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The Early History of the Russian Peasantry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Jerome Blum
Jerome Blum
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.

Type
Review Articles and Discussions
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Spring 1951 , pp. 153 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1951

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References

1 Grekov, B. D., Krestiane na Rusi s drevneishikh vremen do XVII veka [Peasants in Russia from Earliest Times to the XVIIth Century] (Moscow, Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1946), pp. 959Google Scholar.

2 For Grekov's publications through 1946 see Akademia Nauk SSSR, Boris Dmitrievich Grekov (Moscow, Leningrad, 1947), pp. 11–26Google Scholar.

3 For example, Kliuchevskii, V. O., A History of Russia (5 vols.; New York, 1911–31), I, 185–86Google Scholar; Diakonov, M. A., Ocherki obshchestvennago i gosudarstvennago stroia drevnei Rust (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 74–75Google Scholar; Pokrovskii, M. N., Brief History of Russia (2 vols.; New York, 1933), I, 47–48Google Scholar.

4 Bloch, M., “The Rise of Dependent and Seigniorial Institutions,” in Clapham, J. H. and Power, E., eds., Cambridge Economic History (Cambridge, 1945), I. 234Google Scholar.

5 Grekov wrote the chapters on Kievan Russia in the two-volume co-operative Istoriia SSSR, first published in 1939–40 and approved by the government as a textbook for university historical faculties and pedagogical institutes. This interpretation is also presented in Liashchenko, P. I., History of the National Economy of Russia (Eng. transl., New York, 1949Google Scholar), approved by the state for use in all institutions of higher learning.

6 The view that feudalism of the Western type never existed in Russia is still maintained by such outstanding modern authorities as Struve, P., “Medieval Agrarian Society in Its Prime: Russia,” in Cambridge Economic History, I, 427–28Google Scholar, and Vernadsky, G., “Feudalism in Russia,” Speculum, XIV (1939), 315–20.Google Scholar

7 Pokrovskii, M. N., History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism (London, 1931), pp. 30–31Google Scholar; idem, Brief History, I, 255.

8 Development of Capitalism in Russia, in V. I. Lenin, Selected Worlds, I, 243–44.

9 For a detailed discussion of the historiography on the origins of serfdom see Kizevetter, A., “Krestianstvo v russkoi nauchno-istoricheskoi literatura,” Krestianskpia Rossiia, V–VI (1923)Google Scholar.

10 Cf. Platonov, S. F., “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Frage nach der Entstehung der Leibeigenschaft in Russland,” Zeitschrijt für osteuropäische Geschichte, V (1931). 15–19Google Scholar.

11 Platonov, S. F., Ocherki po istorii smuty v Moskovskom gosudarstve xvi–xvii vv. (2d ed.; St. Petersburg, 1901), pp. 122–28Google Scholar; idem, Boris Godunov (Petrograd, 1921), pp. 128–31.

12 Vernadsky, G., Kievan Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 168–69.Google Scholar