosu, 24–8. 24 Ibid., 29. 25 The otrub was a consolidated parcel of ploughland held by a household. Peasants holding otrub parcels did not settle on the parcel as homesteaders, but remained living in a nucleated village. Communes that decided to consolidate communal household shares and were able to complete the process continued to live together in their village surrounded by their surveyed otrub plots (as opposed to resettling their households on them as in the khutor model). In such cases, they continued to share many communal resources. The khutor was an independent, consolidated homestead with marked surveyed boundaries that ideally contained access to all the resources required to operate an independent economy. Settling peasants on khutors, the closest Russian approximation to an American or European family farm, was the preferred goal of the reform process. 26 Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 85, 93, 95–6. 27 Ibid., 197. 28 Rittikh, Zavisimost’ krest’ian ot obshchiny i mira, 180–1. Gaudin’s work confirms Rittkh’s conclusions to a certain extent. See her Ruling Peasants. 29 Pestrzhetskii, Opyt agrarnoi programmy, 110 (original italics).

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Notes to pages 173–8

30 Vestnik finansov, no. 49 (1905), 394. 31 Migulin, Agrarnyi vopros, viii (original emphasis). 32 Ibid., 7 (original emphasis). 33 Diakin, Den’gi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 169–72. 34 R GI A f. 1571, A.V. Krivoshein, op. 1, d. 28, l. 1. 35 Ibid., l. 8ob. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., l. 7ob. 38 Ibid., l. ll. 11–12, 14–15, 17. 39 Veselovskii et al., Agrarnyi vopros v Sovete Ministrov, 105–10; Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 152. 40 On this latter point, see below and Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” esp. 35­–43. 41 Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” 26; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, esp. 37–43. 42 “Settlement,” in this case, has the connotation of management or organization. 43 On continuity see Crisp, “Peasant Land Tenure and Civil Rights Implications before 1906”; Khristoforov, “Ot Speranskogo do Stolypina.” 44 Macey, “A Wager on History,” 151. 45 The award of rights to head of household created household and village tension. See Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, ch. 5. 46 For the text of Stolypin’s addresses see Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Vtoroi sozyv. Stenograficheskie otchety, 1907 god. Sessiia vtoraia, chast’ II, 434– 46; Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety, 1908 god. Sessiia vtoraia, chast’ I, 2279–83. See also Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in Favor of Kulaks?”; Stolypin, Nam Nuzhna Velikaia Rossiia provides a convenient collection of these and other Stolypin speeches. 47 Zaboenkova, “Krest’ianskaia lichnaia sobstvennost’ na zemliu’,” 134. 48 Ibid., 132; Zaboenkova, “Pravoe polozhenie nadel’noi zemli,” 99. For Stolypin’s words, see his Duma speech of 5 December 1908 in Stolypin, Nam nuzhna velikaia Rossiia, 177. 49 Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime, 217. 50 Zaboenkova, “Pravoe polozhenie nadel’noi zemli,” 97; Zaboenkova, “Pravoe aspekty razrusheniia obshchiny,” 47–8. 51 PSZRI , 3-e sob., No. 35370, “O zemleustroistve,” Vol. 31, 459–60. 52 Zaboenkova, “Pravoe aspekty razrusheniia obshchiny,” 48 (original italics); Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 19. 53 PSZRI , 3-e, sob., No. 3342, “Ob izmemenii i dopolnenii nekotorykh postanovlenii o krest’ianskom zemlevladenii,” T. 30, ch. 1 (1910), 752.

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Notes to pages 178–83

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54 Diakin, Den’gi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 173; PSZRI , 3-e sob., No. 26871, “Ob uluchshenii blagosostoianiia i oblegcheniia krest’ianskago naseleniia,” T. 25 (1905), 790; No. 26,875, “Ob oblegchenii zadachi Krest’ianskago Pozemel’nago Banka po sodeistviiu k uvelicheniiu ploshchadi malozemel’nykh krest’ian,” T. 25 (1905), 791; No. 28,547, “O vydache Krest’ianskim Pozemel’nym Bankom ssud pod zalog nadel’nykh zemel’,” T. 26, ch. 1 (1906), 980–2; PSZRI , 3-e sob., No. 28,315, “O prednaznachenii kasennykh zemel’ k prodazhe dlai razshireniia krest’ianskago zemlevladeniia,” T. 26, ch. 1 (1906), 846–7. The view that loans – even for 100% of the assessed property value – would dissuade peasants from thoughts of free additional allotments was wishful thinking. 55 Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” 37–9. 56 N.A. Proskuriakova, Zemel’nye Banki Rossiiskoi Imperii; Zak, Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, 9 (quote), 49–79. 57 R GI A , f. 592, op. 44, d. 244, ll. 190–90ob; Ibid., d. 245, ll. 63–4. 58 PSZRI , 3-oe sob., T. 14 (1894), No. 11,035, Art. 8, 635. 59 Zak, Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, 239–81. 60 R GI A , f. 592, op. 44, d. 244, ll. 186–86ob. 61 Although a Free Economic Society pamphlet on bank reform argued that its efforts should be directed to the needy exclusively. Ibid., ll. 258–65. 62 Ibid., ll. 41ob (original emphasis), 219. 63 Ibid., ll. 218–18ob. 64 Ibid., l. 39; Volkov, Sbornik polozhenii o sel’skom sostoianii, 604–5, 689–91. 65 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, dd. 262 (Chs. I and II), 272, 281, 282, 283. 66 For the list and explanation see Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska k proektu rospisaniia naibol’shago kolichestva zemli. 67 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 428, ll. 94–109; d. 429, ll. 18–18ob, 77–8, 170– 70ob. In reality, most purchases in Tula were for 1 des./soul or less. 68 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 366, ll. 58 (quote), 59a, 67–70. 69 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 245, ll. 70–2. Reservations reflected concern that the resultant lowering of sale prices would increase demand and spur requests for further reductions. 70 I.E. German, Krest’ianskoe zemleustroistvo, 188–98. 71 Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers,” 59–63. 72 German, Krest’ianskoe zemleustroistvo, 190–3. 73 Diakin, Den’gi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 183–4. 74 Macey, “Wager on History,” 154–5. 75 PSZRI , 3-oe sob., T. 25, No. 26,871, 790.

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Notes to pages 183–8

76 Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, Instruktsiia o poriadke peredachi chasti udel’nykh zemel’ Krest’ianskomu Pozemel’nomu Banku. The rules for implementation were issued on 28 October 1906. PSZRI , 3-oe sob., T. 26, No. 28,357 (19 September 1906), 864–5; No. 28,416 (14 October 1906), 902–3. 77 Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, Sbornik pravil i instruktsii po Krest’ianskomu Pozemel’nomu Banku, 667–71. 78 Diakin, Den’gi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 176–7. 79 Zak, Krest’ianskii pozemel’nyi bank, 9–10, 113, 133. 80 Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, Ch. 5; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia. As Gaudin notes, part of the difficulty with the reform was precisely that officials had underestimated the extent to which previous policies had fostered peasant conceptions of private property. 81 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 46, ll. 5–5ob (quote), 254. 82 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 64, l. 22. 83 See Kantseliariia Komiteta po Zemleustroitelnym Delam, Sbornik zakonov i rasporiazhenii po zemleustroistvu (do 1 iiunia 1908 g.), 179. These norms were circulated to local bank branches, the directors of which sat on every district land settlement commission. See circulars reprinted in Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, Sbornik pravil i instruktsii po Krest’ianskomu Pozemel’nomu Banku, esp. 559–83 (maximum landholding per household according to Article 54) and 587–659 (emancipation norms). 84 See Wildman, “The Defining Moment.” 85 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 1657, ll. 63–7ob. In the end, the discussion was moot, as the state realized that these lands were already under long-term lease to other local peasants. Selling them to darstvenniki and meshchane would simply be exchanging one set of land hungry peasants for another. It was possible that these peasants were better off than neighbours who took an emancipation allotment, even though from the standpoint of landholding they appeared impoverished. 86 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 366. 87 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 1657, ll. 51–5. 88 Ibid., ll. 13–14; RG I A f. 408, op. 1, d. 90, ll. 14ob–15; R GIA f. 592, op. 44, d. 366, ll. 161–2. 89 The Obolenskii committee reviewing the provisional norms of 1900 had rejected use of a consumption norm, fearing that attempts to guarantee consumption would not guarantee payments. See R GIA f. 592, op. 44, d. 470, ll. 5ob–8ob. 90 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 1657, ll. 44–44ob (quote), 51–5. 91 R GI A F. 592, op. 44, d. 366, l. 170 (quote)–70ob.

