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Socio‐economic mobilityand the rural history ofRussia 1905–30Teodor Shanin aa University of HaifaPublished online: 06 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Teodor Shanin (1971) Socio‐economic mobility andthe rural history of Russia 1905–30, Soviet Studies, 23:2, 222-235, DOI:10.1080/09668137108410802

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SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE RURAL HISTORYOF RUSSIA 1905-30

By TEODOR SHANIN

IMAGES of reality are used at times as post-factum justifications ofpolitical choices, but operate also as 'lenses through which men see,a medium by which they interpret and report what they see'.1 Inthis sense the meaning attached to political reality may be crucialfor the shape it takes, and must be considered in the study of socialprocesses. The concept of the basic dynamics of peasant societyaccepted by Russian policy-makers and, indeed, by the majority ofeducated Russians at the beginning of the century, can be outlinedin a few sentences. It was believed that economic development isaccompanied in all societies by increasing social division of labour,the establishment of market relations, the accumulation of capital, andsocial diversification. It was also believed that these processes arecentred in towns but inevitably spread into the countryside. Richpeasant farms, which are large and well equipped and enjoy a highercapital/worker ratio, are able to deploy and accumulate capital betterthan poor peasant farms. Continuing cumulation of economic advan-tages on the one side and of disadvantages on the other leads to thepolarization of peasant society. The rich farmers develop into capitalistentrepreneurs; the poor farmers lose their farms and become landlesswage-labourers in the employ of rich farmers, estate-owners or urbanentrepreneurs. Some of the characteristics of a traditional peasantfamily-farm may still be seen in the middle strata of the peasantry, butthese disintegrate or change in the inevitable process of economicadvance. With them disappear the survivals of traditional peasantsociety, and a new social structure based on capitalist farming isfinally established in the countryside.

An important tradition of thought rooted in Russian populismchallenged the above analysis, insisting on the basic cohesion of theRussian peasantry as a class and on the stability—at least relative—of peasant social structure. However, this tradition never came toguide policies of state.2 To those who ruled, the general picture of

1 C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics and People (New York, 1962), p. 406.2 Even during the short domination of the Russian government by the SRs in

1917 the ruling group did not in fact put 'populist' policies into operation.

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223

the dynamics of peasant society, described above, was firmly establishedas a piece of self-evident knowledge, i.e., it had become part of theprevailing ideology not only in the normative but also in the cognitivesense. It was thus taken as given, and incorporated into the ruralpolicies of the Russian state during the politically crucial quarter of acentury which followed the 1905-06 revolution. The political perspec-tive was that the peasantry would break down into new rural classestypical of capitalist society, i.e., capitalist farmers, wage workers, etc.,which would demonstrate increasing self-awareness, cohesion and atendency towards political action in support of their own interests.This expected development was, in fact, a precondition for the successof the policies pursued by all Russian governments from 1905 to1929 in spite of their conflicting purposes and convictions.

The crucial fact of Russian rural history in this period is that thepredicted major development both of the class structure and of thepolitical response of the peasants did not happen. The richer farmersand the rural wage-earners (or poor peasants) on the whole failed toact as independent factions. One can scarcely doubt the fact of socio-economic differentiation in Russian peasant society in the period;the evidence is ample—at the beginning of the century Russia ledthe world in studies of peasantry (the data collected by zemstvoregional authorities alone approached 4,000 volumes by 1917). Yet,in spite of the socio-economic differentiation revealed by those studies,Russian villages went on showing remarkable political cohesivenessand unity of action. This is particularly striking in the 1905-06 and1917-19 revolutions and during collectivization, but seems to holdtrue for the whole of the period 1905-30.

