Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (review)

Retish's regional study of peasants in Russia during the tumultuous years of World War I, the 1917 revolutions, and Civil War complicates our understanding of rural communities. By concentrating on a peripheral area, in this case the northeastern province of Viatka, which had an ethnically diverse population (including Udmurts and Maris), he follows in the footsteps of Figes and more recently, Babcock.¹ At the same time, Retish expands the temporal gaze beyond 1917, or the longer revolutionary period from 1917 to 1921 to reveal the ways in which peasants (whom he defines broadly to include ethnic minorities as well as soldiers and their wives) reacted to state policies and national events and helped to shape the changing political landscape.

Combining political with social and cultural history and using a wealth of previously untapped archival materials and newspaper reports, Retish challenges the stereotypical picture of peasants, crafted largely on the basis of the central Russian provinces, as engaging in drunken violence in 1917 and subsequently carving out an autonomous existence. The absence of serfdom from Viatka province—as well as ecological differences that made forests rather than land most valuable to peasants, coupled with the feminization and politicization of the countryside between 1914 and 1918—produced divergent responses. Empowered by assuming a double burden during the war years, peasant women in the province, unlike their counterparts in other areas of Russia, participated in democratic elections in larger numbers than men. However, the peaceful transition from the tsarist regime to the provisional government and peasants' growing national consciousness were all but squandered by the latter's forced requisitioning of grain. Such seizures not only foreshadowed Bolshevik policy during the Civil War and resulted in peasant resistance but also, Retish reminds us, expanded the tsarist government's 1916 grain procurements.

Like the Bolsheviks, the provisional government was determined to educate "backward" peasants and mold them into its own model of citizenship, only to find the peasants making their own choices. Nevertheless, according to Retish, the Bolsheviks were more pragmatic in their approach to the countryside once the violence of the Civil War dissipated. That appeasement included the provision of aid, a dialogue with peasants outside party lines, and an extension of cultural and educational projects focusing on literacy and agriculture. Simultaneously, peasants turned to the state to mediate in local disputes over land divisions as they attempted to marginalize widows, returning refugees, and migrant workers further as well as to battle prosperous peasants, including the Stolypin separators, and clergymen. Their dependence on the state was best reflected in peasants' demands that the socialist regime bore a responsibility to save them from famine. Retish also enlightens us about the responses of ethnic minorities who resisted grain requisitions by distilling illegal spirits and held conflicting opinions of Bolshevik nationality policies. The survival strategy of peasant migration to Siberia and Asiatic Russia led by women from 1914 through 1919 illuminates the demographic consequences of war and upheaval.

Ultimately, readers will find a great deal to applaud in Retish's interdisciplinary study, if not his sometimes wooden prose.