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Notes to pages 189–99

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  92 Article 54 also applied to bank activities in Baltic and southern steppe provinces after 1909. RG I A f. 592, op. 44, d. 566. For the review of the Bank charter initiated in 1911 see RG I A f. 592, op. 1, d. 222, esp. ll. 19–19ob, 117­–25a. For the 1912 Charter see Volkov, Ustav Krest’ianskago Pozemel’nago Banka. Discussion of the new charter took place in the context of Krivoshein’s efforts to expand peasant access to credit by restructuring all state agricultural credit institutions. See Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” 42.  93 Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 229.  94 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 1657, ll. 101–2, 120–2ob.  95 Sbornik zakonov i rasporiazhenii po zemleustroistvu, 5–7, 40–1.  96 Zak, Krest’ianskii Pozemel’nyi Bank, 499. The rules were issued by a special GUZ iZ commission in 1909.  97 See Stenograficheskii otchet. Gosudarstvennaia Duma pervyi sozyv I, 560– 2, and the discussion throughout RG I A f. 592, op. 44, d. 521.  98 Doklad Soveta VI S”ezdu Upolnomochennykh Dvorianskikh Obshchestv, 8–9.  99 Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 230 (my italics except soslovie); Volkov, Sbornik polozhenii o sel’skom sostoianii, 635, 665–77; R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 233, l. 18ob. 100 For examples see Sbornik pravil i instruktsii po Krest’ianskomu Pozemel’nomu Banku. 101 R GI A f. 592, op. 36, d. 120, ll. 5–6. 102 Ibid., ll. 9ob–12ob. 103 R GI A f. 592, op. 27, d. 52, ll. 7–7ob; d. 79, ll. 3–9; d. 82, ll. 3–14. 104 R GI A , f. 592, op. 32, d. 788, ll. 2–13. 105 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 231, ll. 214–17. 106 Ibid., ll. 214–14ob. 107 Ibid., ll. 214ob (quote)–215. 108 Ibid., l. 215 (my italics). 109 T sGI A S P B f. 2077, op. 1, d. 450, ll. 7–8ob, 31–4. In the end, war saved the delinquents. By 23 July the branch manager was asking the bank director if the process should be postponed (he agreed). On July 31, after mobilization, the bank branch council put the whole operation on hold indefinitely. See also RG I A f. 592, op. 27, d. 18, and d. 231, l. 308ob. 110 Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, 18. 111 Stolypin, Poezdka v Sibir’ i Povolzhe, 21–43, esp. 25–7. 112 R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 323, l. 188. 113 On Russia and debt markets see Siegel, For Peace and Money. 114 Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, 7–8.

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Notes to pages 199–205

115 R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 326, ll. 1–2, 116–19. For a sampling of the grousing, see ll. 56–7 and RG I A f. 592, op. 1, d. 323, ll. 17–20, 35–6, 93–9, 125–32, and l. 229, a 6 February 1906 letter from the Riazan’ marshal of nobility to the bank director in which he labelled bank activities and pricing as “tendentious” and not in the spirit of defending private property included in the Manifesto of 3 November 1905. Diakin notes that such complaints played a role in the downfall of Witte, Kutler, and bank director Putilov. See Diakin, Den’gi dlia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 178–82. 116 R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 520, ll. 1–2ob. 117 R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 326, ll. 56–7, 74–5. 118 R GI A f. 1571, op. 1 d. 43, ll. 1–6. 119 R GI A , f. 1571, op. 1 d. 43, l. 14; RG I A f. 408, op. 1, d. 92, l. 1. Among other places, the “Special Minutes” appear in Ibid., ll. 2–9ob. 120 For the list see ibid., l. 12. 121 For the text of the circular see Sbornik Zakonov i Rasporiazhenii po zemleustroistvu, 195–227. 122 Ibid., 195–6. 123 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 74, ll. 2–7, 15; Sbornik Zakonov i Rasporiazhenii po zemleustroistvu, 202. 124 Ibid., 201. 125 Ibid., 202 (quote), 204. The bank norms calculated in 1900 used a similar figure – an average family of six souls, three of each sex. See R GIA f. 592, op. 1, d. 32, l. 4. 126 Sbornik Zakonov i Rasporiazhenii po zemleustroistvu, 203. 127 R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 241, l. 23 (my italics). Officials considered the normal size of a khutor parcel to be twelve hectares of ploughland plus other arable for a household with 2–3 adult workers. See R GIA f. 592, op. 1, d. 620, l. 12ob. 128 R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 68, l. 328ob. 129 Voskresenskii, comp., Spravochnyi ukazatel’ o pereselenii na novyia mesta i o priobretenii zemli pri sodeistvii Krest’ianskago Pozemel’nago Banka, esp. 35–6. See also Kak krest’ianam uvleichit’ svoe zemlevladenie pri pomoshchi Krest’ianskago Banka. 130 To view a sample of these through 1910 see Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, available in full colour online as part of the State Historical Library’s electronic library; it can also be downloaded from the Russian State Library website. 131 Co-ops with more than twenty members were considered large. 132 R GI A , f. 1571, op. 1, d. 43, ll. 15–17. The provinces considered here were Ufa, Samara, Penza, Simbirsk, Kazan’, Nizhnyi Novgorod, and Riazan’. Even the official history of the operation noted resistance in many land

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133 134 135 136

137 138 139 140 141

142 143 144

145 146 147

148 149 150

Notes to pages 205–9

285

settlement commissions to the new vision of selling land to peasants as individual property. See Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka po pokupke i prodazhe zemli, 21. R GI A f. 1571, op. 1, d.47, l. 10. See copies of telegrams from 24 July 1907 from bank director Polenov to head liquidators Shilkin and Khripunov, R GIA f. 408, op. 1, d. 69, ll. 23–4. Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, 22. R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 241, ll. 28–30ob. See also minutes of Committee on Land Settlement Affairs meeting of 10 November 1907 in R GIA f. 408, op. 1, d. 1657, ll. 120–1. R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 68, ll. 327–8, 329 (quote). Ibid., ll. 329-9ob. Sales were required if the buyer’s allotment exceeded 20 percent of the amount of land being purchased. Ibid., l. 329ob; RG I A f. 408, op. 1, d. 48, l. 16. It never occurred to anyone that peasants might themselves be interested in purchasing such assets. R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 68, l. 330. Ads posted in the metro by real estate firms in Saint Petersburg continue the practice of offering potential buyers discounted or free travel to inspect potential purchases. R GI A f. 592, op. 44, d. 390, ll. 227, 249. Obzor deiatel’nosti Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, 24 (quote)–25. Ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska k otchetu Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka za 1908 g., 17–18; ibid. za 1909 g., 18–19, 24–5; ibid. za 1910 g., 23–5; ibid. za 1911 g., 23–4; ibid. za 1912 g., 26–7; ibid. za 1913 g., 26–8; ibid. za 1914 g., 25–7. R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 241, l. 25ob. R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 46, l. 51. Koslovsko-Vorotynskoe imenie Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, esp. 3–4; Petropavlovskoe imenie Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, esp. 5; Plotitsynskoe imenie Krest’ianskogo Pozemel’nogo Banka, esp. 2. The bulk of these publications list the names of the individual purchasers, including notations of their provenance. R GI A f. 408, op. 1, d. 68, ll. 337–7ob. R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 592, ll. 226–9. R GI A f. 592, op. 1, d. 356, esp. ll. 24, 31–2, 220–48, 251.

