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  • Experts and Peasants
  • Lars T. Lih (bio)
Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution: Le cas russe, 1870–1930. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998. 519 pp. ISBN 2-226-10004-0. $65.00.
Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. x + 245 pp. ISBN 0-312-22099-5.
Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics and Problems of Russian Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. | xii + 301 pp. ISBN 0-691-03187-8 (cloth); 0-691-00433-1 (paper). $67.50 and $29.95.

The three substantial studies under review focus on the outlook of pre-revolutionary and early Soviet experts, especially in the fields of economics and agriculture. The category of "expert" is narrower than the intelligentsia or educated public as a whole. It includes the elite group of scholars who published weighty tomes in economics, sociology, and related areas, as well as professional givers of advice such as the agronomists. Despite a wide range in political outlook, the Russian experts share some common features in their outlook that spring from their position on the intense and contradictory interface between Russia and the rest of Europe. They needed to build up the prestige of Western intellectual achievements inside Russia while at the same time making claims for Russian distinctiveness within the Europe-wide community of experts.

Alessandro Stanziani, Yanni Kotsonis, and Esther Kingston-Mann approach from different angles the central case of how the experts viewed the peasantry. Each of these authors details the way in which the Russian experts negotiated between the standards and expectations of the European scholarly community versus the standards and expectations of their own political bosses at home (whether the bosses were tsarist or Bolshevik). Each author tries to bring out the ways in which theoretical claims about the peasantry were part and parcel of self-aggrandizing claims about the experts' own proper status. [End Page 803]

Alessandro Stanziani's L'économie en révolution is an impressively ambitious book tracing the pragmatic context of theoretical debates among Russian economists from 1870 to 1930. The bibliography is truly massive: 62 entries are provided for Aleksandr Chaianov alone. The book is unusual in form: I would describe it as a mosaic of mini-essays rather than a connected argument. Stanziani takes up some disputed technical issue – Chaianov's theory of peasant behavior, say, or household budget studies during the civil war – and tries to show that the dispute was not merely technical but included wide-ranging social and political assumptions and implications.

Although Stanziani leaps from topic to topic in dizzying fashion, his various contentions do have a strong family resemblance. His favorite word is imbriqué: he delights in showing how various issues and concerns are embroiled with each other. Stanziani's interest in professional education and careers inspires him to provide (often in the endnotes) much valuable biographical information about the Russian experts. He also likes to show a correlation – often in rather priamolineinyi fashion – between shifts in the political situation and shifts in the technical arguments of the specialists.

Another continuing theme is the self-aggrandizement of the experts vis-à-vis both political bosses and peasant clients. In a typical discussion, Stanziani looks at the disputes between Marxists and social agronomists and asks: "aren't certain essential elements common to both? The answer is yes." The common feature is that both sides use technical progress as a way to diminish the role of the peasant. "The Social Democrats exclude the peasants purely and simply, since, for them, only the proletariat exists." The social agronomists, on the other hand, believed in a utopie savante: "Technology, insofar as it rests on education, is a form of appropriation of knowledge by the city. The peasant is incapable of working the earth in a 'rational' manner without the help of the 'specialist'" (111).

Stanziani is also interested in generational issues, that is, in the way a generation of experts constitutes itself through memory and through common views of the future. As an example of the unexpected and original arguments that pop up on these pages, Stanziani argues that in...

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