The Economic Foundations of Social Mobilization

Abstract

Even though the majority of agricultural specialists who joined the post-1905 public modernization movement in the Russian countryside believed in its apolitical nature, we may still characterize this campaign as an important political factor. Indeed, the tense and ambivalent relationships with the state and zemstvo institutions alone testify to the political potency of the “public agronomy” project. The interaction of rural professionals, cooperative activists, and educators with the peasants made the part of Russian educated society that was concerned with agriculture a de facto important political actor.