C ha p t e r s i x This chapter is a substantially revised version of “Agrarian Experts and Social Justice: Land Allotment Norms in Revolution and Civil War,” Cahiers du Monde russe 57, no. 1 (2016): 55–80.

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Notes to pages 214–18

  1 Macey, “‘A Wager on History,’” 162–6.   2 Ibid., 166–7; Shelokhaev, Ideologiia i politicheskaia organizatsiia rossiiskoi liberal’noi burzhuazii, 78–102.  3 On gosudarstevnnost’ see Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State; Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 134–69; McDonald, “1991 and the History of Russian Gosudarstvennost’,” 223–38. On the emergence of the idea of a “public domain” as an institutionalization of the common good see Pravilova, A Public Empire. On fear of speculators’ exploitation of peasants see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward; and Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes,” 157.   4 Peshekhonov became Provisional Government Minister of Provisioning and Groman chaired the State Committee on Food Supply. See, for example, Materialy po voprosam razrabotki obshchago plana prodovol’stviia naseleniia (put together by Chaianov); Materialy po voprosam razrabotki obshchago plana prodovol’stviia naseleniia (put together by Groman); Vremennoe Pravitel’stvo, Ministerstvo Prodovol’stviia. Normirovka potrebleniia prodovol’stvennykh produktov; and Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia.   5 Bulgakova, “The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife”; Moore, “The Demands of Service,” esp. ch. 4. See also Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War; Pyle, “Village Social Relations and the Reception of Soldier’s Family Aid Policies in Russia.” On confiscations and resale see Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 100–6; RG I A f. 592, op. 44, d. 231, ll. 384–9; TsGIA , SPB f. 2077, op. 1 dd. 540 and 550 (examples of bank sales of alien property).   6 Pallot, “The Stolypin Land Reform as ‘Administrative Utopia’” in Pallot, ed., Land Reform in Russia; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 3.  7 Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1, 211.   8 Ibid., 128.  9 Vestnik Vremennago Pravitel’stva, no. 14 (21 March 1917). In Browder and Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, vol. 2, 523–33. 10 See his opening speech to the first session of the GZ K , “Pervaia Sessiia Glavnago Zemel’nago Komiteta” Yaney has his name wrong (“D. Posnikov”—The Urge to Mobilize, 460). Posnikov, of Vlianie urozhaev fame, believed in the approach advocated by zemstvo statisticians and remained an advocate for the commune much like his close collaborator since graduate school, A.I. Chuprov. He remained in Russia after October teaching at the St Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. See Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., Vol. XX, 460. 11 “‘Pervaia Sessiia Glavnago Zemel’nago Komiteta,” 3–5.

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12 In addition to previously cited works by Kotsonis and Holquist see Stanziani, L’économie en revolution, ch. 8; Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia; Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war; Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties; Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism. 13 See Vremennoe Pavitel’stvo, Ministerstvo Zemledeliia, GZ K , Trudy komissii po podgotvke zemel’noi reformy (hereafter TKPZR ), Vyp. II, Normy zemel’nago obezpecheniia, 36; TKPZR , Vyp. V, Organizatsiia territorii, 18. 14 On peasants and property see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, ch. 2; and “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms.” 15 On property rights see G ARF f. 1796, G Z K op. 1, d. 17; “K organizatsii rabot komissii po pravovym formam zemlevladeniia,” IGZK , no. 4–5, 14–15. On other questions, see especially TKPZR , Vyp. I, O krupnom zemlevladenii ; Vyp. III, O krupno-krest’ianskikh khoziaistvakh; and Vyp. IV, O kontingente khoziaistv i lits, podlezhashchikh obezpecheniiu zemlei. 16 Oganovskii, Agrarnyi vopros v Rossii posle 1905 g., 3. 17 Ozeretskovskii, “Zemel’nye komitety,” IGZK , no. 1, 29; nos. 2–3, 26. 18 IGZK , no. 1, [Activities of the Council of the GZ K ], 23; GA R F f. 1796, op. 1, d. 24, l. 2ob. 19 Kantsenelenbaum, Finansovaia storona agrarnoi reformy, 11–27. 20 TKPZR , Vyp. V, Organizatsiia territorii, 9–10. 21 TKPZR , Vyp. II, Normy zemel’nago obezpecheniia, 1. 22 As noted in the previous chapter, Kaufman, also a member of the commission and one of the authors of the Kadet land reform program, made this apparent a decade earlier. See Kaufman, “K voprosu o normakh dopolnitel’nago nadeleniia,” 261–304. 23 TKPZR , Vyp. II, Normy zemel’nago obezpecheniia, 20–1. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 27–30. By this time, peasants were actually doing this in many areas. 26 Kaufman had served in the Ministry of State Domains as part of a party of researchers studying peasant life and land settlement practices in Western Siberia. See his autobiography, published posthumously in Vestnik Statistiki, Nos. 5–8 (1921). 27 TKPZR , Vyp. II, Normy zemel’nago obezpecheniia, 37, 39, 41. 28 Ibid., 40–1, 46. 29 Ibid., 34. 30 Ibid., 49–50. 31 Vorob’ev, Agrarnyi vopros v Simbirskoi gubernii, 4 (quote), 14. 32 Ibid., 11, 21. 33 Miller, Rural Unrest During the First Russian Revolution.

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Notes to pages 225–9

34 GA R F f. 1797, op. 1, dd. 52–5; Gaudin, Ruling Peasants; Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court. 35 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War; Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War. 36 Maleeva, “Chego zhdut krest’iane ot zemel’nykh reform,” IGZK , nos. 2–3, 31. 37 Kostrikin, Zemel’nye komitety v 1917 godu. 38 See esp., G ARF f. 1796, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 83, 95, 99. 39 See Stenograficheskii otchet pervago s”ezda Zapadno-Sibirskago Soveta Krest’ianskikh Deputatov for an illustration of such political beauty pageants. 40 Report of Samara branch of the Peasant Land Bank director, GA R F f. 1797, op. 1, d. 135, l. 32. 41 Pravilova, A Public Empire, chpt. 3. 42 “Primernyi nakaz. Sostavlennyi na osnovanii 242 nakazov, dostavlennykh s mestnymi deputatami na II Vserossiiskii s’ezd Sovetov krest’ianskikh deputatov v Petrograde v 1917 godu,” in Shestakov, Sovety krest’ianskikh deputatov, 152–5. 43 Kosinskii, box 1, folder “Introduction, Table of Contents, Chapts. 1–2,” Hoover Institution Archives (hereafter HI A ). 44 For example, Protokol zasedaniia vtorogo Gubernskago S”ezda Krest’ianskikh Deputatov Mogilevskoi gubernii. 45 GA R F , f. 1797, op. 1, d. 135, ll. 52–8, 75. 46 Baskin, “Proizvoditel’nost’ zemledel’cheskago truda i chistaia dokhodnost’ khoziaistva” Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, and his report to the land committee, Metod opredeleniia potrebitel’no-trudovykh zemel’nykh norm. 47 Ibid., 2–3. 48 GA R F F. 1797, op. 1, d. 135, l. 75. 49 GA R F f. 1796, op. 1, d. 51, Protokoly Golovetsago Volost’nago Zemel’nago Komiteta 29 iiunia 1917, l. 3. 50 GA R F f. 1796, op. 1, d. 51, Protokoly Semeikovskago Volost’nago Zemel’nago Komiteta 15 avgusta 1917, l. 33. 51 GA R F f. 1796, op. 1, d. 51, l. 9. 52 Ibid., l. 25. 53 GA R F f. 1796, op. 1, d. 58, ll. 53–3ob; d. 59, ll. 6–7. 54 Manning, “Bolshevik Without the Party,” esp. 40–4. 55 The program of the Antonov (Green) movement in Tambov – among the last holdouts against Bolshevik consolidation during the civil war – as ­represented by the Union of the Toiling Peasantry (Soiuz Trudovogo Krest’ianstva) did not mention norms specifically, but demanded that the

