Volynki: The Russian Jacquerie

Abstract

Peasant collective action against the new state policy assumed some of the traditional forms and expressions of rural protest: the jacquerie, a generic term for peasant protests and revolt covered by the Russian term volynka. The experience of peasant collective protest in the pre-industrial age interacted with new types of action, channels of expression and technologies of communication, and was not dissimilar to the concept of a ‘forwards-backwards’ dialectic in peasant protest postulated by George Rudé for revolutionary France.¹ Peasant collective action often exhibits its own peculiar protocol of, what one historian termed, the ‘disorderly order’ of the crowd.² By definition volynki were a type of non-violent direct action, characterized by phased acts of mass obstruction and non-compliance leading into sudden explosions of violent protests and riots. Such protests were an indicator of the, as yet, uncaptured status of the Russian peasantry, despite the modernizing goals of the Russian revolution, and a symptom of increasing peasant opposition to party policies. Whether or not they can be classified as ‘amorphous’ or ‘guided’ political actions, where they occurred it demonstrated either widespread peasant frustration with state policy, or efforts to reestablish the traditional social order of verkhushka domination in the village against the incursions of the state.³