Historical study of political aspects of the land tenure system in the USSR and intergroup relations between rural worker societies (communes) and political party organisations (rural soviets) leading to the onset of the collective economy in agriculture. Bibliography pp. 239 to 247, references and statistical tables.

Drawing on Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, this work analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village

ÿThis book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.

The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods – it is, for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and, through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships between the physical environment, peasant economic and social practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of peasant social and political institutions within the context of these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions, tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.

The first book to document the peasant rebellion against Soviet collectivization, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin retrieves a crucial lost chapter from the history of Stalinist Russia. The peasant revolt against collectivization, as reconstructed by author Lynne Viola, was the most violent and sustained resistance to the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. Conservative estimates suggest that over the course of the 1020s and early 1930s, more than 1,100 people were assassinated, more than 13,000 villages rioted, and over 2.5 million people participated in this active struggle of resistance. This book is about the men and women who tried to preserve their families, communities, and beliefs from the depredations of Stalinism. Their acts were often heroic, but these heroes were homespun, ordinary people who were driven to acts of desperation by cruel and brutal state policies. This is a study of peasant community, culture, and politics through the prism of resistance. Based on newly declassified Soviet archives, including previously inaccessible OGPU (secret police) reports, Viola's work documents the manifestation in Stalin's Russia of universal strategies of peasant resistance in what amounted to a virtual civil war between state and peasantry. This book is must reading for scholars of Soviet history, Stalinism, popular resistance, and Russian peasant culture.

In Hammer, Sickle, and Soil, Jonathan Daly tells the harrowing story of Stalin's transformation of millions of family farms throughout the USSR into 250,000 collective farms during the period from 1929 to 1933. History's biggest experiment in social engineering at the time and the first example of the complete conquest of the bulk of a population by its rulers, the policy was above all intended to bring to Russia Marx's promised bright future of socialism. In the process, however, it caused widespread peasant unrest, massive relocations, and ultimately led to millions dying in the famine of 1932–33. Drawing on scholarly studies and primary-source collections published since the opening of the Soviet archives three decades ago, now, for the first time, this volume offers an accessible and accurate narrative for the general reader. The book is illustrated with propaganda posters from the period that graphically portray the drama and trauma of the revolution in Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In chilling detail the author describes how the havoc and destruction wrought in the countryside sowed the seeds of destruction of the entire Soviet experiment.