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Colleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. New Books Network in Russian and Eurasian Studies. I am your host, Polina Popova, and today I will be talking to a historian, Colleen Moore, an author of the authority of a very recent book, the Peasants Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy. The book came out in McGill press just a few months ago. Hello, Colleen, and welcome to the show.
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Hi. Thank you for having me.
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B
Yes. So my first question would be if you can just talk about your academic background and how you got to write that wonderful book.
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A
Sure. I usually joke that it was the movie Rocky IV that got me into this topic. As someone who grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s, the history of the Soviet Union was this sort of mystery, this kind of forbidden fruit. But I really started getting interested in Russian history in high school. My high school had a teacher named Mr. Frusche, and he happened to teach a social studies class on Russian studies. And he was a phenomenal teacher. He was really passionate. And I became hooked and sort of obsessed with all things Russia related. And then when I was an undergrad at American University, I took a seminar with Deb Cohen, who's at Northwestern now, on the Great War. On the First World War. Growing up in the United States, we don't learn a lot about World War I because it wasn't. We weren't very much involved in it. And I was sort of fascinated to see for much of the rest of the world how World War I was. This watershed had really changed everything. So I wanted to find a way to link my love of Russian history with my interest in the First World War. I wasn't sure how to do that, though. And when I applied to graduate school at Indiana University, I actually thought I was going to research something about the Stalinist period. But I was randomly assigned to Ben Eklov as my mentor, and he's an expert on the Russian peasantry. He wrote a book called Russian Peasant Schools, and he was also teaching our sort of Intro to the Study of History course for the PhD students. And so we read a lot about peasants, not even necessarily Russian peasants, but we read montayu, we read the Cheese and the Worms, we read peasants into Frenchmen. And I became really interested in, you know, how peasants enter the historical record. And then I also thought, if Russian peasants constituted about 85% of the population during World War I, then how is it that a study of their wartime experiences and their impact on the subsequent Revolution doesn't exist. So that's sort of what the question I set out to answer in my work.
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B
Very interesting. And by the way, I should mention that not much things are taught about World War. War in Russia as well. Maybe it changed now, I don't know. But unfortunately, I think the case was that the history curriculum, schools, was dominated by World War II and information about that. And so it was always, like, I think it was called by many people, the forgotten war. Yeah. So it's interesting how things get to be forgotten so quickly. Those important and terrible things. Great. And my first question would be getting to the book and straight to your main argument, which, if I understood that correctly, was that peasants, like you said, they were a lot of them, the majority of Russian population of the time, Russian imperial population, they contributed to the World War I effort more than any other social class. And so my question would be, why was that the Emperor Nicholas II or Denikin, why they underestimated and sort of undervalued the peasantry and their collective power. And I also wonder. If I understood this correctly, if this was the case for Russian Empire more so, or if this was more of a global phenomenon, things that were going on in those big empires.
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So, yeah, it's a good question. Nicholas II was under the delusion that he possessed a special bond with the peasantry, that he was beloved by them and that they were unshakably loyal to him. And Nicholas had a habit of simply ignoring information that contradicted his own personal opinion. So I'm not sure that anyone could have convinced him otherwise. And this is also why, when revolution breaks out in February 1917, Nicholas decides, like, he's going back to Petrograd, right? Because he somehow thinks the. His very appearance will just stop the revolution in its tracks and everyone will sort of fall to their knees. But for military officials like General Denikin, who I quoted in the book, and also and Januszkevich, who was the army commander's chief of staff, peasants couldn't understand the war's aims because they lacked national consciousness. And the prevailing belief at this time was that nationalism motivated conscripted men to fight and die for their countries, which we now know was not the case. And if peasants didn't identify with some abstract, higher ideal of Russia, if they didn't imagine themselves as members of the Russian nation, then they wouldn't lay down their lives for it. That was the prevailing sentiment. And in fact, much of this scholarship on the war that was produced in the 1990s and early 2000s because as you mentioned earlier, the war was not a subject of interest really to either Soviet or Western historians, but following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had a kind of renewed lease on life. And even some recent scholarship focuses on this question of whether the Tsarist regime had been able to unite Russia's subjects into a nation. And it argues that the regime's failure to create this kind of national Russian community is what led to its collapse. But I see the problem rather differently because for all of Yanushkevich's or Denikin's grumbling, peasants did answer the state's call to arms, right? They, they did report for frontline duty. They provided food and labor for the war effort. And not necessarily to defend some kind of abstract notion of Mother Russia. But to answer your your question about is this the case for Russia specifically or as a general? I don't think the working populations of any of the countries involved in the war was motivated by nationalism to make sacrifices. So I argue that it was actually the discrepancy between the sacrifices that the peasantry was making and the state's treatment of the peasantry that awakened peasants to their collective bargaining power. For lack of a better term, the state didn't treat peasants as equal members of the nation, even though peasants were bearing the majority of the war's burdens, yet it expected peasants to remain loyal subjects. And peasants are saying, wait a minute, if we're defending Russia, then shouldn't the state be supporting us?
