What do you think?
Rate this book
Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization
Drawing on newly-opened Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint and petition with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, Stalin's Peasants analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village.
Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between transformationally-minded Communists and traditionally-minded peasants over the terms of collectivization--a struggle of opposing practices, not a struggle in which either side clearly articulated its position. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village, exploring questions of authority and leadership, feuds, denunciations, rumors, and changes in religious observance. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the "Potemkin village" created by Soviet propagandists. In the Potemkin village, happy peasants clustered around a kolkhoz (collective farm) tractor, praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the real Russian village of the 1930s, as we learn from Soviet political police reports, sullen and hungry peasants described collectivization as a "second serfdom," cursed all Communists, and
blamed Stalin personally for their plight.
Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in studies of the Stalinist period--a richly-documented social history told from the traumatic experiences of the long-suffering underclass of peasants. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia.
Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between transformationally-minded Communists and traditionally-minded peasants over the terms of collectivization--a struggle of opposing practices, not a struggle in which either side clearly articulated its position. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village, exploring questions of authority and leadership, feuds, denunciations, rumors, and changes in religious observance. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the "Potemkin village" created by Soviet propagandists. In the Potemkin village, happy peasants clustered around a kolkhoz (collective farm) tractor, praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the real Russian village of the 1930s, as we learn from Soviet political police reports, sullen and hungry peasants described collectivization as a "second serfdom," cursed all Communists, and
blamed Stalin personally for their plight.
Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in studies of the Stalinist period--a richly-documented social history told from the traumatic experiences of the long-suffering underclass of peasants. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia.
416 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 1994
10 people are currently reading
514 people want to read
About the author
Sheila Fitzpatrick
48 books166 followersSheila Fitzpatrick (born June 4, 1941, Melbourne) is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.
In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.
According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.
Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".
Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.
Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 15, 2025
Fantastic ground-level social history of the Russian peasants' experience of collectivization and its immediate aftermath, very effectively conveying the deep sense of oppression and alienation the traumatic experience of collectivization and famine created in the Soviet countryside. My major quibble is that I don't find Fitzpatrick's argument that the stratification of the peasantry before collectivization was entirely constructed by the Communists to be convincing, but she does at least show very clearly that the party's categories didn't map onto peasant self-conception at all.
Read
July 26, 2008I have just completed both Fitzpatrick's book and Robert Conquest's 'Harvest of Sorrow.' The two could hardly be more different in approach and tone. Fitzpatrick's book is curiously non-emotional, and by that I mean that she compiles material that Conquest did not include, and all that is very useful, but she seems not to notice much of the human tragedy that collectivation and the Terror Famine brought about. This is not to say that her book is not entirely useful, particularly on the technical and legal aspects of collectivation, but in all a rather 'bloodless' book that would appeal to specialists. It is not a book I would recommend to the general reader, who, most likely, would lay the book aside no later than then end of the introduction. That intro., by the way, is quite fine, a very useful summary of the contents of the entire book.
November 18, 2023
Had you been born a Russian peasant in the early 20th century, what would life have looked like during the 1930s? This was a time of intense change, but sometimes it was change that looked all too familiar — a return to the serfdom and the totalitarianism of an earlier, tsarist time. It was a period of hope; hope in a world of technological progress that could bring the village to a modern standard. And it was a period of tragedy; hunger; death; malice.
Your name is — I quickly run a random name generator —Ilyushin Gaspar Antonovich and you live in the fertile Central Black Earth region. You've heard rumors of famine in Ukraine. You've even seen a few emaciated peasants who made it out of Ukraine. Still, it's a world apart from your own life and not something you even totally believe to be true. You find it hard to believe that the situation in Ukraine is more difficult than the one you're in, knowing that your village too knows the struggle of hunger caused by overzealous party officials requisitioning the output demanded by the new communist state.
During the day, you spend the early hours on the fields. The strips of land you're responsible for have been assigned to you by the kholkoz, the collective. You have better land this year, in part because it was stripped from the kulaks, the "rich" peasants, in the previous months. There are rumors that the Soviet authorities may allow some kulaks to return, and even to join the kholkoz. You are deeply opposed because it might mean that you have to return the house and land assigned to you, the house and land that once belonged to one of those kulaks. Besides, a group of eight kulak survivors have taken up terrorizing those who joined the kholkoz as bandits.
Despite the gains you've made thanks to the policy of dekulakization, you don't work too hard. All of your effort, you know, will not benefit you. The party activists will take everything you produce and leave you with almost nothing, sometimes nothing at all. Last year, they even took the seed. That's why your neighbors slaughtered all of their pigs two years ago. They wouldn't have kept their pigs anyway. Had the kholkoz taken the livestock, they would've been as good as dead to your neighbors anyway — and they would have never seen the pork. Some neighbors killed their livestock not out of fear of requisition, but out of fear of being called a kulak.