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“law on land” as “drafted and passed by the Constituent Assembly” be brought “into reality … to its original extent,” an obvious reference to the GZ K and S R proposals, both of which included norms. Landis, Bandits and Partisans, 124–5. See also Raleigh, “A Provincial Kronstadt,” esp. 89; Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia, 72–3; Smith, Captives of Revolution. 56 Channon, “The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry,” 593–624; Heinzen, Inventing the Soviet Countryside. Lenin, like most tsarist officials post1905, pursued a universalist modernization line that included reading the same German and Danish agrarian studies as his ministerial enemies. See Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 1, 151–3. 57 Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, kn. 2, 257–8. 58 Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, Vol. I, 18–19, 218–24. 59 Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 173–5. 60 Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, kn. 2, 261; Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 177–8. 61 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 718–19. 62 Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, Vol. I, 408. 63 Paragraphs 5 and 6, Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, Vol. I, 411–12. 64 Ibid., Paragraph 14, 412–13. 65 Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, kn. 2, 262–6, 288. See also Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, ch. 10; Kovalev, “Sotsializatsiia zemli,” 97–106. 66 Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War, 140–3. 67 Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika”; Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province; Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers,” 55. 68 Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, kn. 2, 268–70. 69 Ibid., 270–1. 70 Ibid., 288. 71 Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 185. 72 Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests,” 173–4. 73 Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 280. 74 Holquist, “A Russian Vendee,” 599. This resentment had been brewing for well over a decade. See Duma debates on a proposal to address these grievances in Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Stenograficheskii otchet. Tretii sozyv, sessiia II, chast’ I, 3275–9. 75 Holquist, “A Russian Vendee,” 602–12. 76 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1918, 196. 77 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 80, 211. 78 Mal’t, “Denikinshchina i krest’ianstvo,” 147.

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Notes to pages 235–47

79 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919­–1920, 88. 80 Glinka, “Untitled Essay re Wrangel as Reformer,” HIA Wrangel Collection (WC ), box 166, folder 24 (reel 217). 81 On Glinka, see Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests.” 82 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 281–2; Glinka, “Untitled Essay,” H I A W C, box 166, folder 24, 9. 83 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 285–6; Glinka, “Untitled essay,” 10. Sevastopol’ Peasant Soviet representatives evidently did not object to the project terms (though perhaps they were simply playing for time?). 84 Ibid., 16. 85 Ibid., 19, 21–2. 86 Ibid., 20; Glavnokomanduiushchago Vooruzhenymi Silami na Iuge Rossii, Prikaz o zemle, 5–6. 87 Glinka, “Untitled essay,” 28, 31. 88 Ibid., 25–6. 89 Ibid., 26. 90 Gurko, Otryvochnyia mysli po agrarnomu voprosu, 24–8. 91 Glinka, “Untitled essay,” 28. 92 Rybnikov, K postanovke agrarnago voprosa, 2–3. 93 Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh ‘voennogo kommunizma’, 24; Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1, 676. Stalin is quoted by Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 2, 120. 94 O’Leary, “The Constitutional Right to Housing in the Russian Federation”; Barry, “Soviet Housing Law”; Rudden, “Soviet Housing Law”; Hazard, Soviet Housing Law; Locher, “Max von Petterkofer.” 95 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 117–22; Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 2, 227.

C onc l usio n   1 As Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family.” See www.ohcr.org/EN/UDHR/ Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf   2 Kotsonis, States of Obligation; Pravilova, A Public Empire.   3 Porter, Trust in Numbers.   4 On modernity in general and the state in particular see Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust; Scott, Seeing Like a State; and the essays in Hoffman and Kotsonis, eds. Russian Modernity.

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  5 Hoffman, Stalinist Values.   6 See Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak.”   7 Lerman and Shagaida, “Land Reform and Development,” 4-6.   8 Wegren, The Moral Economy Reconsidered, 132–5.   9 Higgins, “Russia Looks to Populate Its Far East.” 10 Feifer, “Russia: Farmland May Prove Putin’s Lasting Legacy”; “Putin’s Agricultural Policies.” 11 Visser and Mamonova, “Large Scale Land Acquisitions in the Former Soviet Union.”

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Page numbers in italics indicate tables. agrarian reform: access to credit and, 179, 184; assessments of, 128–30; attempts at, 4–5; Bolsheviks and, 229–33; extensification as strategy of, 8, 9, 52, 95; historiography of, 5–10; Ianson conclusions in, 79; land norms in approaches to, 167–74; moral and political issues in, 10, 91–2, 216; reasons for failure of, 6; revolution and, 216–24, 239– 40; Special Conference on Strengthening Peasant Landholding, 174; Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture, 167, 174; state and, 97–104; White governments and, 233–9. See also extensification; intensification; land allotment; rural economic development; State Peasant Land Bank; Stolypin reforms Aksakov, Konstantin S., 104 Alexander I, 56 Alexander II, 54, 55, 56–8, 70

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alienation of land, 226, 236, 248. See also compulsory alienation norms Annenskii, N.F., 117, 119 Anuchin, E.N., 137–8 appraisals of land for purchase, 182–3, 192–4 Arsen’ev, K.I., 73 Atkinson, Dorothy, 231 autocracy, end of, 217, 247 average: as equated with “normal,” 134–5; Lenin on use and abuse of, 150–2 average peasant. See middle peasant “average peasant household,” 137, 140–1, 246 Bakunin, A.A., 112 Basic Law on the Socialization of Land of 1918, 230–1 Baskin, Grigorii I., 155, 227 Bazilevich, I.A., 139, 140 Beliaev, Ivan D., 99, 114, 143–4 black soil regions, 76, 78, 261n28

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Bogolepov, I.P., 140 Bogoslovskii, M.M., 109–10 Bolotov, Andrei, 50, 108 bol’shaia moskovskaia sokha, 22 Bolsheviks and land norms, 229– 33, 240–1 Brutskus, Boris D., 221, 222–3 Bulgakov, Sergei N., 153 Bykhovskii, N.Ia., 218, 220 cadastral principles and peasant economy, 81, 91–3 cadastral registration system, 22 cadastral work in Russia and European states, 37, 100 cameralist world view, 25–7, 32 capitalism: controversy over, 141– 2, 148–52; Vorontsov on, 146 categorization of lands as peasant or non-peasant, 73–4 Catherine I, 30 Catherine II: common good and, 32; estate management and, 6; Free Economic Society and, 48; General Land Survey of, 37, 39–40, 98; Legislative Commission of, 133–4; Nakaz, 34, 47; organization of empire by, 34–5, 36; peasant well-being and, 24; populationism and, 33, 35; serfdom and, 56, 108 Central Statistical Committee: averages published by, 134; redemption payment reduction and, 85–6, 87–8, 89–90; rural economy and, 70–2, 74. See also Semenov, P.P. Chaianov, A.V., 121, 122, 137, 163, 215