Soviet historians have repeatedly spoken of the 1905-06 agrarianrevolution as a dual civil war of a) the peasant poor against the peasantrich and b) the peasantry as a whole against the landed nobility.However, even a preliminary glance at their work casts doubt onsuch an explanation. The most important part of their evidence isbased on police reports of 'agrarian disturbances'. In these studiesfor 1905-07 62% of the cases are quoted as peasant action aimedagainst the estates of nobility, 13-4% as rural strikes (once more aimedmainly at the big landowners), and 14-5% as action against the policeand army (which, on the whole, rushed into the countryside to defendthe estates).3 At the same time, only 1 -4% of the cases relate to inter-peasant warfare, i.e., were aimed against the wealthy (or 'enclosed')

3 The evidence in this paragraph comes from Osobennosti agrarnogo stroya Rossiiv period imperializma (M., 1962), pp. 36, 80. The trick of fitting such data into thegeneral picture of a dual civil war was performed by adding the figures of rural strikesto those of attacks on rich peasants under the common heading of 'anti-capitalistrevolution'.

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224 SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE

peasants. What is more, the percentage of 'revolutionary acts' ofpeasants against peasants in fact diminished during the revolutionaryperiod.

The following period saw the bold attempt of Stolypin 'to place thewager not on the needy or drunken but on the strong and sturdy'—to promote a new stratum of independent and wealthy peasant yeomensettled on enclosed farms and '. . . called upon to play a part in thereconstruction of our Tsardom on strong monarchic foundations'.4

If one is to believe reports, a decade of active and essentially successfulimplementation of these policies followed.5 Yet it turned out to besurprisingly easy to reverse all these far-reaching changes in thefollowing period.

As presented by Soviet historians and widely accepted elsewhere,the description of the agrarian revolution has its roots in Lenin'sanalysis by which an anti-feudal revolution of peasants as a wholewould be closely followed by an anti-capitalist revolution of the ruralpoor against the rural capitalists.6 Accordingly, the first stage of anagrarian revolution in which the lands of Russian landlords weretaken over by the peasants is said to have been followed in 1918-19by the take-over of the lands of the rich 'kulaks' in an egalitarianrevolution of the rural poor. The success of the Stolypin reforms inestablishing and reinforcing a stratum of rich farmers would lead oneto expect this inter-peasant war to be particularly intense.

However, there definitely seem to be flaws in this scheme. Tobegin with, the Russian peasants had almost uniformly opposed the'Whites' in 1918-19, and by the end of 1920 were again in active andpassive revolt, this time against Bolshevik policies, and again actingwith remarkable unity. How does one explain such unity of villageneighbours within a year of mutual fratricide and land expropriation?

Moreover, the kulaks, according to Soviet historians, comprised20% of the peasant population, up to 20 million 'souls' organizedin the best-managed households of rural Russia.7 With their relatives,dependants and mature sons freshly back from the army and on thewhole armed, the kulaks would represent a formidable force. These

4 Quoted from Stolypin's speech in the Russian Duma in 1907 (A. Bol'shakov,Istoriya khozyaistva Rossii (M., 1926), vol. III, pp. 26-27). For the best analysisof the period available in English see G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the OldRegime (New York, 1949).

5 See Robinson, op. cit., chs. VI, VII; see also S. Dubrovsky, Stolypinskayazemel'naya reforma (M., 1963).

6 V. I. Lenin, The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution(1907).

7 Bol'shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 2nd edition, vol. 23, p. 327, estimates the'kulak' households as 15% of the total, whilst their membership size far exceededthe average one. See also the more recent M. Rubach, Ocherki po istorii revolyutsionnykhpreobrazovanii na Ukraine (M., 1956), pp. 20-23.

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RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA 1905-30 225

'sturdy and strong' of the Russian countryside are said to have beenstripped within a year or two of up to 50 million hectares (about125 million acres) of their land and enclosures by the rural poor.One would expect a gigantic inter-peasant civil war, and yet seriousand substantial evidence of this is lacking. To be sure, five decadesof studies have pinned down some riots in the countryside in 1917-19and duly named them 'kulak uprisings'. But these were remarkablyinsignificant in size when compared with the peasant uprisings of1906 and 1920. More important, a closer study even of these revealsas a rule a picture of anti-taxation riots in which no class conflict canbe traced and in which peasant communities showed, if anything,remarkable unity against outsideis.8 We are left with a question:what was it that made the powerful kulaks accept meekly what wouldhave amounted to robbery in their eyes? Alternatively, what is wrongwith the two-stage theory of the agrarian revolution?

