Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Lynne Viola's new book provides a welcome addition to the growing literature on Soviet collectivization and the Russian (Soviet) peasantry in the 1930s. Like other recent work, Viola's main sources are newly opened Soviet archives, whose contents are particularly illuminating on the issue of peasant revolt in 1930 with which this book is primarily concerned. Viola sees the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union as a clash of two cultures, Communist and peasant. The onslaught of the state's collectivization drive, which included the expropriation of part of the peasantry ("dekulakization") and an anti-religious drive that closed many village churches, produced a variety of types of peasant protest including murders and assaults on officials and local activists, arson, and riots and disturbances in which over two million peasants participated nationwide in 1930. Viola characterizes this as a "peasant revolt" against collectivization that "was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian civil war." (p. 4)

The core of this study lies in chapters 3-5, which deal with the range of peasant protest responses to collectivization in 1930. Chapter 3, on "peasant Luddism, evasion, and self-help," discusses non-violent responses: slaughter of livestock, flight, and petitioning. The discussion of collective petitions - a characteristic form in the collectivization period, though increasingly rare thereafter - is particularly interesting. Chapter 4 deals with violent responses of the type classified by the authorities as "terrorist acts," namely murder and assaults on officials and activists and arson. Chapter 5 focuses on disturbances and riots in the countryside during collectivization.

Among the most interesting archival sources on which Viola draws in chapters 4 and 5 is an OGPU (secret police) memorandum on "forms of class war in the countryside in 1930" which covers both "terrorist acts" committed by individuals (murder, assault, arson) and collective disturbances (protests, riots, armed uprisings). The OGPU reported almost 14,000 terrorist acts in the Soviet Union in 1930, of which 1,198 were murders, 5,720 were attempted murders and assaults, and 6,324 were cases of arson. The largest number of acts came from the Ukraine (2,779) and Russia's Central Black earth region (1,088), with the Urals, Siberia, and the North Caucasus (all regions of the Russian Republic) not far behind. (The significance of these figures would be easier to judge if Viola had supplied population figures for the various regions.) In mass disturbances, the OGPU's other recording category, Ukraine again led the field in 1930, with over four thousand incidents with a total of almost one million participants, followed by the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth region, the Volga, and Central Asia. Nationwide, according to the OGPU's figures, almost two and a half million peasants participated in some form of collective protest in 1930.

The book also contains two chapters incorporating previously published work. The first of these, ch. 2 on rumors, is a reworking of Viola's article "The Peasant Nightmare: Visions of Apocalypse in the Soviet Countryside," which appeared in The Journal of Modern History 62:4 (1990). (Curiously, this article is neither listed in the Bibliography nor fully identified in the Acknowledgements). Ch. 6 on women's revolt draws on an article of Viola's that has been extremely widely read and justly acclaimed, "Bab'i Bunty and the Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization," originally published in Russian Review (1986). The book is rounded out by a brief final chapter on the post-1930 transition from violent to "everyday" resistance.

The book's basic claim that peasant revolt against collectivization was much more serious and widespread than has hitherto been thought is persuasively argued and supported by an impressive array of data. (Here I should declare a personal interest: my book Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], which deals with "everyday" forms of resistance, is one of those criticized by Viola for underestimating the importance of peasant revolt in 1930.) Nevertheless, there are several weaknesses in the analysis. First, there is the vexing problem of regional variation. Viola does convincingly show that violent resistance to collectivization was not confined to the non-Russian peripheries of the Soviet Union: not only the Ukraine but also the Central Black Earth and Central Volga regions of the Russian Republic experienced serious and large-scale disturbances and a high incidence of peasant "terrorist acts." But it remains unclear whether there was a basic difference of response between different regions of the Soviet Union, notably between regions with Slavic and Muslim populations, and whether the most violent range of peasant responses to collectivization - murder of officials, large-scale armed peasant revolts that had to be put down with troops - was characteristic of the whole of the Soviet Union, albeit at different levels of incidence in different regions, or was confined to a relatively small number of regions. Similarly, one would like to know more about the regional distribution of milder forms of protest such as arson and the "women's revolts." If, for example, as the OGPU figures cited by Viola imply, the Muslim peasants of Central Asia were much more likely than Russian peasants to murder collectivization officials and activists, but much less likely to resort to arson, these are differences that deserve discussion and explanation.