City and Countryside in Revolution

Abstract

During 1917 the established pattern of authority relationships, land-holding and social hierarchy in the countryside were completely overturned by peasant direct action. The tsarist administrative system collapsed and the organs developed by the Provisional Government failed to take root in the countryside. Throughout the villages peasants turned to their traditionally-based institutions for guidance, rejecting all forms of external interference in village life. The formal state structure characterised by the dominance of an urban-based government over the rural areas was ruptured as villages and volosti became, in effect, independent enclaves; the territorial integrity of the state evaporated. The government was left as a head without a body. This development was accompanied by the elimination of the traditionally-dominant group in the countryside, the private land-owners. Although not all non-peasant-owned land was seized between the two revolutions, the peasants took over sufficient to smash the established land tenure pattern and to cripple the private landowners as a political force in the country. By the autumn, the non-peasant land-owner was little more than a memory in many areas of the countryside, his lands seized, his home frequently destroyed, and his traditional dominance broken.