38.1 Theme 1 - The changing status and condition of the peasantry

The Breadth Argument

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme, so do not treat the topic as a list of rural policies. The question running through the whole period is: how far did government policy improve the status and condition of the peasantry, and how far did it simply change the form of dependence?

Two terms matter.

Status means the legal and social position of rural people: whether they were serfs, communal peasants, individual landholders, collective-farm workers, state-farm wage workers, or private farmers.

Condition means the material quality of rural life: land access, food security, taxes, payments, famine, migration, household plots, wages, welfare, and the possibility of leaving the land.

The broad chronology looks like this:

The main turning point was 1928-32, because collectivisation changed the relationship between village and state more violently than any other policy. Emancipation ended legal serfdom; the Land Decree confirmed the peasant seizure of land; NEP restored incentives; Khrushchev and later leaders eased some rural hardship. But collectivisation permanently broke the idea that the peasant household could control production independently of the state.

For assessment judgement, keep a double argument in mind. Across the whole period there was real change: serfdom disappeared, redemption payments ended, private plots were tolerated, peasants moved to towns, state-farm wages and later pensions improved security, and by 1990-91 private farming was again legally imaginable. Yet there was also deep continuity: governments repeatedly treated the countryside as a source of grain, labour, taxes, soldiers and social stability rather than as a group whose welfare came first.

Emancipation and the Village

In 1855 Russia was still overwhelmingly rural, and millions of peasants were serfs. A serf was not simply a poor farmer. Serfs were legally bound to estates and owed labour services, dues or obedience to landlords. They could be bought and sold with land, punished by estate authorities and restricted in movement. Serfdom made Russia look socially backward compared with much of western Europe, but it also underpinned noble power and local order.

Alexander II's Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 was therefore a huge change in status. Privately owned serfs gained personal freedom: they could marry without landlord permission, own property, bring cases to court and engage in trade. The reform also created elected peasant institutions at village and volost level. In principle, the peasant was now a legal subject rather than a landlord's dependent.

But emancipation was deliberately cautious. Landlords were compensated, while peasants had to pay for the land allotments they received through redemption payments. These payments were made to the state over decades because the state had advanced money to compensate landlords. The burden mattered because many peasants believed the land should have been theirs by right. Instead, freedom arrived as a debt.

The village commune, or mir, also remained central. It redistributed strips of land among households, collected taxes and redemption payments, and controlled passports for peasants who wanted to leave temporarily for work. The commune could protect households from complete destitution, but it also limited individual freedom. Land was often held in scattered strips, decisions were communal, and peasants were collectively responsible for obligations.

The result was a mixed emancipation:

Living standards were shaped by overpopulation. Rural population grew rapidly in the later nineteenth century. Because land was divided among more households and heirs, many villages experienced land hunger. This did not mean every region was identical: the black-earth provinces, forest zones, steppe areas and non-Russian borderlands had different patterns. But the general pressure was clear. More people were trying to live from limited land, with low yields and limited capital.

The burden of redemption payments made this pressure worse. Payments absorbed cash that could otherwise have been used for tools, animals, seed or household consumption. They were not the only cause of rural poverty, but they symbolised the injustice of emancipation: peasants were free, yet still paying for freedom.

Periods of famine exposed the weakness of rural life. The famine of 1891-92 affected tens of millions across the Volga and central agricultural regions. Drought and harvest failure mattered, but famine also revealed deeper vulnerabilities: poverty, weak transport in some regions, grain-market pressures, limited reserves, poor relief systems and the thin margin between survival and disaster. Later crop failures and food shortages reinforced the point that emancipation had not made the countryside secure.

Leaving the land was one response. Some peasants became seasonal workers, known as otkhodniki, leaving villages for factories, building sites, mines, ports or towns and then returning. Others migrated permanently to cities or to frontier regions such as Siberia. This could improve cash income and loosen communal control, but it also showed the limits of village agriculture. Migration was both opportunity and evidence of pressure.