Finally, the October revolution marked an attempt by the newgovernment to 'put the wager' on the rural proletariat, to activateand unify the rural poor as the natural allies of the urban proletarianrevolution. Rural Committees of the Poor (Kombedy) were set up tosecure food requisitions for the needs of the towns but also to socializethe countryside by mobilization of the rural poor for a second revolutionagainst the wealthy peasants. Yet within less than a year this policyhad to be abandoned and the 'Committees of the Poor' which hadbeen set up disbanded. This step is described by a leading historian ofthe period as 'timely recognition of failure—a retreat from untenablepositions'.9 Similar results occurred with the so-called policy of'directed agriculture' in 1920.10 The attempts of the Soviet governmentto split the peasantry and establish a Bolshevik foothold among therural poor failed.

The New Economic Policy at the end of 1920 amounted to agovernment surrender to the pressure of peasant will, and an explicitrecognition of the Russian peasantry as a cohesive, specific andpowerful social class. Sporadic attempts to organize the rural pooron class lines were, it is true, made during the NEP period, but wereunsuccessful.11 When major efforts to socialize the countryside wererevived in the form of imposed collectivization, the anticipated socialistrevolution of the rural poor (supported by urban allies) against their

8 For example see the introduction to V. Aver'ev, Komitety bednoty (M., 1933)or the recent works by V. Gerasimyuk and G. Sharapov.

9 E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, vol. II (London, 1963), p. 159.10 See, for example, I. Teodorovich, O gosudarstvennom regulirovanii sel'skogo

kliozyaistva (M., 1920).11 See, for example, L. Kritsman, P. Popov and Ya. Yakovlev, Sel'skoe khozyaistvo

na putyakh vostanovleniya (M., 1925), p. 318.

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226 SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE

exploiters, again turned into 'a battle . . . more perilous and formi-dable . . . than the battle of Stalingrad',12 between the forces of theSoviet state and the Russian peasantry acting once more virtuallyas a united whole.13

Basic discrepancies between the expectations and the results ofjural policies in so far as the cohesion and militancy of peasant com-munities is concerned thus constitute the crux of the political historyof rural Russia from 1904 to 1930.

The apparent failure of accepted theories to accord with the evidenceof Russian rural history can be approached in several ways. One cansimply deny the existence of the problem, i.e., of the inexplicablyhigh political cohesion of Russian peasants in the period in question.Soviet historians (especially after collectivization) and some scholarsin the West, for example, have persistently retained the image of adual peasant revolution both in 1905-06 and in 1917-18. Two genera-tions of studies along these lines have produced a few examples ofvillages for which such a claim might be justified (one can alwaysfind single examples of nearly everything, especially in peasant Russia),but have failed completely to produce massive and representativeevidence to support such views. Alternatively, one can abandon thepremise of class analysis by denying the correlation between socio-economic positions and political attitudes and actions. But neither theRussian evidence available nor the judgement of contemporary politicalsociology support this kind of solution.14

Another approach is to retain the initial theory while claiming thatthe predicted changes did not have time to mature. Interest andfurther research promoted by this approach concentrates, therefore,on factors of 'social inertia' which may have acted as a brake on thepredicted changes, i.e., on static factors which reinforce stability.Research on these lines has produced interesting results in the formof studies of peasant culture, and the structure of peasant communes.13

Discussion of the influence of a low starting point (i.e., the generalpoverty and low surpluses in rural areas) on slowness of capital forma-tion is another facet of this approach. Such factors retarding socialchange will no doubt have played a role; yet an explanation based

12 Stalin's description of collectivization as reported by Churchill in F. Maclean,Eastern Approaches (London, 1951), p. 360.

13 E. H. Carr, 'The Russian Revolution and the Peasant', Proceedings of the BritishAcademy, vol. XLIX, 1963; see also M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power(London, 1968).

14 For the accepted contemporary view of the political sociologists, see for exampleG. Lenski, Power and Privilege (New York, 1966).