They said that a better life was coming. True, there are schools now. The communists say that the oppressive patriarchy of family is no more. Your clothing has changed, too. You wear the same pants and shirt as the city boys do. This isn't necessarily because you prefer city clothes. But with the requisitions, it doesn't pay to grow flax. And the local artisans who once made your clothes are now in Siberia, victims of the dekulakization policy. (They practiced commerce, as such they must have been kulaks.)
Anyway, you are jealous of the stakhanovites, the hard workers. You dislike the kholkoz chairman as well. The other day, you passed on information to the local OGPU authorities on the chairman, who you suspect is a kulak who managed to weasel his way out of dekulakization. In truth, the man is better off than you. He often takes the kholkoz' only horse for his transportation, leaving you and the other peasants with nothing to help til the fields. He uses his position of authority to earn a little bit more income than you. You could be kholkoz chairman if the position were empty. You could earn a little bit more, too. So you inform on him and hope that he disappears.
Grandmother laments that the village church has been stripped of its bell and icons. It's now a schoolhouse. The children are to go to school until the age of 5. Soon it will be 7. You are young, not religious, and welcome the closing of the church. Religion was just a tool of the tsarist state to oppress you, anyway. While the old folk seek to return to old traditions, you look to the future. The future, to you, is not even about the kholkoz. No, you seek to leave the Kholkoz. And if you can't be chairman, maybe you can learn to drive a tractor or truck, or learn some other skill that can serve as your ticket out of the village and into the city. The city is where the opportunities for a better life are.
On your way home from the fields one day, you come across Mashka Ruslanovna. Her husband left for the city last year. He said he'd be back in a few months. The man never returned. Another neighbor said that he saw the husband in the city of Kursk. He had remarried. Men can remarry, even if the previous marriage was never annulled or ended. Women are not given the same freedom, although rumor is that Mashka has been seeing another man in private. All the same, Mashka excitedly tells you about all the new opportunities that Stalin has opened for women like her. Opportunities for leadership and education. She dreams of leaving the village, too.
Leaving the village is a function of escaping illegally or earning a passport from the kholkoz. They are hard to get. The kholkoz needs as much labor on the fields as it can get. With the kulaks gone, there are less workers. And men continue to leave in small streams, whether on their own volition or thanks to a passport. The passport they may have earned through learning a skill or some other reason, or they may have simply paid the kholkoz authorities off with a bottle of vodka.
You are told that you don't need to leave if you want a better life. A better life is coming to the collective farms. Soon there will be running water and electricity. Some people, mostly stakhanovites, have received radios and other trinkets of modern technology. You don't know this yet, but your village probably won't see any of this until after Stalin's death. By then, you'll either be dead on a battle ground of central Europe or you'll have survived to never return to the village again. The Red Army is your ticket out: dead or alive.
In a couple of years, when the coming war is just a rumor, an anxious suspicion, and even a faith of deliverance from this hell you know as life, the Great Purges arrive to the kholkoz and raion. All of those years of mistreatment and corruption have finally led up to an opportunity for retribution. The men who mistreated you, your family, and your neighbors now stand trial. Many of the guilty are shot out in the woods in mass. Others are sent to the gulags. The rest are liquidated, that is, stripped of all of their property. There is a general nervousness. You never know if a neighbor will denounce you because they want something of yours. You no longer trust those around you. In fact, it has been a long time since you've last known to trust.
Amidst it all, there is a general sensation of coming conflict. You know little of the world outside of the kholkoz. But the people talk. You look forward to the day that invaders, whether they be the Germans or the Poles, end Communist rule.
Your name is — I quickly run a random name generator —Ilyushin Gaspar Antonovich and you live in the fertile Central Black Earth region. You've heard rumors of famine in Ukraine. You've even seen a few emaciated peasants who made it out of Ukraine. Still, it's a world apart from your own life and not something you even totally believe to be true. You find it hard to believe that the situation in Ukraine is more difficult than the one you're in, knowing that your village too knows the struggle of hunger caused by overzealous party officials requisitioning the output demanded by the new communist state.
During the day, you spend the early hours on the fields. The strips of land you're responsible for have been assigned to you by the kholkoz, the collective. You have better land this year, in part because it was stripped from the kulaks, the "rich" peasants, in the previous months. There are rumors that the Soviet authorities may allow some kulaks to return, and even to join the kholkoz. You are deeply opposed because it might mean that you have to return the house and land assigned to you, the house and land that once belonged to one of those kulaks. Besides, a group of eight kulak survivors have taken up terrorizing those who joined the kholkoz as bandits.
Despite the gains you've made thanks to the policy of dekulakization, you don't work too hard. All of your effort, you know, will not benefit you. The party activists will take everything you produce and leave you with almost nothing, sometimes nothing at all. Last year, they even took the seed. That's why your neighbors slaughtered all of their pigs two years ago. They wouldn't have kept their pigs anyway. Had the kholkoz taken the livestock, they would've been as good as dead to your neighbors anyway — and they would have never seen the pork. Some neighbors killed their livestock not out of fear of requisition, but out of fear of being called a kulak.
