ABSTRACT
1917 witnessed a profound transformation in the Russian countryside. The old landlords were engulfed by a tidal wave of peasant revolution which left the peasants, for a time, masters of their domains (Figes 1989:355–6). The question of the underlying sources of this revolution, however, remains much more complex. It is no longer possible to attribute it simply to the growing impoverishment of the peasant mass. Recent studies suggest that despite an agrarian productivity that remained low in comparison to West Europe, peasant standards of living generally had been rising before 1914 (Channon 1992a:117; Perrie 1992:19). Yet substantial pockets of rural poverty did exist, most noticeably in the Black Earth region (embracing much of the Central Agricultural and Middle Volga regions) and the Ukraine. The majority of peasants, moreover, continued to believe that a free and equal redistribution of all land not in their hands (especially that of the gentry and the ‘separators’, those peasants who had taken advantage of the Stolypin reforms of 1906–11 to set up their own farms independent of the old village commune) would resolve all their problems. The aspirations of the peasants were set out in their famous ‘Model Mandate’. Drawn up and published by the SRs in the Izvestiia of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies in August it was based on the 242 sets of instructions given by local peasant communities to their delegates to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies which convened in Petrograd on 4 May. It began by expressing support for a democratically elected Constituent Assembly which was to transform Russia into a federal republic, one in which civil liberties were to be inviolable. It also accepted that the state should preserve its monopoly on the distribution of grain which was to be implemented by democratically elected, local food committees. The price of grain, and of other items of mass consumption, was to be fixed. It also outlined the peasants’ vision of land reform.