By 1905, then, emancipation had changed status more than condition. It ended the legal scandal of serfdom, but did not create a prosperous peasantry. The countryside remained crowded, unequal, vulnerable to famine and suspicious of a state that demanded payment, obedience and grain.

Stolypin, Revolution and NEP

The 1905 Revolution forced the tsarist state to rethink its relationship with the peasantry. Rural unrest, land seizures and attacks on landlords showed that emancipation had not settled the land question. The government also wanted a more productive countryside that could support industrialisation, exports and social order.

Peter Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, tried to create a class of conservative, prosperous peasant proprietors. His reforms, beginning with the decree of 9 November 1906 and later confirmed by legislation, allowed peasants to leave the commune and claim consolidated private holdings. The state also encouraged loans through the Peasant Land Bank and migration to Siberia.

Stolypin's aim was political as well as economic. He hoped that independent landowners would be less revolutionary because they would have something to defend. His famous idea was to "wager on the strong": support the more enterprising peasants, encourage them to farm commercially, and use them as a stabilising force in the countryside.

The reforms changed the peasantry in several ways:

There were some gains. Grain production increased in the years before the First World War, some peasants became more commercial, and migration opened new opportunities. Redemption payments were also ended after 1905, removing a major symbolic and financial burden from the post-emancipation settlement.

But the reforms did not have enough time or reach. Many peasants remained communal farmers. Others saw successful separators as threatening village equality. Land hunger persisted. Stolypin's reforms changed the status of a minority rather than transforming the whole peasantry. When war and revolution came, the countryside again acted collectively and violently over land.

The Land Decree of 1917 was the next major turning point. Passed by the Bolshevik government immediately after the October Revolution, it abolished private ownership of land and confiscated landlord, crown, church and monastery land without compensation. In practice, it recognised what many peasants had already done during 1917: seizing estates and redistributing land through village institutions.

The Land Decree gave peasants a dramatic improvement in perceived status. Landlords disappeared as a political force in the village. Peasants gained use of land, and the Bolsheviks won rural support by accepting the peasant land revolution. Yet this was not secure private property. Land could not simply be bought and sold like capitalist property. The decree strengthened peasant control in the short term, but it also established the principle that land belonged ultimately to the state or people as a whole.

Civil war then damaged conditions severely. From 1918 to 1921, the Bolsheviks used requisitioning to take grain for cities and the Red Army. Peasant resistance grew, including the Tambov rebellion. The famine of 1921-22 showed again how war, state extraction, drought and disrupted markets could turn rural weakness into disaster.

The New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, was Lenin's retreat from emergency coercion. Requisitioning was replaced by a tax in kind, later converted into money taxation. Peasants could sell surplus produce after meeting obligations to the state. Small trade revived. NEP therefore improved conditions by restoring incentives: peasants had a reason to sow more, sell more and rebuild herds and households after civil war.

NEP did not make peasants politically secure. The Communist Party saw market-minded peasants as ideologically suspect, especially better-off peasants labelled kulaks. The state still controlled heavy industry, banking, foreign trade and the main political institutions. By the late 1920s, grain procurement crises persuaded Stalin that the peasantry had too much power to withhold grain from the towns.

The period 1906-28 therefore marks the high point of peasant land control, but also its fragility. Stolypin tried to make private peasants loyal to the tsar. The Land Decree gave land use to the village revolution. NEP allowed peasant markets to recover. All three improved some conditions. None solved the state's deeper problem: governments wanted grain and stability more than they trusted peasant autonomy.

Collectivisation and Famine

Stalin's collectivisation of 1928-32 was the most destructive change in the status and condition of the peasantry. It was linked to the First Five-Year Plan and the drive for rapid industrialisation. Stalin wanted grain to feed workers, exports to help pay for machinery, labour for factories, and political control over a countryside that the party regarded as backward and unreliable.