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Chelintsev, A.N., 222–3, 225 Chernenkov, N.N., Towards a Characterization of the Peasant Economy, 157, 158–62, 163 Chernikov, Sergei, 29 Chernyshevskii, Nicholas, 114 Chicherin, Boris N., 98, 114, 143 Chuprov, A.A., 169–70, 172 Chuprov, A.I., 115, 116–17, 125–7, 146, 157 civic virtue, early modern empire of, 32–4 Cohn, Bernard, 10 colonization or resettlement, 35–7, 44 combination table analysis, 153–7 Commission on the Centre, 168 Committee on Land Settlement Affairs, 201, 202–3 common good, 26, 32, 33–4, 35 “communal proletarians,” 136 communes, repartitional land: assessment of efficacy of, 129; as blamed for rural poverty, 174–5; debate over origins of, 98–9, 114; as failed institutions, 173; frequency of repartitions and, 142–3; household inventory information on, 120–1; households and, 162–3; land sales to, 204–5; loans to, 184; moral economy of, 6; “outside interference” thesis on, 142–8; Populist faith in, 141–2; Prugavin on, 144–5; separation from, 176–8, 186, 214–15; state partnership with, 165; statistical studies of, 115–16; Stolypin reforms and, 165–7; transition from, 202. See also village

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compulsory alienation norms, 168, 169, 170, 173–4 Confino, Michael, 48, 49 consolidation and separation from commune, 177–8, 214–15. See also individual property consumption needs norm, 170, 188–9, 191, 221, 224, 230, 232 co-ops, land sales to, 204–5 Council of Ministers, 200–1 credit, access to, 179, 184 Crimean War, defeat in, 54 Crown properties: income from, 40; liquidation of, 201. See also state lands Custine, marquis de, 56 “cut-offs,” 78, 81–2 Czap, Peter, 51 darstvenniki, 186, 187, 189 data collection: on nadel, 72–4; on redemption payments, 85–6. See also statistics; zemstvo statistical studies decree of 9 November 1906, 177, 178, 184–5, 198 Decree on Land of Bolsheviks, 229 Demidov, A.N., 135 Denikin, Anton I., 235 desiatinas, 253n3 deviance, concerns about, 133 Diakonov, M.A., 103 “differentiation debate,” 155 Digest of Laws, 107 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, 133 Dovnar-Zapolskii, Mitrofan V., 103 Druzhinin, N.M., 99 “eaters,” 230, 232

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economic “disarray,” villages in, 83–4, 85, 86, 87 Economic Section of Editing Commission, 62–3, 65 Editing Commissions, 57, 59–60, 64, 65 efficiency. See intensification; productivity Efimenko, Alexandra, 99 Elizabeth I, 33, 37, 38–9 emancipation land allotment: definition of, 61–2; evaluation of, 92, 95; income derived from, 77–8; Kursk statistical bureau critique of, 122–3; situated historically, 104–10; sufficiency of, 75, 76–80, 121–4; Vorontsov on, 148 Emancipation Manifesto, 58–9 Emancipation of 1861: as cast in moral terms, 57–8; drafting of statutes for, 59–69; evaluation of, 75–80; failings of, 219–20, 244; overview of, 54–5. See also emancipation land allotment Encyclopedia (Brokgauz and Efron), 79 Essay of Statistical Research on Peasant Allotments and Payments (Ianson), 76–9 European Russia: focus on, 12; sale of state lands in, 186–7 Evtuhov, Catherine, 112 extensification: as measure of peasant well-being, 109; statistician measures and, 118; as strategy of agrarian reform, 8, 9, 52, 95 family size and peasant economy, 158–62

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famine of 1891–92, 157 Far East, settlement in, 249 Filaret, Metropolitan, 58 firewood, access to, 78, 107 First All-Russian Peasant Congress, 225–6 First World War, 217 forest, access to, 107 Fortunatov, A.F., 146 Free Economic Society, 48, 50, 100–1, 105, 118 Free Economic Society statistical congress, 156–7 Frierson, Cathy A., 136 Fuller, William, 32 Gaudin, Corrine, 186 General Land Survey, 37, 39–40, 46–7, 61, 98, 105 German Historical School, 94, 116–17 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 3 Glinka, G.V., 235, 236, 237, 238 Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls, 56 Golovin, K.F., 146 Goremykin, I.L., 174, 200 Got’e, Iurii, 109 grain prices, changes in, 125–6, 127–8 Great Reform, The (Society for the Dissemination of Technical Knowledge), 109–10 Great Reforms, 70, 76, 94 Groman, Vladimir G., 154–5, 215 guardianship (popechitel’stvo) of peasants, 36, 43–4, 48 gunpowder revolution, 25 Gurko, V.I., 171–2, 200 Gurvich, Isaak A., 149

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g uz iz (Main Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture), 175, 187–8, 190, 210. See also land settlement commissions, local g z k (Main Land Committee), 217–19, 221–4. See also land committees, local Halle Pietism, 26 Hamburg, Gary M., 97 Haxthausen, August von, 56; Studies on the Interior of Russia, 114 hearth tax, 30–1 Hellie, Richard, 20, 25 The Herald of Europe (journal), 124–5 Herzen, Alexander, 58, 114 high politics, perspective of, 104 historiographic types, 96–7 historiography: of agrarian reform, 5–10; schools of, 96, 97, 103 history: of agrarian economy and reform, 97–104, 128–9; as discipline, 94–5 Hoch, Steven L., 60, 61, 64, 92 Homestead Act of 2016, 249 homesteads (khutors), 177, 187, 205–6, 214, 279n25 household (dvor): “average” defined as, 120; “average peasant household,” 137, 140–1, 246; categorization of, by type, 136– 41, 156–7; as category for understanding peasant economy, 120–1; combination table groupings of, 153–7; conceptions of, 245; life cycle of, 157–63; repartitional land commune and, 114;

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search for “normal” or “typical,” 132–6; shift of basis of taxation to, 23; as viable economic unit, 95 household inventories, 49–50, 117– 19, 129 Iakovenko, V.I., 126 Iakushkin, E., 160 Ianson, Iu.E., 76–9, 106, 108 Imperial Manifesto of 3 November 1905, 183, 198–9, 200 Imperial Russian Geographic Society, 137–8 Imperiia Vserossiiskaia, 25 income: from emancipation land allotment, 77–8; as measure of peasant well-being, 119; from nadel, 83–4; non-agricultural, 137, 223, 227 individual property: attitudes towards, 216–17; as focus of agrarian reform, 173–4; liquidation of Land Bank lands and, 198, 206–10, 208, 211; ownership of, 214; State Peasant Land Bank and, 183–4; Stolypin on, 165–6; Stolypin reforms and, 175–8, 194–6; turn to, 214–15; White governments and, 233–9 Influence of Harvests and Grain Prices on Several Aspects of the Russian National Economy, The (Chuprov and Posnikov), 125–7 intensification: to increase productivity, 245; land shortages and, 107; of serfdom, 108; sufficient land as prerequisite for, 172, 220 International Statistical Congress, 70, 71, 72, 133

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Ioanovna, Anna, 30 Iuzhakov, S.N., 227 Ivan III, 19–20, 231 Ivan IV, 21 Journal of the Ministry of State Domains, 52 “juridical school” of Russian historiography, 97, 103 Kablukov, N.A., 116, 128, 157, 169 Kahan, Arcadius, 31 Karamzin, Nicholas, Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, 104 Kaufman, A.A., 71, 167, 168, 217, 222, 225 Kavelin, K.D., 104 Kharizomenov, S.A., 115 Khodskii, L.V., 79, 100–2, 109, 127 Kholkhoz (Collective Farm) Charter of 1935, 241 Khriashcheva, A.I., 156 Khripunov, S.S., 195 khutors (homesteads), 177, 187, 205–6, 214, 279n25 Kingston-Mann, Esther, 148 Kiselev, P.D.: as Ambassador to Paris, 57; biography of, 99, 101; Khodskii on, 100–2; Ministry of State Domains and, 6, 43–4, 45, 46, 100; Semevskii on, 105–6 Kliuchevskii, V.O., 102–3, 104, 105, 109 Kofoed, A.A., 187, 241 Kolchak, A.V., 234 Kosinskii, V.A., 157, 226 Kostomarov, Mykola, 96, 102 Kotov, N.I., 87 Kotsonis, Yanni, 12, 175, 243

