Governing the village: Peasant culture and the problem of social transformation in Russia, 1906-1914.

In 1906 the Tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian reform which was explicitly predicated on overcoming the resistance of a cohesive, self-regulating village, and which in the course of one year largely undermined the administrative and fiscal means through which the commune had controlled its members. This dissertation analyzes how peasant attitudes towards authority and conceptions of community evolved in the face of external pressures, focusing on several districts of central Russia. The resulting chaos of the land reforms often had less to do with the dramatic conflicts between separators (peasants who claimed their plots as private property) and communes, which have claimed so much attention from historians, than with the internal dynamics which redefined the village community itself. This study first traces the social and institutional context within which peasant self-government was embedded, by examining the nature of formal and informal village authority and its entanglement with the lower levels of state administration. The state's increasing preoccupation with bureaucratic efficiency in this period changed the nature of the articulation between state and village administrations. By implicating the village more closely in the concerns of official administration, the government undermined the role of informal institutions, but strengthened the village assembly and the peasant (volost) courts. An examination of the practice of the assemblies and of the courts reveals which questions continued to be resolved and regulated by the commune, as well as the conflicting attitudes and expectations of the various local actors. Finally, the impact of the land reforms on villagers who remained in the land commune suggests that the rural system of regulating internal and external relations was resilient enough to assimilate changes in ways which frequently subverted government intentions. The ironic result was that in some areas, the new legislation led to a more conservative peasant practice, and strengthened, rather than weakened the commune.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103758/1/9409692.pdfDescription of 9409692.pdf : Restricted to UM users only