The Peasant Movement in Russia on the Eve of Emancipation as a Moment of Truth

Abstract

In the first half of the 19th century peasant “unrest” was rare, small, spontaneous and unorganized; the participants did not put forward political demands, did not oppose the supreme power and the existing socio-economic system. The available statistics of the peasant movement were constructed in Soviet historiography methodologically incorrectly and was misinterpreted, in view of ideological motivation. In these statistics, various types of complaints and petitions were considered to be equal among themselves and at the same time equal to other forms of “protest” : escapes; unauthorized felling of forests; seizure of landlords’ livestock and land; refusal to pay the rent and to bear corvée; resistance to the landowner, the authorities or military punitive expedition; and even direct rebellion — these all forms were taken as a unit of account, called “unrest,” and were evaluated as manifestations of class struggle. Nowadays, such interpretations should be considered arbitrary, contrived, strained, sometimes ridiculous and strongly bearing the stamp of presentism. However, in fact, the statistics of “unrest” constructed in Soviet historiography is still widely used in researches, textbooks and folk history on the Internet. The method of assessing the strength of the peasant movement does not meet scholarly criteria. The researchers could not agree on what to take as a unit of social protest, and used as such, at their discretion, “rest”, “village”, “county/province”, “number of participants”, sometimes all at once. As a result, an insurmountable obstacle arose in the way of summarizing the data, which, despite this, was carried out.