15 See, for example, D. J. Male, 'The Village Community in the USSR: 1935-1930', Soviet Studies, vol. XIV, no. 3 (January 1963), and Y. Taniuchi, The VillageGathering in Russia in the Mid-1920's (Birmingham, 1968).

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RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA 1905-30 227

solely on them seems doubtful in view of the extreme persistence ofpeasant political cohesion shown through one of Russia's stormiestperiods of history, in time of revolution and of economic boom anddisaster alike.

One can finally examine the possibility that some factor has beenignored, and specifically examine and check against the evidence theassumptions made by both common sense and theory about basicsocio-economic processes in the Russian countryside.10 Statisticalevidence provides clear proof of socio-economic differentiation, andsuggests, at least at first sight, an ongoing socio-economic polarizationof Russian rural society. (A single exception in the direction of theprocess was noted during the 1917-19 agrarian revolution and landredistribution when levelling was reported.) The most importantdata both establishing and explaining the socio-economic polarizationof rural society were those provided by the so-called Budget Studies.These were first presented in their advanced form by Shcherbina in1900, and by 1917 56 of them had been assembled.17 From 1920 to*1928 the Central Statistical Administration (Tsentral'noe statisticheskoeupravlenie—TsSU) continued with Budget Studies, increasing thesize of the regional and national annual samples, until they werecovering 30,000 households annually. These studies provided asystematic input/output analysis (including labour, production, con-sumption, sales, tax and accumulation) of each peasant farm of aselected sample and a census of its major factors of production, i.e.,land, workers, equipment, etc. These data were then categorized bysocio-economic strata. Both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionarystudies showed a correlation between size and wealth of peasanthouseholds and also a clear and constant tendency for cumulation ofadvantages and disadvantages. Productivity in particular (both totaland per capita) was higher in the wealthier and larger peasant householdsand lower in the poorer and smaller ones.

Furthermore, a number of Rural Censuses were conducted inRussia during the period discussed, including comprehensive nationalcensuses in 1916, 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1926. The indices of wealthused were on the whole those of land sown and horses owned; theseshowed a high correlation with other measures of peasant wealth, andwere relatively easy to estimate.18 The evidence of these censusesconsistently showed differentiation of the peasantry into rich and poor

16 For more complete evidence see Part II of T. Shanin, The Awkward Class(forthcoming).

17 E. Volkov, Agrarno-ekonomicheskaya statistika Rossii (M., 1923).18 For discussion of the complex problems of the rural indices of wealth see ch. 7

of The Awkward Class.

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228 SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE

strata.19 What is more, comparison of successive censuses seemed tosupport the view that with the exception of the 1917-19 period areasonably constant, though admittedly low, process of polarizationwas taking place.

Yet, in spite of the seemingly self-evident truth of the suppositionsdiscussed above, and the important empirical support provided for itby the evidence of the Budget Studies and Rural Censuses, the storyof polarization as the main socio-economic process among the Russianpeasantry is not true, or, more precisely, is not the whole truth. Moresophisticated methods of study suggest that the main form of socio-economic mobility in Russian peasant households at this time wasmulti-directional. The polarizing trends were powerfully challengedby simultaneous mobility of the opposite type in which large numbersof wealthy households deteriorated while the position of a considerablenumber of the poorer ones improved, at least in relative terms. More-over, a substantial number of peasant households seemed successively

• to ascend and descend with cyclical regularity—the higher the relativesocio-economic position of a household the greater on the whole thechance that it would begin to deteriorate. Conversely, the lower theposition the better the chance of improvement. On the face of it, thissounds quite incredible, especially to an observer trained in neo-classical or Marxist traditions of economic thought. It was duly greeted,even at the time, with expressions of disbelief and a tendency to dismisssuch evidence as spurious, accidental or temporary.20 Yet, as a Russiansaying has it: 'facts are stubborn', and despite the denials the proofsof powerful levelling and cyclical trends failed to disappear. Indeed,some recent studies of peasants in China, Iran and Turkey point tothe possibility that such processes may exist in a number of peasantsocieties in other parts of the world.21

The evidence which suggests multi-directional and cyclical processesof socio-economic mobility in the Russian peasantry is supplied by theso-called Dynamic Studies (Dinamicheskie issledovaniya). The methodused resembles what modern psychologists and demographers call thestudy of cohorts. A comparative study of the same sample is repeatedat various intervals of time so that we are able to locate not only socialand economic changes in peasant society as a whole but also those of

19 Lenin's fundamental Development of Capitalism in Russia was based on a numberof such censuses carried out by zemstvos.

