ABSTRACT
The Organization-Production speakers were at a considerable disadvantage at the 1927 meeting. Unlike their former students, they had devoted relatively little attention to the problem of differentiation. Two groups of scholars came to the 1927 debate with widely varying views of differentiation in Soviet Russia, its nature and its effect upon peasant society. The existence of the inequalities, so ran the argument, generated webs of hire-and-lease transactions whose objects ranged from inventory and livestock to the land itself. The keynote speakers began by admitting that differentiation as defined by their former students was a real problem in the Soviet countryside and consequently was worthy of study. The addresses were followed by comments from the floor; most of the commentators were members of the Agrarian-Marxist group, which, it will be recalled, was well known for its original research on peasant stratification.
