ABSTRACT
Serfdom and the other means by which the ruling and landowning elites exploited the Russian peasantry were superimposed on an existing peasant economy that was based mainly, but not solely, on agriculture. With the partial exception of labour services (barshchina) on landowners’ demesnes, the forms of exploitation were not ways of organising production. Russian landowners did not run their estates like slave plantations. Instead, Russian landowners and the state allowed peasants considerable leeway in organising production. Throughout the period under consideration, right up to the end of the 1920s, the landscape of rural Russia was a patchwork of thousands upon thousands of peasant households grouped in village communities. In the early twentieth century, the agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov stressed the importance of the peasant ‘family farm’ (‘khozyaistvuyushchaya sem’ya’) as the basic unit of production (and consumption) in rural Russia. 1
