ABSTRACT

The scholarly work on the countryside done in pre-1917 Russia and in the Soviet Union in the 1920s was of a remarkably high quality: of a higher quality, probably, than that on the peasantry of any country before or since. In that corpus, perhaps least known is the work of L. N. Kritsman and those influenced by him - the so-called 'Agrarian Marxists'. Yet the quality of that work was extremely high and it was very original. Moreover, its significance is more than historical, since it has great relevance to the study of peasantries in contemporary poor countries and especially to the analysis of peasant differentiation.