Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917

"Since the collapse of the USSR there has been a growing interest in the Stolypin Land Reform as a possible model for post-Communist agrarian development. Using recent theoretical and empirical advances in Anglo-American research, Dr. Pallot examines how peasants throughout Russia received, interpreted, and acted upon the government's attempts to persuade them to quit the commune and set up independent farms. She shows how a majority of peasants failed to interpret the Reform in the way its authors had expected, with outcomes that varied both temporally and geographically. The result challenges existing scholarship which either concentrates on the policy side of the Reform or, if it engages with the results, uses aggregated, official statistics which, this text argues, are unreliable indicators of the pre-revolutionary peasants' reception of the Reform."--Jacket.