peasants' kulak: Social identities and moral economy in the Soviet countryside in the 1920s, The

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Dec 2000 by Lynne Viola

Generational and gender relations within the village constitute another and different type of determinant of peasant relations. Both types of relations were potential areas for conflict, again suggesting nonmaterial or cultural sources of division and struggle within the village. However, neither generation nor gender has been studied sufficiently in this context to offer any but the most tentative suggestions regarding the importance of these two areas of study.

Generational warfare was probably a not uncommon feature of village life in the turbulent years after the Revolution as the authority of the head of household weakened and traditional standards of behavior eroded in the wake of years of foreign and domestic war. Contemporary sources tended to show village youth either as complete hooligans, upsetting the village order through their decadent ways, or as ardent Komsomols, acting as a political thorn in the side of the older generation.112 The political importance of generational divisions is not entirely clear, although the sources noted above sometimes pointed to the greater (Communist) political activity of youth. The socioeconomic significance of generational division is clearer, for this type of division was readily apparent as the basis for the enormous increase in household division that came in the aftermath of the Revolution and Civil War.

An equally interesting area concerns gender relations in the peasant household and village. Gender constitutes an important and generally overlooked line of division in the village. Gender divisions could be sources of conflict or simply difference. In recent years, Western scholars of Russian women's history have noted the tendency of some peasant women to attempt to exercise their new-found rights after the Revolution and the conflicts which these attempts gave rise to.113 Moreover, evidence of a response on women's part may not be necessary to realize that an ever-present conflict existed in a society which sanctioned cruelty to women.114 An ingenious but empirically troubling work of the 1920s by M. Kubanin, a member of the Kritsman school, attempted to explore gender (as well as generation) as a variable of conflict in the village. Kubanin applied a Marxist analysis to the peasant family structure, viewing the contradictions between the head of household, who begins to resemble an entrepreneur in conditions of a growing market economy, and other members of the household, especially women and younger sons, who represent labor. Kubanin further concluded that the highest degree of internal contradictions arise in economically stronger households. Interestingly enough, to support a part of his analysis, he cited a study which showed that sixty percent of household splits were initiated by women.115 Christine Worobec has explored the issue of gender in shaping social relations in the prerevolutionary village. She suggests that village patriarchy was based as much on economic factors as on power relations, ideology, and religious factors. According to Worobec, peasants viewed traditional patriarchal relations as essential to the economic maintenance and survival of the household and community. 116 Issues of gender, as well as generation, are important variables to consider in attempting to explore the diversity and divisiveness of village life after the Revolution.