Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms by Darrow David W.;

Author:Darrow, David W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2018-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

*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.

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.

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