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B
Interesting. It almost seems like a very arrogant position that the state was in at the time, especially taking into consideration that the majority of population was peasants. But why Was World War I specifically so different? Maybe for the more general audience, you can even elaborate. And why was this war, you know, World War. Right.
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Why?
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B
What was so special about it? But specifically why was it special for the Russian Empire? And why was it during that war, that particular war, not before peasants started to explicitly or implicitly going against the state?
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A
So I think one thing that made this war, the First World War, different was the scale and the scope of the conflict. This was the first time that Russia had to carry out a general mobilization since it had implemented universal military service in 1874. Almost every peasant household sent a father, husband or son to the front. Almost every household had someone serving there. I can't remember the exact figures. I think it was about. It was either 4 or 5 million men were mobilized just in the first general mobilization in August according to the Russian July and August according to the Russian calendar. And as Scott Sarevny argued, the presence of so many peasant men at the front generated peasant interest in what was happening in the world outside the village. So peasants, for the first time, arguably, were sort of like, interested in news, and they turned to Russia's newspapers to kind of learn what was happening. Despite wartime censorship, the number of newspapers proliferated during the war. And from scholars like Benedict Anderson, we know that newspapers are the key to creation of imagined community. So peasants started realizing that what was happening to their family or to their fellow villagers and was happening to peasants all over Russia, all across the empire. This is also the first war that Russia had to fight since the creation of the Duma, a representative legislative body, and since the legalization of political parties, both of which generated debates about how peasants ought to be rewarded for their wartime service, how they should be compensated. And peasants read about these debates in newspapers. Finally, owing to industrialization, which Russia. Which Russia came to comparatively late in the 1880s and 1890s, the peasant household economy became more specialized, it became more integrated into the market, and it became more dependent on processed or manufactured goods, which meant that wartime inflation and shortages affected peasants more acutely than they had previously. So not only were almost all peasants motivated for the war, either by the military or for the economy, but peasants became aware that what they were experiencing as individuals or families was almost a universal peasant experience, and yet distinct, worse, from what other groups like the police or merchants or educated society were experiencing.
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B
Very interesting, and especially your comment about imagined communities going off of that. I have the following two questions. I had them separately initially, but I'll probably just merge them into one, because you already touched upon that, upon the importance of media, new arriving media, newspapers, right? For this creation of this national consciousness, common, common ground for people. And so, first of all, I wanted to start with this idea, which, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this myth, mythology behind Tsar Nicholas II was that he was a great family man. He was indeed a good family man. In his own private life, he took care of his family, but he also presented himself as this, a family man, a father to his people. And so that myth, I wonder how it sort of. I think it was shaken during World War I. And can we even go as far as saying this might have foreshadowed the revolution? Because that's what, you know, when this kind of mythology falls down, that's when the revolutions happen. But I also want to go, you know, push a little further and say, I'm interested in propaganda. So I wonder how military propaganda during World War I work. So going off of what you were saying, how newspapers sort of formed this collective consciousness, can we also talk about the other side of this coin, about how state propaganda worked through newspapers and other new media. And I know that in your book you mentioned how there were numerous publications that at the time, especially in the beginning of the war, they promoted this self sacrificing spirit, which is not surprising to see, and we actually can see it even now in military propaganda in Russia, for example. So I wonder if you perhaps can talk about that or maybe even zoom on to one particular case of such propaganda. Sorry, Colleen, this is such a long question.
