Russian Agriculture 1860–1900: Some Effects of the Emancipation Settlement

Abstract

In the later nineteenth century, agriculture was the primary occupation of nearly two-thirds of the Russian population, and even in 1913 this sector contributed 45 per cent of the National Income. Pre-revolutionary Russia was dominated by a backward peasantry which farmed the land in almost medieval fashion, and which was considered by many contemporary socialists as the bulwark of Russian autocracy and a barrier to political change. It would be wrong however to treat this section of the population as either a unitary mass, or as a rural, traditional sector which shackled the possibilities of political and economic development. As the Bolsheviks were to establish, any revolutionary change which did not take into account the aspirations of sections of the peasantry would be doomed to failure, and we shall later show how this position distinguished Bolsheviks from Mensheviks after the split in Russian Social Democracy.