20 One of the leading economists of Russia, Kondrat'ev, in 1927 simply declaredall evidence of such trends 'temporary and spurious' without any proof of his state-ment; see Puti sel'skogo khozyaistva, 1927, no. 5.

21 Yang Chang Kun, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (New York,1959); I. Ajami, 'Social Classes, Family Demographic Characteristics and Mobilityin Three Iranian Villages', Sociologia Ruralis, vol. IX, no. 1, 1969, pp. 62-72; P.Stirling, Turkish Village (London, 1965).

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RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA 1905-30 229

individual peasant households. The life histories of these families,statistically analysed and related to socio-economic strata, revealpatterns of multi-directional and cyclical mobility. Table 1 presentsthe results of a pre-revolutionary Dynamic Study by Rumyantsev,and can be used as an example of the method.22

A straight comparison between the socio-economic differentiation ofthe households studied in 1884 and that in 1900 showed practically nofurther polarization and a slight improvement in the economic positionof the community as a whole. Altogether, 97% of the households seemto have changed their position in terms of the arbitrarily definedsocio-economic strata. However, the Dynamic Study of the same sampleand period proves that in fact nearly half of the households accountedfor in 1900 found themselves in different strata, and that the changeswere particularly predominant amongst the poorer and the wealthier(of the last category four-fifths lost their position within the period).

The Dynamic Studies were initiated by N. Chernenkov in 1897, andfour more of them were published before the revolution.23 In thepost-revolutionary period TsSU established a special section for thiswork (headed by A. Khryashcheva), which produced increasinglysophisticated annual studies of representative samples, and also providedreliable sampling and regional breakdowns. The size of the sampleshad grown by 1926 (the last study to be published) to about 600,000peasant households each year.24 The evidence gathered during fourdecades of Dynamic Studies of Russian peasantry reveals a clear andpersistent uniformity in the pattern of mobility of peasant householdson lines described above and exemplified by the study of Rumyantsev.This process proved, without exception, qualitatively similar inDynamic Studies of samples representing different periods, drawnfrom different areas and using different categories of peasant wealth(e.g., land held, land sown, number of horses and even 'the extent ofexploitation' in terms of wage labour). The recorded differencesbetween the results of the various Dynamic Studies were as a rulequantitative in nature: an increase in the extent of mobility in thepost-revolutionary period and somewhat higher rates of mobility inthe agricultural south and south east of Russia than in the north andwest.25

22 This Dynamic Study was carried out by the statistical department of the zemstvoof Smolensk Guberniya and published in P. Rumyantsev, 'K voprosu ob evolyutsiirusskogo krest'yanstva', Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniya (St. Petersburg, 1906).One Russian desyatina = 1.09 hectares = 2.7 acres.

23 First published in N. Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest'yanskogo khozyaistva(Saratov, 1905).

24 Last published in 1928. See Itogi desyatiletiya Sovetskoi vlasti v tsifrakh (M.,1928), pp. 124-36. Collectivization stopped further publications.