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A
No, it's good. It's fine. So first. Okay, first I'll talk about this myth of the Tsar. Right. And for our listeners who don't know, the myth of the Tsar, which was famously explained by Daniel Field, was the alleged peasant belief that the Tsar would deliver the peasants from their suffering if only he knew of their plight. But the officials who stood between the Tsar and his people were concealing the truth from him. But we don't know, I guess, that peasants ever truly believed in the myth of the Tsar. We don't know if they ever truly thought the Tsar was coming to rescue them. We only know that they acted sometimes as if they believed it. So the myth was useful to peasants in that it allowed them to resist any legislation they didn't like by saying, well, that's not the Tsar's true will. Right? The Tsar benefactor wouldn't do that. And as Field notes, the myth was not useful to the regime because it couldn't draw on the myth to get peasants to behave. If the regime said, well, this is what the Tsar wants, peasants would say, no, the true Czar would never say that. Right. You're an official and you're just concealing the truth from me. But you're right that the image of the Tsar as a benefactor, and especially as the peasants protector, was one that the autocracy consciously sought to project, especially after the abolition of serfdom and during the war, I found evidence that peasants continued to employ the myth by portraying their own hopes or desires as the Tsar's wishes. For example, they were reported as saying, after the war the Tsar will give us all the landowners land and move the landowners to Siberia. The difference, however, between what I'm arguing between peasant uses of the myth during the war and previous instances is that during the war, peasants characterized the Tsar's benevolence not as an act of pity or charity, but as a reward for their wartime sacrifices. I argue that the war reversed in peasants minds the relationship between the Tsar's responsibility and his authority. Before the war, the Tsar protected the people because he was the tsar. But now the Tsar was the Tsar because he protected his people. And once his authority became conditional on his fulfilling the duties of his office, he could conceivably be overthrown. In terms of, in terms of propaganda, the state, for reasons that I mentioned earlier about concerns about peasants, kind of lack of nationalism, made concerted efforts, as you noted, to project this ethos of self sacrifice. Right. And to kind of, you know, remind themselves and remind potential peasant readers that peasants were, you know, loyal, they were heroes, they were capable of making these sacrifices. And much of the propaganda aimed at the peasant population took the form of something called lubki, which are illustrated prints are broadsides. They used to be woodcuts, but by this time they're on paper. And most of these prints featured stereotypical depictions of the enemy or of battle scenes. But it's hard to know how peasants received these images. I never encountered any peasant references to them. Also, I found a collection of songs and poems that, that appealed to peasant soldiers primarily as husbands and fathers, asking them, you know, make sure you make your wives and children proud, don't surrender or desert. Also, if you end up dying in battle, your widows and your orphans will be, will be taken care of. And this messaging, I think, reinforced the notion that peasant state relations were reciprocal, that in exchange for the service that the peasant, the military service the peasant rendered to the state, the state would materially support the members of the peasant soldier's family. But by far the most interesting and unusual propaganda publication intended for peasants that I found was this booklet that was telling the life story of a peasant civilian named Stefan Veremchuk. And I learned about this booklet in Melissa Stockdale's book Mobilizing the Russian Nation. And she talks about how many issues were printed by the government. But then I actually found a digitized version of the booklet online through Karazin University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. So I'll just briefly recount Verumchuk's story because it's wild. Wormchuk was a peasant from Volyn province who was living with his blind mother, his pregnant wife and his two young sons when the war broke out. Because he was the only able bodied member of his household, he was at the time exempt from conscription. When Austrian troops occupied his village in August 1915, he risked his life to warn Russian forces who were stationed on the riverbank opposite his village. And he also ferried scouts across the river, Russian scouts across the river. And it was his second return trip across the river. When he was returning scouts to their position, he was wounded in the thigh by Austrian fire. And so he crawls out of his boat and he almost makes it to his hut when a couple of Austrian soldiers grabbed him and dragged him into a nearby trench where they tortured him to death. His fellow villagers heard his cries for help, but they were too afraid to try and rescue him. His wife discovered his broken, bloody body the next morning, like less than 30ft from the door to their house. And I'm reading this story and I'm thinking, what, what is the moral here? Right? What is the point? How is this horrific story going to inspire any peasant imitators? But the lesson is revealed in the the booklet's final pages, which listed all the ways that the state was rewarding Wyramchuk's family for his sacrifice. They were providing lifetime pensions to his mother and to his wife, and they were providing scholarships to any agricultural school of the choice of their choice to his now three sons because his wife had been pregnant. So I think the message was that your friends and neighbors might let you down, but the state never will. Right? Your friends and neighbors may, may not value your sacrifices, but the regime does. And, and you'll be rewarded and your family will be rewarded.
