If Russian peasants were more cruel than average, are they far worse than average?
This is also interesting to me because most of the historical evidence of “how Communism actually turned out” we have is from Russia and China. One could imagine that communism won in Russia (as opposed to Germany or Britain or various other countries) because there was an unusually high level of this sort of peasant envy, and that this then made it more horrific than it otherwise would have been. [The main info I’d look for here is if we have this sort of ethnography about peasants in China before 1930 or so.]
[My guess is that Russian peasants were not outside of distribution, tho they might have been on the cruel end of the spectrum. In particular, Malthusian logic of the sort that applies to agrarian peasant societies suggests that there should always be marginal people on the edge of subsistence, and the question is just how densely packed they are.]
I would be really hesitant using these findings to frame Russian Communism, especially if we conclude that ‘peasant envy’ was a contributing factor in how horrific the Stalinist regime was. The Russian Revolution was won by workers in major industrial cities, whilst peasant uprisings, whilst present, had nowhere near the same effect as working class militancy on the Soviet Government and the state of Russian Society.
The wretched state of the peasantry and their attitudes toward another, if anything, evidence that the early Russian Marxists were right in dismissing the peasantry as an ineffectual instrument of revolutionary change (which was the opposite of the leftist mainstream at the time). As the support and participation of the peasantry in the revolution were far less important than that of the fledgling working class, and because the collectivisation measures were imposed on the peasantry by foreign actors (and not a product of their own self-emancipation), I don’t think the peasantry had that big of an influence in how horrific Communist rule was.
That being said, I really agree that comparing the state of the Russian Peasantry and Revolution to China’s peasant society and their revolution would be a really fruitful task. To my understanding, the Chinese Revolution was based almost entirely in peasant struggle, so the sociological factors in the frame of that class would be especially pertinent.
This is also interesting to me because most of the historical evidence of “how Communism actually turned out” we have is from Russia and China. One could imagine that communism won in Russia (as opposed to Germany or Britain or various other countries) because there was an unusually high level of this sort of peasant envy, and that this then made it more horrific than it otherwise would have been. [The main info I’d look for here is if we have this sort of ethnography about peasants in China before 1930 or so.]
[My guess is that Russian peasants were not outside of distribution, tho they might have been on the cruel end of the spectrum. In particular, Malthusian logic of the sort that applies to agrarian peasant societies suggests that there should always be marginal people on the edge of subsistence, and the question is just how densely packed they are.]
I would be really hesitant using these findings to frame Russian Communism, especially if we conclude that ‘peasant envy’ was a contributing factor in how horrific the Stalinist regime was. The Russian Revolution was won by workers in major industrial cities, whilst peasant uprisings, whilst present, had nowhere near the same effect as working class militancy on the Soviet Government and the state of Russian Society.
The wretched state of the peasantry and their attitudes toward another, if anything, evidence that the early Russian Marxists were right in dismissing the peasantry as an ineffectual instrument of revolutionary change (which was the opposite of the leftist mainstream at the time). As the support and participation of the peasantry in the revolution were far less important than that of the fledgling working class, and because the collectivisation measures were imposed on the peasantry by foreign actors (and not a product of their own self-emancipation), I don’t think the peasantry had that big of an influence in how horrific Communist rule was.
That being said, I really agree that comparing the state of the Russian Peasantry and Revolution to China’s peasant society and their revolution would be a really fruitful task. To my understanding, the Chinese Revolution was based almost entirely in peasant struggle, so the sociological factors in the frame of that class would be especially pertinent.
Good to know! [I was mostly working off of remembering kulak as a term of abuse, rather than a detailed knowledge of how the Revolution went down.]