ABSTRACT
Although the Bolsheviks claimed that the peasants were their allies, in practice they always suspected that they were in some way hostage to them: peasant interests stood in the way of their advance to a proletarian state. The Russian peasantry was fiercely independent, and had its own values and traditions. Rural life was based on a pre-capitalist economy, in which the family was the basic unit of production. Work was regulated not by the clock, but by the needs of the seasons. Holidays coincided with Orthodox festivals. The village, the mir, was a ‘world in itself’ (Altrichter 1991: 192).
