The Peasants’ Kulak: Social Identities and Moral Economy in the Soviet Countryside in the 1920s

shila v meshke ne utaish' (you can't hide an awl in a sack) -the peasant I. Riaboi, noting that it is very easy to distinguish a from a laborer if one applies the above maxim (Derevnia pri NEP'e. Kogo schitat' kulakom, kogo-truzhenikom. Chto govoriat ob etom krest'iane? [Moscow: Krasnaia nov', 1924] 48) Western studies of the postrevolutionary Russian village have long minimized socio-economic division and struggle among peasants.1 The existence of the kulak (or rural capitalist) is often downplayed as Stalinist fabrication or treated as little more than a political issue exaggerated by leftist factions in the Communist Party during the power struggles of the 1920s. The dominant image of the 1920s village is that of an economically homogeneous and more or less socially cohesive community. The peasant experience of agricultural collectivization has, to a great extent, shaped Western analysis of rural social, economic, and political dynamics in the 1920s. During collectivization, peasants fiercely resisted the state's attempts to socialize their farms and banded together in their struggles against the common, outside enemy. Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist expectations of class war between rich and poor peasant failed to materialize as the predominant conflict became one of town versus countryside. Given this basic reality, most Western scholars have concluded that the antecedent socioeconomic stratification and struggle necessary to the Stalinist conception of class struggle were nonexistent or weakly developed. The threat did not exist or was grossly overestimated.2 Ironically, Marxist paradigms of the peasantry have dominated Western studies of the precollectivization village. In attempting to disprove Stalinist claims of class polarization and class struggle, predominantly non-Marxist scholars have essentially accepted many of the terms of Soviet debate laid down in the late 1920s. The basic emphasis in Western considerations has been on the issues of economic stratification and class formation. Accepting standard Soviet categories, most scholars have restricted their analysis within the confines of a model that divides the peasantry into poor, middle, and wealthy (and/or) groups, although they have concluded, contrary to Stalinist dogma, the existence of only a very minimal degree of stratification.3 In The Awkward Class, Teodor Shanin altered the categories of analysis, while broadly adhering to many of the terms of debate. Drawing on the seminal studies of A.V. Chaianov, Shanin focused his attention on the peasant family farm, arguing that it was precapitalist in nature and that the basis of its economic status was labor, or family size, rather than land or other forms of property and property relations. Shanin demonstrated the multi-directional mobility of the peasant family as families experience random catastrophe (e.g., fires, accidents, etc.) or, more generally in the course of several generations, traverse a path from a small (and therefore poor) family unit to a large (and therefore strong) extended family unit, and back to a smaller and poorer unit as the daughter units separate from the parental unit. This conception challenged Marxist notions of class polarization and consequent formation of class identities and consciousness, but still remained concerned with countering basic Marxist issues of socio-economic differentiation and conflict. Shanin was a participant in an argument, the terms of which were defined by Marxists.4 While it is true that the postrevolutionary village displayed minimal socioeconomic differentiation, the existence and degree of differentiation may not necessarily have been the sole or even primary determinant of village social relations. Socio-economic factors may have been less important in defining peasant social identities and interactions with other rural inhabitants than what we might broadly label cultural factors (moral economy, notions of utility, patriarchalism, etc. …

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