The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View

Abstract

One of the most important and most generally espoused interpretations in Russian history is the existence of a crisis in Russian agriculture toward the close of the nineteenth century. A discussion of this crisis or agrarian problem is found in contemporary, in Soviet, and in the Western scholarly works. Statements such as “the economic condition of the peasantry kept deteriorating,” or “famine conditions, epidemics, increased mortality, decrease in the number of livestock, … this is the spectacle of the growing destitution of a faminestricken Russian village,” are commonplace. In fact, “to numerous observers of Russian rural conditions, the growing destitution of the village seemed so evident that it required no special demonstration.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the indexes used to support the crisis interpretation, and to show that this interpretation is not only arguable, but probably fallacious.

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