25 See, for example, the regional breakdown presented in Statisticheskii spravochnikSSSR 1927, pp. 66-73.

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TABLE i

THE MOBILITY OF PEASANT HOUSEHOLDS IN VYAZ'MA UEZD 1884-1900

A. Changes in Socio-Economic Differentiation

Households sowing (% of total)

O

Year

18841900Households changing

stratum 1884-1900

Households sowingland totalling:

NilLess than 3

desyatinas3-9 desyatinas

More than 9desyatinas

All strata

No. ofHouseholdsin 1884

1,329

2,2495,238

4139.294

Nil

'4-39\S

- 4 - 8

Nil

49-0

10-7

3-2

Less than3 desyatinas

24-224'6

+0-4

B. Dynamic Study

3-9desyatinas

569592

+ 2-3

Of which households sowing in 1900 (%):

Less than 3-9 More than3 desyatinas desyatinas 9 desyatinas

2 6 3

39-7196

io-6

2 3 6

48-3687

65-3

f i

1-376

20-9

More than9 desyatinas

4'567

+ 2-2

Total

1 0 0

100100

1 0 0

Total

100100

9-7

Householdschanging stratum1884-1900 (% in

stratum)

5i-o

6 C 3

79-1

44-5

SOC

5tqn

'0N

01

O

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TY

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RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA 1903-30 231

Before attempting to show how an unexpected pattern of socio-economic mobility may help to explain the unexpected socio-politicalbehaviour of the Russian peasantry, let us outline a possible explanationof such mobility patterns. (For more comprehensive treatment thereader is referred to the full study mentioned in footnote 16.) Thepicture of the socio-economic mobility of the Russian peasant house-holds which emerges from these studies is more complex than themonistic model of polarization described earlier; it suggests theexistence of three types of processes, operating simultaneously—polarizing, levelling and multi-directional:1. Cumulation of advantages and disadvantages favouring polarizationas documented by the Budget Studies and predicted by economictheorists.2. A number of processes of a levelling nature: a) Among Russianpeasants there was a strong positive correlation between wealth ofhousehold and size of household; the richer the household the biggerits membership, and consequently the more numerous the unitsresulting from division of the household between the sons accordingto egalitarian inheritance or partitioning customs. (The word inheri-tance is in fact misleading: the majority of peasant sons received theirshare before their parents died.)28 b) A substantial number of mergersbetween peasant households (mainly by marriage) was reported, onthe whole negatively correlated with household size, i.e., the smallerand poorer households had the best chance of an increase in size, andhence in prosperity. The poorest and smallest households often lackedone of the production factors essential to a peasant economy, such asmale labour, or horses; a merger would restore such a household to'normality'. In some cases it was the richest which found it profitable toacquire family labour or land by 'swallowing' the poor, c) A high rateof extinction and emigration of peasant families was reported in neg-ative correlation with size and wealth, i.e., the poorer and smaller thehousehold the greater the chance of its disappearing. The selectiveextinction and emigration of households constantly purged villages oftheir poorest and deteriorating members, which led again to a powerfullevelling trend in the village community. The differential characterof all the processes of substantive change (organicheskie izmeneniyain the accepted Russian terminology) in peasant households, i.e., ofpartitioning, merger, extinction and emigration provided for a con-siderable egalitarian trend. It reinforced egalitarian communal landredistribution in those places in which this still operated.

26 For Russian peasant property and inheritance customs and law, see V. Mukhin,Obychnyi poryadok nasledovaniya u krest'yan (1888); see also T. Shanin, 'RussianPeasant Law and Inheritance of Property', Discussion Papers, University ofBirmingham, CREES, 1966.

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232 SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE

The simultaneous operation of polarizing and levelling trends foundexpression in multi-directional and cyclical mobility.3. Two more ongoing processes were multi-directional or cyclical bytheir very nature: a) Peasant families went through a life cycle to whichChayanov drew attention.27 This cycle consisted of three stages: theyoung family struggles hard to feed an increasing number of children;then pressures ease as the children become old enough to help; finally,the parents age, partitioning takes place and decline sets in. Thisbiological cycle would be the more distinct where units of productionwere small and resources limited, b) The chance factors in peasant lifeincrease multi-directional mobility, in particular the powerful, arbitraryand uncontrollable impacts of nature, market and state policies on thepeasant economy of limited resources.