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B
It sounds like a very powerful message and I really do believe it might have been true. Right. With the pensions and the scholarship. The only problem, I'm just thinking is that once you have millions of people like that, can state really provide for their families?
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A
Right, Exactly. And so there was, according to law of 1912, there was a certain ration or allowance that the state guaranteed to servicemen if they were the provider. So like, it could be your wife or it could be your mother, depending on the age of the soldier. But during the war, the women who were receiving the rations are constantly complaining that they're insufficient, right? That they can't cover the needs, especially due to, like, the rising costs of goods during the war. And so they're constantly advocating for an increase in, in these rations.
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C
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A
Experian.
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B
Why. Why were the prices on food, on goods were. Were rising during the war?
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A
So that, I mean, that's. That is an interesting question. And a lot of it has to do with difficulties in transportation, that Russia simply did not possess the track, but also like the car, the cars, the train cars, the wagons to simultaneously transport both people from villages to the warfront and then also goods from the countryside to the front and the countryside to urban areas. And so the delays in transportation, or sometimes it would be. I remember reading this one report where a train would arrive and the workers at the railway station were supposed to unload the goods in the train and put them in a silo or warehouse and then send the empty cars along and then put the goods on new cars when they arrived. But the workers thought, well, that's ridiculous. Why don't we just wait for the new cars to arrive and then we only have to move the goods once rather than moving them twice. And so cars were just standing full of goods at these railway stations, not going anywhere. So that drove up the cost of goods. But there was also a widespread belief, and this was a belief that was shared among state actors, among peasants and among educated society, that the private traders who were in charge of supplying urban areas were engaging in speculation that they were taking advantage of wartime circumstances to earn a profit. And so they were deliberately holding back goods, which was creating shortages, which was increasing demand, which was then increasing the price.
- [23:52]
B
I see, I see. That's very unfortunate. You also talk about, I think one of the chapters in your book is dedicated to the topic of the prohibitions on alcohol during that war. So my questions, of course, would be, first, why were they implemented? I mean, just logically, it's a little unclear. Why would you prohibit alcohol? And maybe I just don't understand something here, and if I understood you correctly, that the, you know, alcohol played this important bonding role for the peasant communities. And the major driver for the prohibition of alcohol wasn't religion or morals, but rather some. A set of economic factors. Because vodka, you know, first of all, vodka drinking was a ritual, right? And second, it was almost like a currency in the peasant community. So my second question is why was the state so eager to stop or regulate those, why were they interfering with vodka drinking or vodka selling? And third, how did the peasants resist those prohibitions?
