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The Crisis in Russian Agriculture: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

G. M. Hamburg
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Extract

Not long ago Randolph Starn observed that the word “crisis” is a particularly ambiguous term which historians have not always used with the requisite care. “One historian's crisis lasts moments, another's decades, even eras; political, social, economic, mental, or moral crises are blurred by one historian's insistence on treating them discretely, while another lumps them together under the confusing rubric ‘general crisis.’ “ Starn's strictures about the abuse of common terminology and about the confusion resulting from such abuse deserve our attention, especially now that Professor James Y. Simms has asserted that Russian historians have been wrong in thinking that there was an agrarian crisis in the late nineteenth century.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 481 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1978

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References

1. Randolph, Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’” Past and Present, 52 (August 1971): 3 Google Scholar.

2. See Simms's article, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review, 36, no. 3 (September 1977): 377-98.

3. Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis, ’ ” pp. 21-22.

4. For examples of gentry concern about the “agrarian crisis” facing the nobility, see Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Leningrada (TsGIAL), fond 593 (Gosudarstvennyi dvorianskii zemel'nyi bank), opis’ 1, delo 47, listy 330 and 507; see also Trudy Vserossiiskogo s “ezda sel'skikh khoziaev, vol. 5: Doklad B. V. Lilienjel'da (Moscow, 1896), p. 10.

5. “The implication is clear: it was the mass of the population, or the vast majority of the peasants, who had become impoverished and destitute by the turn of the century. This is a basic component in the crisis hypothesis” (Simms, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” p. 378).

6. Doklad predsedatelia vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi v 1888 godu kommissii po povodu padeniia tsen na sel'skokhoziaistvennye proizvedeniia v piatiletie 1883-1887 (St. Petersburg, 1892), pp. 61-66.

7. One government commission which dealt with the peasant problem in the wake of the famine was the so-called “Commission on the Center” (see Issledovanie ekonomicheskogo polozheniia tsentral'no-chernozemnykh gubernii: Trudy osobogo soveshchaniia 1899-1901 gg. [Moscow, 1901]).

8. See, for example, Simonova, M. S., “Problema ‘oskudeniia’ tsentra i ee rol’ v formirovanii agrarnoi politiki samoderzhaviia v 90-kh godakh XlX-nachale XX v.,” in Problemy sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi istorii Rossii: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1971), pp. 236–63 Google Scholar.

9. Simms, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” p. 396. Simms follows this admission by arguing that wages for agricultural laborers rose faster than rye prices in the 1890s, and by repeating his earlier point on the rise of consumption. It is fascinating to note that Simms's data on wages, taken from Geroid T. Robinson's well-known chapter, “The Hungry Village,” are also taken out of context. I do not have the space to quote Robinson in full, but he notes that wages generally declined from 1882 until they began to go up again in the early 1890s. Then from 1895 to 1901 wages rose in ten of thirteen regions of Russia. However, they fell rapidly after 1901, declining in twelve out of thirteen regions. Robinson concludes his paragraph by saying that for the poorest peasants, who were most dependent on wages, “the period which immediately preceded the Revolution of 1905 was one of more than usual distress.” For Robinson's complete citation, the reader should see Robinson, Geroid T., Rural Russia under the Old Regime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 105–6 Google Scholar. By quoting only those statistics that happen to be convenient for his case, Simms, it seems to me, violates his readers’ trust and common scholarly practice.

10. Simms, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” p. 391.

11. Nifontov provides a chart which shows that the total amount of grain available for the economic needs of the populace ( “na khoziaistvennye nuzhdy naseleniia” ) grew from 149, 100 chetverti in the 1870s to 203, 700 chetverti in the 1890s. Nifontov does not attempt to give per capita figures here, so one must assume that Simms made his own calculations, or else cited the wrong source. Nifontov does provide other tables in his book which give per capita grain production (tables 43 and 44, pp. 284-89), but these tables are based on the net harvest and do not subtract the amount of grain exported (see Nifontov, A. S., Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka po materialam ezhegodnoi statistiki urozhaev evropeiskoi Rossii [Moscow, 1974]Google Scholar).

12. Simms, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” p. 391.

13. On oats production and use see Nifontov, , Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii, pp. 255–59Google Scholar; on corn, see ibid., pp. 264-65, 270.

14. Simms, “The Crisis in Russian Agriculture,” p. 391.

15. On the dimensions of the peasant migration to St. Petersburg from the late 1860s to 1914, see James H. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialisation and Change (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), pp. 308-21. Bater offers no blanket explanation for the influx of peasants to Petersburg. He does propose that some were drawn by industry or the prospect of nonindustrial employment in Petersburg; he also implies that rural poverty influenced many'peasants: “The source of many peasant migrants was the impoverished and overpopulated non-black earth region of central Russia” (Bater, ibid., pp. 385-86).