The handbooks of TsSU and the works of its leading memberspublished in the 1920s provide sufficient proof of these assertions, andcan be referred to with relative ease.28 The Dynamic Studies presentedin Tables 2 and 3 bring further evidence for the kind of levellingtrends discussed. The first (see Table 2) was carried out by TsSU on arepresentative sample of villages of European Russia (exclusive of theareas hit by the 1920-21 famine).29 Horses per household were usedas the accepted index of peasant wealth. The second (see Table 3)uses sown area per household as the index of prosperity (as in Table1 above), and is based on a representative sample of 265,436 householdsin 16 guberniyas of European Russia.30

Acceptance of a strong and consistent multi-directional and cyclicaltendency in peasant socio-economic mobility must, in turn, lead to areconsideration of the nature of the socio-political effects of polarizationon peasant communities. In the first place, the effects on the polariza-tion process will be weakened and may be cancelled or even reversedby a stronger opposing trend resulting in levelling. Indeed, recognitionof this may help to clarify the puzzle of the 1918-19 'second agrarianrevolution' referred to above.

Ideology aside, the main evidence supporting the claim of a secondrevolution lies in the comparison of the 1917 and 1919 (or 1920) ruralcensuses. These showed extensive levelling of the Russian peasantry,

27 A. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966—firstpublished in Russian in 1925). The analysis was first suggested by the author in1915.

28 For Budget Studies and Dynamic Studies see the statistical handbooks publishedby TsSU between 1921 and 1929, and in particular the one mentioned in footnote24. See also footnote 25 and the works of A. Khryashcheva cited in the four followingfootnotes.

29 A. Khryashcheva, 'Usloviya evolyutsii krest'yanskogo khozyaistva', Sotsialisti-cheskoe khozyaistvo, 1925, no. 5, p . 59.

30 A. Khryashcheva, Gruppy i klassy v krest'yanstve (M., 1926), pp. 15, 146-7,and, for the guberniyas included, pp. 139-40.

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IAUL.1L a

THE MOBILITY OF PEASANT HOUSEHOLDS IN REGIONS OF THE RSFSR, 1920-24

A. Changes in Socio-Economic DifferentiationYear No. of Households Owning (% of total):

No horse 1 horse 2 horses More than Total2 horses

1920 300 63-9 S'8 O'3 1001924 33-3 6 I - I 5-4 0-2 100

It

Households in1920 owning:

No herses1 horse2 horsesMore than 2 horsesAll strata

Stratum Households in1924 with area

of sown landtotalling:

ABCDEFGH

AllStrata

o-i desyatinaso -i-2 des.2*1-4 des.4-1-6 des.6 - I - I O des.

10-1-16 des.16-1-25 des.

>25 des.

No. ofHouseholdsin sample

22,36447.5344.344

21174.453

B. Dynamic StudyHouseholds undergoing 'Substantive

Changes' in 1920-24 (%)Partitioned Merged Emigrated Total

or Extinct

Households not undergoing 'SubstantiveChanges' in 1920-24 (%)

Unchanged Ascended Descended Total

3-610728-243-6

97

3-8i-81'42-82-4

13-22-1i-6095-4

20614631-24V317-5

5468-529-89-5

62-3

23-0

10-3

n-937043-2

99

79'485-468-852782-5

TABLE 3

PEASANT MOBILITY IN 16 GUBERNIYAS OF EUROPEAN RUSSIA 1924-25

Households undergoing 'SubstantiveChanges' in 1924-25 (%)

Partitioned Merged Emigratedor Extinct

10-3

i-3274-07'5

12-0

12-2

17-4

27

21-2

070-30-3

0-2

0-4

o-6

31573'51-9!'51-2

o-81-2

2-8

Total

17-4

5-6

5'0

5-9

9-1

13-5

14-4

17-4

Households not undergoing 'SubstantiveChanges' in 1924-25 (%)

of which, by 1925, showing membership ofstratum:

TotalA B C D E F G H (A-H)

58-1 20-3 3-1 o-8 02 o-i o-o 00 8261-174-817-7 07 o-i o-o o-o o-o 94-4o-i 9-171-113-4 1-3 o-o o-o o-o 95-0o-i 0-817-360^015-5 0-4 o-o o-o 94-1o-i 0-2 3-017-663-2 6-6 0-2 o-o 90-9o-o o-i 1-4 5-729-244-6 5-4 o-i 86-5o-o 0-2 0-6 o-8 6-i 32-7399 5-3 85-6o-o o-o o-8 o-o 17 5-828-945-4 826