- [25:18]
A
A number of considerations led to the implementation of prohibition. But yeah, I think you're right that it couldn't really be considered a success at any level. So first, the regime hoped to avoid a repeat of the situation in the previous war, the Russo Japanese War, when entire echelons of reservists arrived intoxicated at the theater of operations. Second, though, the state at this time and for much of Russian history, actually possessed a monopoly on the production and sale of vodka. And the vodka monopoly generated like 25% of the state's budget. So prohibition financially was a risky measure. But by 1914, temperance, temperance activists, many of whom operated in the sort of upper circles of the autocracy, had convinced Nicholas II that there was something unethical or immoral about relying on the sale of vodka for so much of the state's budget. And he had actually instructed his minister of Finance, Bark, at the, at the opening of 1914 to start thinking of ways, other ways to make money. And Bark was looking into alternatives. But he expected that this process of extricating state revenues from, from vodka production and sale would take years, if not decades. When the war started, then in, in mid-1914, the trade in spirits was prohibited in mobilizing areas and along reservist lines of March, except in first class establishments, which shows that Prohibition was definitely targeting the peasant population, right, because officers and elites and people in cities, you know, could still access alcohol. But Prohibition was only supposed to last until September 1st, at which point this initial general mobilization would have been completed. Yet on, on August 22nd, Nicholas announced that he was extending Prohibition till the end of the war. And then on 20th, on September 28th, he said, I'm extending it forever with the August extension. And he was sort of acting unilaterally, right. This was kind of like his decision with the August Extension. Nicholas appears to have believed that he was carrying out the people's will because he had received some petitions and I think even a peasant delegation saying how much everyone appreciated Prohibition. But then on September 28, he learned that his cousin Oleg had been killed in battle. Like Oleg was killed, you know, first day of the war. And Oleg's father, Nicholas's uncle, Konstantin Konstantinovich, was a huge temperance advocate. And so Nicholas learns Oleg has been killed. And he dashes off a telegram to his uncle, and he says, you know, I'm really sorry. And he added, I've already decided to abolish the government sale of vodka in Russia forever. And this telegram is printed in newspapers. And that's kind of how Prohibition, you know, eternal Prohibition forever. Prohibition is announced. But as you noted, vodka played A ceremonial role at peasant weddings and funerals. It was given and received by peasants as a form of payment, as a bribe. And for my purposes, most importantly, mobilized peasants observed a custom of consuming vodka before departing for military service. So wartime prohibition deprived peasant reservists of the ability to partake in this custom, and also, I argue, insulted them by suggesting that they could be trusted with the defense of Russia, but not with responsible consumption of alcohol. Even beyond reservists, the peasant resistance to Prohibition was fierce and widespread. So mobilized reservists ransacked liquor stores on their way to the front. Liquor storekeepers would sell their stock on the black market, but then report it stolen. And then I have these police reports that say, like, the police showed up and the liquor store clerk said, oh, they stole our vodka, but the windows were broken from the inside, and the footprints in the mud led the wrong way. Peasants also consumed, and this is kind of the tragic park part, peasants consumed all kinds of impotable substances, things like cologne, varnish, wood alcohol as surrogates for vodka, and often with fatal consequences because these were poisonous substances.
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B
Very, very interesting. I'm just thinking about this whole situation. I'm sorry, maybe I missed that in your book about emperor's cousin Oleg. What a story. And turns out there were even personal interests, right? Familial interests in that prohibition, or at least the moral question, was rooted in that to some extent. Okay, so now if we can, is that okay if we shift to a different topic? And that would be the military conscription. And I wonder how that worked During World War I, if you can explain that to our listeners, and if there were any exemptions for certain groups of population. And Colleen, can you please describe the riots that you talked about in the book? For example, the Moscow riot of 1914. What, what were they like and what were they all about?
