ABSTRACT
Russia’s late-nineteenth-century radicals, the populists, cultivated utopian views of the peasant majority as ‘the key to Russia’s future’; the twentiethcentury Bolsheviks took a different stance entirely. Following in Marx’s footsteps, Lenin dismissed the Russian institution of the peasant commune and wrote of peasants as competitive ‘isolated producers’ living in an essentially capitalist economy, who were prone to bigotry, superstition, subservience to authority, and abuse of women.1 Yet he also argued that in the competitive economy that flourished in the countryside, ‘not less than half’ of the peasants belonged to the ‘rural proletariat.’2 Due to this tension the Bolsheviks undertook a two-pronged position toward the peasantry, both treating them as recalcitrant and also trying to instigate a class war among them. Starting in the 1920s the Bolsheviks increasingly emphasized the Party’s proletarian identity, and promoted ‘working-class upward mobility.’ Until the completion of collectivization, the possibility for advancement was not extended to peasants.3 This meant that politically, the urban proletariat was favored while the peasantry was treated as a backward category that needed to be overcome in order for society to move forward.
