Soviet Peasants and the "Test of War": Food Politics and the Second World War in the Soviet Countryside, 1939-1945
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is the first archive-based study of the Soviet countryside during the Second World War in English (or French). It is about life, death, and survival on the collective farms between 1939 and 1945. Problematically neglected in Western historiography, the story of how the majority of the Soviet population, who indeed continued to live in the villages, survived during the war is also the story of how the world’s victory over fascism was achieved. Based on extensive research in central and regional archives in Russia and Ukraine, this study looks at political attitudes and the impact of the war on state-peasant relations in the USSR through the prism of food politics. It shows the different roles of food and gender in navigating extreme circumstances in the rapidly changing Soviet villages, while noting peasant agency and the endurance of peasant culture and community. Food and gender influenced how rural dwellers experienced and made sense of the war in the USSR, but also how boundaries and identities were redrawn, renegotiated, and reasserted in the villages. Above all, this study provides a sense of the diversity of experiences and the sheer horrors of life on the collective farms during the war. This dissertation is divided into five chapters following the chronology of the war. The Second World War in the Soviet countryside began in 1939. Chapter 1 discusses the importance of the 1939-1941 period for understanding the war of destruction that was to follow the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. The following chapters document the growing tensions and problems in the villages, which eventually led to postwar repression and famine. This study draws attention to the limits of state control and the extent of change and continuity in the Soviet countryside. During the war, rural dwellers employed a variety of old and new tactics to cope with hardships and defend their ways of life. The war witnessed more solidarity on the collective farms, but it also witnessed disputes and cruelties. In the final analysis, the Second World War radicalized a continuum of violence initiated by the forced collectivization of agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".