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A
Sure. So technically, Russia practiced universal military conscription, which meant upon turning 21, all able bodied men were supposed to serve three years in the regular army on active duty, and then after that they would be released to the reserves for a period of about 15 years, and then they would spend an additional four to five years in the militia or the home guard. And I think it was either age 43 or 44 was the time that you were considered, like, too old to be serving anymore in the military. But that's in theory, in practice, in addition to medical exemptions, Russia offered a whole host of exemptions for reasons of religion, of ethnicity, education, occupation, or family status. And so the family status exemption meant that if you were the only able bodied member of a peasant household, like the Stefan Voromchuk example I spoke about earlier, which meant that your father was either deceased or infirm, and your brothers were either already serving in the army or were under the age of 16. You were exempt from active duty, and you were enrolled in the second tier of the militia. So these men were. They were capable physically of bearing arms, but they never received any military training because they bypassed their three years in the regular army and they were never supposed to see frontline service. However, Russian casualties in the war were so great that by September 1915, the regime had to repeal exemptions granted for reasons of family status and draft these second tier militiamen. This draft provoked, as you can imagine, considerable outcry from the militiamen and their families who argued that the state, by taking away their breadwinners, was leaving peasants to starve. They also argued that the performance of agricultural labor was just as important to Russia's victory in the war as the performance of military service. And they complained that the repeal of exemptions based on family status was unfair because members of other groups, like the police, retained their exemptions from having to serve. So it was like, well, why are you taking our only remaining sons when you can take the police? So clashes between militiamen and the police ensued. But the greatest of these occurred in Moscow in, in mid September 1915. And they began because there were rumors that policemen had assaulted a second tier militiaman on, on what's now Pushkin Square, Strasnay Square, then. And these rumors led crowds to erect barricades and pelt police forces with stones and bottles. And this occurred over like a two day period. But the alleged victim, this, this alleged militiaman who had been assaulted was nowhere to be found until the third day of these riots, when police arrested a second tier militiaman who they found standing on the streets shouting at a police armored car, I will shoot all the police. And they brought, so they bring this man to the station for questioning. And an officer on duty recognized him as the man who had provoked the riot that began several nights before on Sarasnaya Square, the militiaman in question, whose name turned out to be Khudilov, had indeed been called up from the second tier militia. But rather than report to Saratov province as instructor, as instructed, he'd gotten drunk on Khanja, which is a surrogate for vodka, and he blacked out. And so he had no recollection of the incident on Sabassnay Square that he had started three days prior. But rumors persisted that he was not Only a militiaman, but he was a decorated peasant soldier and had been assaulted. And the. I think it was the mayor of Moscow had to, like, issue a statement in the newspaper saying this. This was not a decorated soldier. Right. He. He's never been to the front before. He's just been mobilized. Stop with the rumors. And so I think it speaks to the tension and the animosity that had a MA like had reached this point between the population and the police, where the police are kind of seen as the antithesis of this peasant hero in uniform. Right. And they're seen as these kind of shirkers and these enemies of Russia.
- [35:54]
B
And just out of curiosity, police. The members of the police would usually be. Oh, sorry. Members of the police would usually be from. Not from peasant background. Right.
- [36:08]
A
It did vary. And so at the very lowest level, like the village constable probably was of the peasantry, but the police in Moscow are not going to be.
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B
Yeah, that's. Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. Interesting. So my next question is about land ownership. And I think that issue kind of connects this book and our conversation today about, you know, peasants in World War I Russia to the contemporary situation in Russia and, you know, this problem of ownership of something. Right. So with the beginning of the 20th century Russia, that would be the land. And I know for the fact that many men who go fight in the war with Ukraine, their motivation is not political, but get the money and become owners of a condo or a house. So it's interesting how often those cruel wars are driven by those economic motivations. Right. So my question here is, was that issue raised by the peasants who fought for Russia in the war, and how did Nicholas ii, but later the Provisional Government, treat that issue? How did they deal with that?
- [37:53]
A
That's an interesting tie in to the current circumstances and the. The fact that the often the most economically marginalized group are the ones who are. Who are sort of forced by circumstances, Right. Into providing military service. So, I mean, peasants always were advocating for more land. Right. The emancipation legislation in the 1860s was incredibly unfavorable to peasants. They did not receive.
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B
They.