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352 Index

Krivoshein, A.V., 173–5, 183, 198, 208, 235 Kudriashev, Lev, 185 kulak class, 136, 142, 145, 209, 232, 247. See also “rich” peasants Kurakin, B.A., 107, 108 Kursk statistical bureau, 122–33 Kutler, N.N., 167, 168, 171, 181 labour: competition for, 20; migration of, 76, 132; off-farm, 137, 149, 223, 227; serfdom and, 23–4; shortage of, 27; in tax structure, 22, 23 labour norms: arguments for, 169; Bolsheviks and, 230, 232; Commission on the Centre and, 168; determination of, 181; Gurko and, 171–2; g zk and, 221; limitations of, 170; State Peasant Land Bank and, 180–2; White governments and, 238 land allotment: in cameralist states, 18–19; by early modern state, 19–24; equalization of, 44–5; mentalité of, 216; to military servitors, 18, 19–21; Senate decree of 1784 on, 35; shortage of land for, 25; state as grantor of, 23, 65; state obligation to provide, 7, 10–11, 46, 97, 179, 215, 220–1; in steppe, 36–7; Stolypin reforms and, 176–8. See also emancipation land allotment; land allotment norms; nadel land allotment norms: in approaches to agrarian reform, 167–74; Bolshevik repartition and, 229–33, 240–1; consensus

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on, 239; under General Land Survey, 37; gz k and, 217–19, 221–4; Ministry of State Domains and, 45; past practice and, 109, 110; peasantry and, 66, 224–9; reform process and, 186–7; for relocated peasants, 36–7; revolution and, 219–21; of Semevskii, 108, 110; serfdom and, 50–1; as technocratic tool, 215; White governments and, 233–9, 241; zemstvo statistical studies and, 128–30 land committees, local, 217, 219– 20, 223–4, 225, 226–9 land hunger (malozemel’e): agrarian reform and, 184; dichotomy with sufficiency, 52–3; liquidation of state land to satisfy, 186– 7, 207; “Organic Statute” and, 41–2; as requiring state action, 46; resettlement and, 36; solutions for, 107–8; supplementary reduction and, 86–7; Vasil’chikov on, 120 landownership, current restrictions on, 248–9 land reform. See agrarian reform land seizures: Bolsheviks and, 230, 234; land committees and, 217; by nobility, 29; norms and, 241; Order on Land and, 238; peasant violence and, 224; Provisional Government and, 229; United Nobility on, 190 land settlement commissions, local, 175, 178–9, 187–8, 189–90, 196, 200–6 Land Settlement Statute of 29 May 1911, 191

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Index 353

land surveys: of Elizabeth I, 37, 38–9; emancipation and, 60–1; laws in eighteenth century about, 37–8; of Ministry of State Domains, 44–6. See also General Land Survey land tenure data, collection of, 72–3 latifundia, 171 Law on Agricultural Land Transactions of 2002, 248–9 League of Agrarian Reforms, 218, 219 Lenin, V.I.: classes and, 142; The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 150–2; economics and, 146, 149; family size and, 158; land norms and, 229; on middle peasant, 240; peasant farms and, 157 Le Play, Frédéric, 135 Lincoln, W. Bruce, 44 Lomonosov, Mikhail, “On the Propagation and Maintenance of the Russian People,” 33–4, 110 lords (nobility): asset management practices of, 110; comparison of economy of, to peasant economy, 127; control over serfs by, 34; decline of, 174; dues from serfs to, 67, 247n65; on emancipation allotments, 61–2; emancipation of serfs and, 59–60; exploitation of serfs by, 29; as improving landlords, 48–9, 50; indebtedness of, 42; land disputes among, 37, 39; protection of interests and property of, 171, 199–200; provision of land resources to serfs by, 107–8; tax census decrees for, 30. See also serfdom

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Macey, David A.J., 183, 189, 198 Main Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture (guz iz), 175, 187–8, 190, 210. See also land settlement commissions, local Main Land Committee (gz k ), 217–19, 221–4. See also land committees, local Makarov, N.P., 218, 221–2, 225 Manuilov, A.A., 169 Maria Therese, 37 Marx, Karl, 114 Marxism, debate with Populism, over capitalism, 141–2, 148–52 Maslov, S.L., 221, 222 mean approach to statistics on agrarian economy, 74–5 meshchane soslovie, 186, 187, 189 middle peasant (seredniak): in combination table analysis, 154; Groman and, 155; Gurvich on, 149; as ideal, 131, 140, 151, 163–4, 245–6; Lenin on, 152; as “normal,” 137; Stolypin reforms and, 166–7; Vorontsov on, 146– 8; wager on, 176–8, 240, 246–7; White governments and, 235; Zlatovratskii on, 136 Migulin, P.P., 168, 173 Mikhail (tsar), 22 military need and rank, allotment of land by, 19–21 Miliutin, N.A., 60 Ministry of State Domains, 43–6, 52, 100, 101–2 Mironov, Boris, 31 modernity: media of, 94; as reinforcing past institutions, 3–5;

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statistical thinking as characteristic of, 4 Moore, Colleen, 215–16 moral economy: commune and, 6; as driving reform, 11; as embodied in nadel, 7–8, 11, 242–3; paradigm of, 6–8; peasant land allotment and, 91–2; populationism and, 35–40; of serfdom, 54–5, 167; statization of personal power and, 48; traditional concept of sufficiency and, 51 moral imperative, populationism as, 32–5 “Moscow Type” zemstvo statistics, 117 Moscow University Juridical Society, 116, 118 nadel (peasant land allotment): as category of economic measurement, 4; data collection on, 72–4; emancipation statutes and, 59–61, 63–4, 66; as entitlement, 11, 95, 215; impact of legacy of, 4–5; income from, 83–4; information void and, 69–75; as measure of social justice, 216; minimum and maximum approach to, 63, 64; moral economy, “custom” and, 7–8, 11; overview of, 3; persistence of, 242–9; as “private” plot, 241; as representation of moral commitment of state, 56–9, 91; transformation of, 16–17; universalization of, 54–5; value of, 67–9, 74. See also land allotment Narodnoe Khoziaistvo (journal), 100–1

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natural economy of peasantry, 75, 117–18, 125, 127 Nazimov, V.I., 56 Nicholas I, 43, 56 Nicholas II, 173–4, 179, 183, 217 Nikolaevan era, bureaucrats of, 69–70 nobility. See lords Noble Land Bank, 184 non–black soil regions, 68, 77–8, 81, 88, 137, 261n28 “normal” or “typical” household, search for, 132–6 norms in Soviet life, 241, 247–8. See also compulsory alienation norms; consumption needs norm; labour norms; land allotment norms Notes of the Fatherland (journal), 136 Novgorod, gentry servitors settled in, 20 Novikov, Nikolai, 47 obrok: agrarian reform and, 67; Catherine II on, 34; Khodskii on, 101; redemption payments and, 68, 82–3; shift to “land fee” from, 41–2 official histories, 96 Oganovskii, N.P., 219, 223 opeka (tutelage), 4–5, 166 open field system, complete economy in, 207 Order on Land of 1920, 236–9 Orlov, G.G., 36 Orlov, Vasilii I., 116, 117, 120–1, 142–3 otrubs, 197, 202, 205–6, 214, 279n25 Ozeretskovskii, N., 219–20

