The Peasants

Abstract

Until recently, the English-language literature on the peasantry in 1917 consisted virtually exclusively of Lancelot Owen’s pioneering but dated work, published in 1937.¹ Since the mid-1970s, however, more studies have become available, the fullest discussion being in the chapters on the peasantry in John Keep’s book on the revolution, and in the monograph by Graeme Gill.² Marc Ferro and Dorothy Atkinson have dealt more briefly with the peasantry in 1917, Ferro as part of a general social history of the revolution and Atkinson in the context of a study of the commune from 1905 to 1930.³ George Yaney’s idiosyncratic contribution to the subject is rather less than helpful: his discussion of 1917 is entitled ‘Obscurity in the countryside’, and stresses the essential ‘unknowability’ of the peasantry in this period.⁴