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A
They did not receive as much land in the. With the emancipation legislation as they had farmed under serfdom. Also, population explosions in the aftermath of abolition led to acute land hunger in certain regions, especially like along the Volga. And there were concerted attempts by the autocracy to encourage peasant migration to places like Siberia. But the climate in Siberia is not always as hospitable to agriculture. So peasants were kind of always looking for opportunities in ways to increase their land holdings at the expense of the gentry. But peasant demands that they should receive land as a reward for their service in the war were at least strengthened, if not inspired, by the autocracy's own proposals regarding what to do with land that it expropriated from enemy subjects, from German, Austrian or Ottoman subjects or their descendants. And some tsarist officials suggested, people like Januszkevich suggested, awarding the expropriated land to peasant soldiers who had distinguished themselves in battle. But peasants said, okay, that's your proposal. And then they expanded upon these terms. So they expanded the terms of the proposal from land owned by enemy subjects to all privately owned land, and from decorated soldiers to all peasants. And clearly they thought this was a fairer arrangement. Peasants then began to carry out this redistribution of the land themselves, maintaining that in doing so, they were simply fulfilling the autocracy's plans. Right, oh, he's a German, we heard you're going to take his land anyway, we're helping you do it. Or we heard, as I mentioned earlier, that the Tsar is going to give us all the land in European Russia, and he's going to move all the landowners to Siberia. And it was peasant women, particularly the wives of peasant soldiers, Soldatki, who led this initiative. They also stopped paying the rent and stopped paying their taxes, arguing that the blood that their husbands, fathers and sons had spilled was payment enough. After 1917, the provisional government acknowledges that the land question is one of the most pressing questions facing Russia's new administration. But they instructed peasants to be patient and to wait for the Constituent assembly, the body that writes a constitution, to decide the land question. But the original government also unintentionally created additional opportunities for peasants to acquire land. So to continue to supply the army and the towns with food, the Provisional government needed to increase the amount of land under cultivation. So in April 1917, it passed the Law on the Protection of Crops. And this law dictated the transfer of any unsown land to food supply committees that were established at the volest level. So like, above the kind of like township or canton, it's not an easy word to translate. And these committees were under peasants control. The Provisional Government also authorized the creation of local land committees, which peasants also dominated. And then the peasants used these committees to fix rent and wages by setting rent prices low and wages agricultural labor wages high. The land committees ensured that privately owned gentry land remained unsown. Right, because the gentry was not willing to rent out its land for nothing, Nor were they willing to pay people to harvest Pay high prices to people to harvest land, and when the land was unsown, then it justified its appropriation by the Food Supply Committee. So peasants found legal workarounds to this, to the Provisional Government's, you know, plea that they. They wait for the Constituent assembly in order to continue to take land following the collapse of the autocracy.
- [42:35]
B
I see. Now, honestly, your book and our conversation cleared out this one important thing for me. Why? One of the major slogans of the Bolsheviks and Lenin was Zimlia Christianum. Ziemlu Christianum. Right. It was because of that, you know, continuity throughout, you know, from the World War I that issue was there. Right. So Zimla Christianum was an issue that existed even before the first. No, even before the revolution of 1970. Okay. So usually when I read books, I usually like to sort of dig into one little argument or one little sentence. So I wanted to ask you about this phrase that you wrote. It was the autocracy's violation of peasants rights as consumers rather than producers that ultimately turned peasants against it. So I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on that for our listeners who may not have read the book yet or who are not familiar with this, you know, with the issues of economic history.
- [44:03]
A
Sure. So it seems hard to believe, but by the early 20th century, more peasants in Russia were consumers than producers of grain. Although some Russian provinces were exporters of grain, most provinces either imported what they needed from neighboring provinces or they just broke even. They grew enough grain to feed their own population as more and more peasants migrated to industrial areas in search of wage labor. Right. These are Khodniki. Peasant households relied more and more on the market to satisfy their needs, not only for grain in certain regions, but even in the grain producing provinces, they relied on the market for goods like wax, soap, matches, footwear, cloth, tea, sugar and flour during the war. Initially, the government prioritized the food, the satisfaction of the food, food needs of the army. Right? And they left provisioning the home front with food and other necessary goods to the private trading network. And we talked a little bit about this already. The, the transportation bottlenecks and the causes of shortages in inflation. But another issue was this kind of lopsided government interference in the economy. Because the government offered fixed prices for grain, right, purchased by its procurement agents for the army. But these fixed prices could not compete with the market or above market prices that private traders could offer who were dispatched from grain consuming regions of the empire. So peasant producers of grain simply sold to the highest bidder. And this often meant the private traders, which meant that food the army needed was kind of being redirected to urban areas. The traders, for their part, passed on the elevated prices to the consumers, resulting in the high costs of goods of, of bread and flour in urban areas, potatoes, things like that. But then also bred these accusations of speculation because how could the prices be so high? You know, the traders must be manipulating the market. Now, eventually, in I think it was the summer of 1916, the regime was compelled to fix prices for all grain transactions, state and private, erroneously assuming that peasant households were autarkic and also that they were flush with cash because they weren't spending their money on vodka anymore. During Prohibition, the state set grain prices low and as a result, it led to what we call a scissors crisis. Right. The peasants could not afford to buy the manufactured goods that they had come to see as necessities from proceeds, with proceeds from the sale of their agricultural products. And they began to complain that the autocracy only limited the prices for products that leave peasants hands, while allowing merchants and manufacturers to enrich themselves. And peasants then stopped marketing their grain, milk, eggs, in attempt to drive up the fixed prices for them. Right. They sort of created artificial scarcity. Consequently, though, because peasants stopped trading their goods on the market, peasant consumers of grain suffered acute shortages of staples like bread and flour. And it was a protest over the lack of bread, Right. That triggered the revolution in February 1917. And so it was a direct consequence of the states setting these fixed prices low and forgetting that peasants, both in consuming and producing regions of grain, were also consumers of other goods.