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pasture, access to, 78 patriarchal “master,” finance ministry as, 42 Paul I, 40–2, 101, 105 peasant congresses, 225–6 peasant economy: combination table analysis of, 153–7; conceptions of, 96, 120–1; continuities in thinking about, 174; dynamics of, 157–8, 161–3; false assumptions about, 159; family size and, 158–62; household inventories and, 117–19, 129; measurement of, 244–5; normalization of, 95, 125–8, 129–30, 245; quest for theory of, 124–5; search for universal laws of, 132–3; Vasil’chikov on, 119–20. See also household peasantry/peasants: borrowing requirements for, 184–6; categories of, 34–5; as “collectors of land,” 224; conceptions of, 61, 169, 244; as development project, 9, 94; essentialist view of, 133–4; guardianship of, 36, 43–4, 48; historical studies of, 94–5, 96, 98; histories of, 104– 10; land allotment norms and, 224–9; landowners and, 47; natural economy of, 75, 117– 18, 125, 127; as objectified in statistics, 115–16; Peter I and, 28, 29–30; rational choice from perspective of, 7; relocation of, 237; standardizing or rationalizing life of, 42, 46; state relationship with, 5, 6, 172, 243; statistics and management of, 8–9; strong, and liquidation

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system, 206–10, 208, 211; “to the people” movement and, 114–15; uprisings of, 165, 224. See also nadel; peasant economy; peasant well-being; state peasants peasant well-being: appraisal forms and, 192–3; evaluation of, 55; extensification as indicator of, 109; Imperial Manifesto of 3 November 1905 on, 183; income as measure of, 119; inputs as measures of, 118, 120, 131, 139–40; land allotment norms and, 66; measures of, 129; Pososhkov on, 27–8; shift to active concern for, 24–32; state responsibility for, 67 People’s Socialist Party, 121 Perovskii, L.A., 43 Perrot, Michelle, 133 Pershin, P.N., 233 Peshekhonov, A.V., 121–2, 124, 157, 215 Pestrzhetskii, D.I., 173 Peter I, 24, 25–6, 28–9, 32, 98 Petrograd Soviet, 217, 225 Petrovich, Michael, 94, 102 Pettenkofer, Max Joseph von, 241 Piletskii, A.Ia., 222 Plekhanov, Georgi, 148 ploughland, 40–1, 177–8 Pobedonostsev, K.P., 107 Pokrovskii, V.I., 140–1, 142 Polevoi, Nikolai A., History of the Russian People, 104 poll tax, 30–1, 37–8, 98 pomest’e system, 20–4

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“poor” peasants (bedniak), 138, 139, 140 population, concern for feeding, 42–3 population component to early modern state-building, 24–5 populationism: moral economy and, 35–40; as moral imperative, 32–5; noblesse oblige and, 47–8; Peter I and, 27–9, 30 Populist ideology, 114, 141–8, 267n36 Porter, Theodore M., 244 Posnikov, A.S., 125, 169, 217 Pososhkov, Ivan, The Book on Poverty and Wealth, 27–8, 29, 33, 110, 174 post-emancipation land allotment. See emancipation land allotment Postnikov, V.E., 152, 155–6, 157 poverty: communes as blamed for, 174–5; definition of, 120; in Riazan’ province, 123–4. See also land hunger primogeniture, law on, 29 private property. See individual property productivity: Bolshevik policy and, 231; Chuprov on state obligation for, 170; intensification and, 245 property registration, 72 Provisional Government, 217, 226 Prugavin, A.S., 143 Prugavin, Viktor, The Russian Land Commune in the Works of Its Local Researchers, 143–5 Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr von, 26 Putilov, A.I., 200 Putin, Vladimir, 249

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Quetelet, Adolphe, 71, 116, 133, 134, 135 Radishchev, Alexander, Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 56 redemption payments: ability to pay, 84, 88, 91; communal repartition and, 145; competing definitions of, 84–5; data collection related to, 85–6; for emancipation land allotments, 67–8; end of system of, 198–9; land values and, 79–80, 81, 83–4; percentage made, 90; property ownership and, 185; reductions in, 80–90; as too high, 76–7; views of, 75 Reiber, Alfred, 3–4 “relative backwardness,” 3 rental of land, 119, 123, 151–2 repartition, 98–9, 142–3, 144–5, 146–8, 229–33. See also communes, repartitional land repossession of land, 196–7 resales of liquidated lands, 209 resettlement of peasants, 35–7, 44 resources, peasant access to, 78, 107 revolution and agrarian reform, 216–24, 239–40 Riazan’ province: Andreev township land committee of, 229; Dankovsk district, 86–8; Muraevenskaia township, 138; statistical bureau of, 123–4 Richkov, Peter, 50 “rich” peasants, 136, 138, 140, 150. See also kulak class Ritter, Carl, 73

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Rittikh, A.A., 168, 187–8, 205, 208, 209 Romanov tercentenary, celebration of, 209–10 Roscher, Wilhelm, 116 Rostovtsev, Ia.I., 60, 62 rural economic development: debate over, 141–2, 163; household types and, 140; liquidation of state lands and, 200–10, 208, 211; Marxist view of, 148–53; mid-sized farms in, 240; Populist view of, 142–8. See also agrarian reform rural society: assessment of value and income of lands of, 44–6; data collection on, 72–4; insufficient allotments and economic ills in, 80; levelling of, 231; state as shaping, 104; universalistic model of economic activities within, 71. See also rural economic development Russian Thought (journal), 124 Russian Wealth (journal), 124 Rybnikov, A.A., 240 Samara province: land committee of, 226–7; Stavropol’ district, 88–9 Samarin, Dmitrii F., 77, 79, 82 Samarin, Iu.F., 102, 103, 104 Saratov province: Kuznets district, 89–90; Serdobsk district, 208, 210, 211 The Saratov Zemstvo Week (publication), 158 Schlözer, August Ludwig, 33 Schmoller, Gustav von, 94

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Scott, James C., 7, 10, 38, 247 Seegel, Steven, 24–5 Semenov, P.P.: data collection by, 72–3; Editing Commission and, 60; emancipation allotments and, 68; on peasant types, 138–9, 140; redemption payments and, 86, 89, 90; The Statistics of Landed Property and Inhabited Places of European Russia, 73–4 Semevskii, Vasilii I.: activist state in works of, 97; allotment and payment norms of, 110; career of, 105; on emancipation allotments, 106; Krest’ianskii vopros, 19; manifesto of, 96; “Measures Against Land Shortage,” 107–8; The Peasant Question in Russia, 104–6; on serfdom, 106–8 seredniak. See middle peasant serfdom: abolishment of, 6; administrative improvements and, 48–9; Alexander II and, 56–7; communal system and, 114, 144; establishment of, 24; golden age of, 46–7; household inventories and, 49–50; land allotment norm and, 50–1; legacy of, 3, 4–5, 242–9; moral economy of, 54–5, 167; projects to end, 56; rationale for, 27; role of nobility in, 47–8; Semevskii on, 106–8; state intervention in, 54; Struve on, 110; Tatishchev on, 28 serfs: control over, 34; dues to lords from, 67, 247n65; exploitation of, 29; as fixed capital, 49; former, responsibility for, 75; ownership of, as wealth indicator, 23;

