Introduction

The Russian peasantry made up the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia between 1600 and 1930. Throughout this period, 80–90 per cent of Russians were peasants. ¹ In this respect, tsarist and early Soviet Russia were similar to other pre-industrial societies, and societies in the early stages of industrialisation, in early modern Europe and ‘less developed’ regions of Asia, Africa and South and Central America until the late twentieth century. In England in 1500, around 80 per cent of the population worked in agriculture. In China as recently as the 1980s, 74 per cent of the labour force farmed the land. The low and uncertain levels of agricultural productivity in most pre-industrial societies meant that only small minorities of their populations, typically 10–20 per cent, could give up farming for other economic activities, or live off the labour of others as privileged elites.