- [47:49]
B
Interesting. Thank you so much. And I'm just thinking how much of the. I'm just thinking about this issue of how much of this really horrible things like wars are interfered with just everyday lives, right? With consumerism, with buying, like you said, matches or walks or food. Sorry, I think we already took too much of your time, Colleen. And the book is really, really wonderful and it has so many little details and more, more stories about, you know, peasants in. During World War I in Russia, Russian Empire. So I just want to ask if you can talk about your current projects or maybe any future books or articles you plan on.
- [48:49]
A
Thank you so much for having me and for inviting me to talk about my book and to share these stories which, you know, I love the opportunity to kind of bring the stories of these peasants to life and to make them full fledged historical actors in this story of war and revolution. What I'm going to work on next is kind of a tough question because of the impossibility of doing any research in Russia right now for the foreseeable future. But I do have two ideas that I'm kind of working on. One was probably an article. It'll be an article length project. And it was actually suggested by one of the reviewers of the book manuscript, which is a study of the relationship between the harmonica and harmonica playing and peasant hooliganism. For reasons I don't yet know, mobilized reservists were prohibited from singing and playing the harmonica when they were reporting for duty. And this was often what ignited conflicts between the reservists and the police who were the ones enforcing this kind of seemingly arbitrary rule. The State Historical Public Library in Moscow has some digitized materials that I can access online that might help me research this question. Some gendarme files that actually cross the 1917 divide. But the second, more ambitious question, book length idea I have involves the so called potato riots that occurred in the 1840s under Nicholas I. There's very little written about them in English or in Russian that I can find. Alexander Herzen mentions them in his memoirs in my Past and Thoughts. And I found one Russian dissertation and then an article based on this dissertation about them. And then from the footnotes to this article, it seems that there are a few published reports on the riots in that Krestyanskaya Dijenya series that from the 1960s. I also found two articles in Russian, like Thick Journals from the 1870s, 1880s, that discuss these riots in, in retrospect. And I'm. I haven't read those articles yet. But my suspicion is that something about the riot assumed new significance in the wake of emancipation, and that's why these, the intelligentsia return to them. And then my friend Emily Baron actually suggested that I do something comparative around peasant resistance to potato farming, which seems to be a theme in a number of societies and would also then allow me access to archives not in Russia.
- [51:30]
B
Yes, I think that's a good approach. And especially since you already wrote a book on the peasants in Russian Empire, you know, comparing the comparison would be a good next step. But the harmonica playing, can I ask you if harmonica is the one that you play with your mouth? Right?
- [51:49]
A
Yes. And there's, it's not in the documents I've seen. It's not the Garmushka, it's not that one. It's like literally harmonica.
- [51:57]
B
I wonder, just out of curiosity, this is not related to the book, but I wonder if it was because harmonica is so small and you can sort of sneak it in everywhere you go. So it's like, it's like an easy entertainment on the go, right?
- [52:12]
A
Yes. Yeah, I think that is right.
- [52:14]
B
Wow. Very, very interesting. I'm very excited about both of these topics, and I'm looking forward to your next projects, to reading your articles and books. Colleen, thank you so much for being on our show today.
- [52:30]
A
Thank you, Paulina. I really appreciate it. Sa.