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state intervention in lives of, 42. See also Emancipation of 1861; serfdom Shchapov, A.P., 96, 102 Shcheglovitov, I.G., 200 Shcherbatov, A.A., 82 Shcherbatov, M.M., 47–8 Shcherbina, F.A., 118, 126, 135, 147, 149 Sheremtev, P.B., 106 Shlikevich, A.S., 118, 154, 157, 158 Shuvalov, I.I., 33 Shvanebakh, P.Kh., 200 Siberia, land reforms in, 234 Simbirsk province, 224 Snow, Karen, 106 social construction of knowledge, 8 socialism and commune, 114 social justice: Basic Law on the Socialization of Land and, 230– 1; class-based system of, 233; land allotment norm and, 239; nadel as measure of, 216 social physics, 71 social sciences, development of, 133 soil variations, 232. See also black soil regions; non–black soil regions sokha (assessment unit), 22, 23 Soloviev, Sergei M.: History of Russia from Earliest Times, 104; “Observations on the Historical Life of Peoples,” 98 soul tax, 35–6, 41, 45, 74, 98, 103 “sown area,” as category for analysis, 124, 125, 129 Special Conference on Strengthening Peasant Landholding, 174

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Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture, 167, 174 Speranskii, M., 43 Stalin, Joseph, 240, 241 state: activist, as ordering empire, 96–7; as agrarian reformer, 97–104; in cameralist world view, 26–7; obligation of, to allot land, 7, 10–11, 97, 179, 215, 220–1; as patriarchal commonwealth, 51–2; relationship with peasantry, 5, 6, 172, 243; as responsible for peasant wellbeing, 66–7; as undergoverned, 61 state institutions, historical studies of, 96 state lands: encroachment on, 39, 44; liquidation of, 186–7, 201–4; right of first refusal and, 248 state of sufficiency, 18–19, 51–3 State Peasant Land Bank: in agrarian reform, 175–6; appraisals of, 192–4; article 54 of charter of, 181, 182, 186, 188–9, 190; borrowing requirements of, 184–6; defaults on loans from, 194–7; guz iz norms and, 187–9; individual property and, 183–4; labour norms and, 180–2; land owned by, 197–8; land prices and, 182–3; liquidation of land owned by, 198, 200–10, 208, 211; liquidity crisis of, 199–200; local branches of, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7; as real estate developer, 197, 198; role of, 174, 178–80, 191, 212; rules governing activities of, 184–5; zemstvos data

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and, 112. See also land settlement commissions state peasant reforms, 102. See also Ministry of State Domains state peasants (udel): land seized from, 29; land survey laws and, 38; monastery peasants and, 35; organization of lives of, 46; percentage of, 51; of Pomor’e region, 110; soul tax obligations of, 35–6, 41; survey of, 44 “state school” of Russian historiography, 96, 97, 103 statistical bureaux, 112–13, 116 Statistical Digest of the Russian Empire, 72 statistical thinking, 4, 9, 10 statistics: agrarian question and, 242; allotment norms and, 16; approach to issues of “normal” of, 134–5; Central Statistical Committee, 70–2; field of, 113– 14; mean approach to agrarian economy, 74–5; mid-nineteenth century conceptions of, 71–2; as mode of comprehending population, 8; nadel and, 243, 244; as objective, 70; reliance on, 90–1; zemstvo reform of 1864 and, 111. See also zemstvo statistical studies Statistics of Landed Property and Inhabited Places of European Russia, The, 73–4 Statute on Service of 1556, 21 steppe, state-directed resettlement of, 35–7, 44 Stolypin, P.A., 9, 16, 175, 176, 198, 200

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Stolypin reforms: individual responsibility and, 186–7, 194–6; land allotment in, 176–8; “liking for squares” and, 211; overview of, 6, 165–7, 175–6, 210–13, 246–7; success of, 9, 214–15, 216–17. See also State Peasant Land Bank Struve, Peter, 110, 146, 152–3 sufficiency: cadastral conception of, 83–4, 90–1, 91–3; of emancipation land allotment, 75, 76–80, 121–4; land appraisal and, 193– 4; land reform and, 172; as means to ensure common fiscal health, 32; measures of, 61–3, 64–5, 69, 244; persistence of, over efficiency, 10–11, 16–17; persistence of state concern about, 189–91, 243–9; preconceived notions of, 122; state of, 18–19, 51–3; Stolypin reforms and, 212–13; traditional concept of, 51. See also extensification supplementary reductions, 83–4, 85, 86, 87–90 sustenance, perceived right to, 9–10 Sytin, Ivan, 58 Tatishchev, Vasili N., 28 tax structure: Khodskii on, 101; Kiselev and, 43; poll tax, 30–1, 37–8, 98; pomest’e system and, 21–3; redemption payments and, 82, 84; zemstvos and, 111–13. See also obrok; soul tax technocrats, 165 territorial component to early modern state-building, 24–5

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Thompson, E.P., 7 tiaglos (labour teams), 50, 254n14 Time of Troubles, 21, 22 time series data, 158, 163 Tolstoy, Leo, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” 242 “to the people” movement, 114–15 Transactions of the Free Economic Society, 50 Treadgold, Donald W., 176 Trepov, D.F., 173–4 tsar: civic and Christian virtue as united in person of, 33; votchina (patrimony) of, 19, 21. See also specific tsars Tugan-Baranovskii, M.I., 126, 169, 170 Turchinovich, I.V., The History of the Agrarian Economy, 97–8 Tver’ province, Bezhets district, 88 type studies, 135–41 “typical,” as equated with “normal,” 135 udel. See state peasants Udel Department, 40–2, 108–9 United Nobility, 190 urban employment, migration for, 76, 132 Uspenskii, G.I., 115, 116 value of land: appraisals of, 182–3, 192–4; assessment of, 44–6; in bonds, 199–200; calculation of, 67–9, 74; redemption payments and, 79–80, 81, 83–4; rental prices and, 119 Valuev, P.A., 75 Valuev Commission, 75, 80, 110, 112, 179, 184

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Vasil’chikov, A.I., 82, 84, 92–3, 158; Rural Life and the Rural Economy in Russia, 119–20 Veletskii, S.N., 118 Verner, I.I., 122 Veselovskii, S.B., 20, 103 village: heterogeneity of, 141, 157, 163; “outside interference” thesis on, 142–8; policy development for, 133–4; types of household economies in, 135–6. See also communes, repartitional land Vil’son, I.I., 79 Voldarskii, Ia.E., 29 Volkonskii, N.S., 123 Volkov, B.V., 221, 222 Volkov, N.K., 218 Vologda province, land committees in, 228 Volunteer Army, land policies of, 234–5 Vorob’ev, K.Ia., 223–4 Vorontsov, V.P., 99, 109, 125, 146– 8, 151–2, 163 votchina (patrimony), 19 “wager on the strong,” 165–7, 176–8, 246 Walicki, Andrej, 141, 148 wartime economy, norming of, 215–16 White governments and land norms, 233–9, 241 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, 33 Witte, Sergei, 125, 167, 171, 173–4 Wortman, Richard, 58; The Crisis of Russian Populism, 136 Wrangel, P.N., 235–9

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Yaney, George, 210 Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, A.P., 60; Count P.D. Kiselev and His Time, 99, 101 Zak, A.N., 179 zemstvo reform of 1864, 111 zemstvos: economic development agenda of, 113; in Order on Land, 237, 238; role of, 111, 264–5n89; sale of land to, 206 zemstvo statistical studies: Chuprov impact on, 116–17; combination table analysis, 153–7; findings of,

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128–30; focus on particular and local of, 117–18; household inventory method for, 117–19; impacts of, 120–1; in “Internal Review” sections of journals, 124–5; Lenin use of, 150–1; as normalizing peasant economy, 95; soil quality in, 232; sufficiency of land allotments and, 121–4; tax structure and, 111– 13; “typical” household in, 135–6 zhivushchaia chetvert’, 22 Zlatovratskii, N.N., 115, 116, 136

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