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

Where would Russian history be without peasants? Historians of late Imperial and early Soviet Russia have cast them as villains, victims, and passive observers. Retish in this stimulating study of Viatka Province sees them as the key players in the war, revolution, and Civil War. He shows how the war shaped ethnic relations, ties between men and women, and interactions among those who had left the peasant communes under the Stolypin Reforms and those who had not. His description of the wives of soldiers who received a payment from the government is fascinating. He finds that the war energized peasants’ patriotism but also notes their resistance to the government’s efforts to secure as much grain as possible for the army. Summing up this era, he suggests that the wartime mobilization and the February Revolution undercut peasants’ traditional “subordinate role in society” and that “by spring 1917 peasants saw themselves as more equitable participants in a larger, national struggle” (p.74–75). Thus by October, in his view, “An active and developed political culture and sense of citizenship had emerged in the countryside” (p. 118). The result, he argues, was that the Bolsheviks seized power in “a socially polarized world” (p. 119). This seems a bit of a stretch, since rural people mingled with the urban population through markets, off farm labor, and work in cities as well as stints in the army and wartime service. One would expect that peasants with outside experience would influence their more insular neighbors and visa versa. The fact that peasants supported the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had a strong following among rural schoolteachers, would suggest that any polarization was perhaps incomplete. Retish describes the announcement of the tsar’s abdication from the pulpit in rural Viatka but notes that peasants centered their revolutionary activities in the schools. In this regard it is perhaps too bad the author did not do more with the teachers.

Retish develops several broad historical themes when he argues that peasants turned to the Soviet regime and gave the Bolsheviks the wherewithal to win the Civil War and consolidate their rule. Perhaps his greatest contribution is to demonstrate that the Soviet government gained legitimacy by adjudicating local disputes and confirming or denying requests of peasants, groups of peasants, committees of the poor, and communes. This aspect of the author’s story is compelling. He suggests that a broad range of rural people were drawn to the new state. He writes, “Petitioning peasants, categorized by the Bolsheviks as anti-Soviet kulaks, adopted Soviet language and used Soviet land law to better their situation” (p. 147). The author argues that the Soviet government decided disputes among peasants by reference to Soviet law or, as he puts it, putting “legal order above their aim for class warfare” (p. 162). He concludes that peasants in Viatka who petitioned Soviet authorities came to identify with the state. This begs comparison with Jane Burbank’s recent book showing how peasants in late Imperial Russia used the courts.¹ Since Viatka was comprised chiefly of state peasants, one supposes that their engagement with Soviet authorities was as much an extension of past practice as a new phenomenon. Another issue concerns the presumed “legal order.” Chinese advocates for human rights recently charged in their Charter 08 Declaration that “China has many laws but no rule of law.”² The same was certainly true of early Soviet Union, only more so. The Bolsheviks were hardly law abiding, and they changed or ignored their own legislation and pronouncements whenever it suited them. In fact, since the printed word barely reached urban provincial centers, let alone the countryside, arrangements with peasants must have been largely ad hoc. Clearly, there is more to learn about such interactions.

Retish’s most controversial conclusions pertain to the role of violence and coercion, which he downplays...