| "Face to Face with the Peasant" focuses on peasant and state in Riazan, Russia, in the years between the civil war and the first collectivization drive. Typically, in the historical literature, the Russian peasantry in the 1920s is regarded as apolitical, desperately wanting to be left alone. This study argues that peasants were interested in coming to a workable living arrangement with the Soviet regime in the mid-1920s. One of the central arguments of the dissertation is that the Bolshevik center lost patience with such negotiations because of its profound commitment to a high modernist program. This commitment involved complete devotion to the idea that progress for Russia would involve industrial development and a bright, modern, socialist future. The peasant population in its "peasantness" was seen as a serious obstacle to such development. Thus the commitment to high modernism led to a civilizing mission and peculiar kind of colonizing project.; Part one focuses on those divisions of the state, which came into contact with the peasantry in the arena of both violent and non-violent crime. The Bolshevik struggle with the peasantry over who was to control local space forms the basis of part one of the work. Part two of the dissertation deals with the struggle between state and peasantry for resources. Together with the portrait of the state at the lowest levels and its crisis of shortages, one begins to understand why the battle for resources was so fierce. Through a study of banditry, hooliganism and samosud (vigilante justice), part three traces changing perceptions of the countryside at the central level, while simultaneously attempting to convey elements of everyday life in the village. The center expressed an increasing fear of the backwardness, violence and darkness of the countryside, and an escalating fear about the nature of its own administration at the lowest levels. The epilogue of Face to Face with the Peasant, through the example of the Pitelinskii Rebellion, explores how this fear fed on itself, and played itself out at a fever pitch in the carnival of violence that was collectivization. |
