Stalin's peasants : resistance and survival in the Russian village after collectivization /

Fitzpatrick's book deals with perhaps the most traumatic experience in the post-emancipation history of the Russian peasantry--collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s. The authorities had often intervened in traditional peasant life, but as the author notes in her introduction, "no previous state reform had been conducted so violently and coercively, involved such a direct and all-encompassing assault on peasant values, or taken so much while offering so little." Freeing the period from many Soviet myths, Fitzpatrick emphasizes the range of strategies that the oppressed and exploited victims of communist policies in the countryside employed to protect their interests and to contend with catastrophic conditions imposed on the peasants by the state. As part of her narrative, Fitzpatrick also presents a richly documented and well-argued analysis of the impact of collectivization on the changing social and cultural life of the village. This is a rare example of a scholarly work in which historical abstractions and obscurities emerge as real people with genuine concerns, values, and choices. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A. Geifman; Boston University

Russia's rural lassitude persists in the form of state and collective farms, a legacy of Stalin dating from 1930. The peasants of that year sensed the apocalyptic meaning of the dictator's slogan to "liquidate the kulaks as a class" and responded by slaughtering about 50 percent of their livestock in an orgy of despair. Fitzpatrick dissects the subsequent decade, when the Communists--cued by Stalin's famous and speciously titled article "Dizzy with Success"--first recoiled from, then grimly pressed on with the dispossession of private farming, virtually re-enserfing the peasants. She delves into new archives, examining closely the secret police's reports of rumors, which reflect the pattern of popular resistance to the state's draconian policy. The state's occasional conciliation--relaxations of religious persecution, for example--inspired a pervasive skepticism expressed in the many pithy quotations Fitzpatrick reprints. A pioneering piece of historical sociology that delineates the deplorable reality of ideological utopias, this serious, professional work is indeed specialized for public libraries--but not for those that enjoy steady use of the Soviet affairs collection. ~--Gilbert Taylor

Scholarly and poignant account of conditions in Russia's collective farms in the 30's. In an attempt to obtain ever higher grain quotas and stamp out private enterprise, Stalin forced millions of peasants into the collective farm (kolkhoz) system--with catastrophic effects in both human and economic terms. Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives, including reports of the secret police, and her own vast reading of the newspapers of rural Russia, Fitzpatrick pieces together the picture of how collectivization worked in the lives of local communities and individuals. We learn the various ways in which people reacted to the closing of the churches and the liquidation of the more prosperous peasant class (the kulaks), how peasants were cajoled into the kolkhoz and the effects of expulsion from it, how the officials behaved, how the roles of women varied, how local handicrafts came to be replaced by factory products, and much more. We meet heroes of Soviet labor (udarniks and stakhaovites) like Sasha Angelina, who promised Stalin she would plough 1,200 hectares with her tractor, and combine operator Maria Demchenko, whose photograph with Stalin in 1936 entitled ``The Flowering Soviet Ukraine'' became one of the notable icons of the period. The author describes the almost religious cult of Stalin and the idealized ``Potemkin Village,'' but she shows that in reality the peasants hated Stalin and considered collectivization a second serfdom: those who could not depart for the cities hoped for deliverance by a counter-revolution or even foreign invasion. Fitzpatrick makes her account vivid with quotations of first-person experiences, but she resists the temptation to oversimplify the issues. A glossary explains Soviet terms and acronyms. Highly detailed--a must for students of Soviet, or social, history.