Showingstratum

change (%)

24-519623-934-127-741-945-537-2

AllHouseholds

100100100100100

AllHouseholds

(.1-3+A-H)

6-0 2-1 33-434-6 14-9 7'5 1-2 O-2 0-0 93-9

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

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234 SOCIO-ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND THE

in terms of land owned and horses owned per household, while thenumber of households rapidly increased.31 There can be little doubt ofthe genuine economic ascent of the landless and the poorest whoshared in the distribution of the lands of the nobility in 1917-18.However, to attribute the levelling of the wealthier peasant householdsto expropriation of the richer peasants by the poor means to disregardthe simple fact that after a four-year period in which partitioning hadvirtually been suspended millions of peasant sons suddenly came backfrom the army. They were mature, aggressive, marriageable, and keento claim their share in a society in which wealth coincided with numeroussons, and equal sharing-out of the farm holding to all mature sonswas customary. The return of ex-servicemen must have led to rapidpartitioning of the richer households. And what could be more sensiblein anticipation of progressive taxation and possible egalitarian policiesof the socialist government? The few relevant studies of this periodindeed show that more than half the wealthier households werepartitioned between 1917 and 1919-20, and estimates were made of arate of partitioning 10 times higher for this period than for the period1914-17.32 The data also show an extraordinary decrease in the sizeof membership of the wealthiest households in this period.33 Thepuzzling notion of a 1918-19 inter-peasant revolution (for whichthere is very little evidence), followed within a year by a powerfulpeasant rising all round Russia, in which the same peasant communitiesacted as remarkably united wholes (evidence for which is rich tooverflowing), may after all be laid to rest. The inter-peasant war andthe kulak counter-revolution of 1918 failed to materialize because theanti-kulak peasant revolution had never taken place. The socio-political cohesion of the peasantry in 1917-19 is reflected in the peasantunity of 1919-20 and after.

Further considerations of levelling trends by no means exhauststhe consequences of an analysis of socio-economic mobility. Themassive mobility revealed would limit the chances of class crystallizationof rich and poor strata within the peasant communities, an effect wellknown to social scientists.34 As early as 1907 Sombart noted highvertical mobility as a major determinant of low degree of 'class-consciousness' and of limited political 'class antagonism'. If, indeed,'each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of

31 Ekonomicheskoe rassloenie krest'yanstva v 1917 i 1919 gg. (M., 1922). See alsoA. Khryashcheva, Gruppy i Massy v derevne (M., 1926).

32 See A. Khryashcheva in Sotsialisticheskoe khozyaistvo, 1924, no. 2, p. 57. Forthe estimates see A. Bol'shakov, Sovremennaya derevnya v tsifrakh (M., 1925), p. 32.

33 Ekonomicheskoe rassloenie krest'yanstva . . . , Tables p8, p9.34 See, for example, Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology (1966),

vol. 3, and Lenski, op. cit.

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RURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA 1905-30 235

different people',35 the rate of turnover will be particularly relevantto the tendency of a socio-economic stratum to develop from a 'classin itself to a 'class for itself, from a socio-economic category into apolitically self-conscious conflict-group.

The concepts of multi-directional and cyclical mobility are notintended here to provide a new master key to the understanding ofpeasant society, but are to be seen rather as an additional major factoranalytically distinguishable, but in reality always enmeshed with avariety of others. In particular, the patterns of mobility have to berelated to the specific cultural patterns of the peasant community andthe dominant conflict relations in rural society. Claiification of therole of socio-economic mobility in the rural history of Russia helpsto explain the failure of analyses and policies which implicitly presumedrelative stability of the socio-economic strata among the peasantry.The evidence of the political history of rural Russia does not afterall invalidate the essentials of classical political sociology but onlydemolishes its crude and static forms. It calls for sociologically morecomplex, more sophisticated and more dynamic expressions of classanalysis.

University of Haifa

35 J. A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York, 1951), p. 165.

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