They said that a better life was coming. True, there are schools now. The communists say that the oppressive patriarchy of family is no more. Your clothing has changed, too. You wear the same pants and shirt as the city boys do. This isn't necessarily because you prefer city clothes. But with the requisitions, it doesn't pay to grow flax. And the local artisans who once made your clothes are now in Siberia, victims of the dekulakization policy. (They practiced commerce, as such they must have been kulaks.)
Anyway, you are jealous of the stakhanovites, the hard workers. You dislike the kholkoz chairman as well. The other day, you passed on information to the local OGPU authorities on the chairman, who you suspect is a kulak who managed to weasel his way out of dekulakization. In truth, the man is better off than you. He often takes the kholkoz' only horse for his transportation, leaving you and the other peasants with nothing to help til the fields. He uses his position of authority to earn a little bit more income than you. You could be kholkoz chairman if the position were empty. You could earn a little bit more, too. So you inform on him and hope that he disappears.
Grandmother laments that the village church has been stripped of its bell and icons. It's now a schoolhouse. The children are to go to school until the age of 5. Soon it will be 7. You are young, not religious, and welcome the closing of the church. Religion was just a tool of the tsarist state to oppress you, anyway. While the old folk seek to return to old traditions, you look to the future. The future, to you, is not even about the kholkoz. No, you seek to leave the Kholkoz. And if you can't be chairman, maybe you can learn to drive a tractor or truck, or learn some other skill that can serve as your ticket out of the village and into the city. The city is where the opportunities for a better life are.
On your way home from the fields one day, you come across Mashka Ruslanovna. Her husband left for the city last year. He said he'd be back in a few months. The man never returned. Another neighbor said that he saw the husband in the city of Kursk. He had remarried. Men can remarry, even if the previous marriage was never annulled or ended. Women are not given the same freedom, although rumor is that Mashka has been seeing another man in private. All the same, Mashka excitedly tells you about all the new opportunities that Stalin has opened for women like her. Opportunities for leadership and education. She dreams of leaving the village, too.
Leaving the village is a function of escaping illegally or earning a passport from the kholkoz. They are hard to get. The kholkoz needs as much labor on the fields as it can get. With the kulaks gone, there are less workers. And men continue to leave in small streams, whether on their own volition or thanks to a passport. The passport they may have earned through learning a skill or some other reason, or they may have simply paid the kholkoz authorities off with a bottle of vodka.
You are told that you don't need to leave if you want a better life. A better life is coming to the collective farms. Soon there will be running water and electricity. Some people, mostly stakhanovites, have received radios and other trinkets of modern technology. You don't know this yet, but your village probably won't see any of this until after Stalin's death. By then, you'll either be dead on a battle ground of central Europe or you'll have survived to never return to the village again. The Red Army is your ticket out: dead or alive.
In a couple of years, when the coming war is just a rumor, an anxious suspicion, and even a faith of deliverance from this hell you know as life, the Great Purges arrive to the kholkoz and raion. All of those years of mistreatment and corruption have finally led up to an opportunity for retribution. The men who mistreated you, your family, and your neighbors now stand trial. Many of the guilty are shot out in the woods in mass. Others are sent to the gulags. The rest are liquidated, that is, stripped of all of their property. There is a general nervousness. You never know if a neighbor will denounce you because they want something of yours. You no longer trust those around you. In fact, it has been a long time since you've last known to trust.
Amidst it all, there is a general sensation of coming conflict. You know little of the world outside of the kholkoz. But the people talk. You look forward to the day that invaders, whether they be the Germans or the Poles, end Communist rule.
July 20, 2023
Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization is an excellent monograph of the collectivization of the Soviet village in the 1930s. Author Sheila Fitzpatrick, distinguished emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago, uses a variety of primary source archival and published records – including documentary publications, statistical handbooks, newspapers, and citizen petitions and complaints – to trace how the rushed and haphazard implementation of collectivization produced deep fissures in Soviet rural life.
Fitzpatrick exhaustively shows how collectivization used violence, expropriation, and deportation to radically alter the relationship between the peasantry and the state. What resulted could be characterized as a tug-of-war between over how much grain to take or hold, how to maximize or minimize collective property, and how to expand or minimize state interference. Fitzpatrick unspools how this tension affected many different dimensions of rural life, including the division of labor in villages and comity between different social classes. The author also describes how these tensions created social traumas among the collectivized, who soon developed passive strategies of “resistance and adaptation” to cope with authorities’ use of such arbitrary and brutal tactics.
Fitzpatrick’s organic historical approach offers a stark reassessment of Soviet authorities’ idealized and distorted representation of rural life (what she calls a “Potemkin village” reconstruction) and replaces those misleading images with a more practical view that reflects the lived experiences of the Soviet peasantry.
Fitzpatrick exhaustively shows how collectivization used violence, expropriation, and deportation to radically alter the relationship between the peasantry and the state. What resulted could be characterized as a tug-of-war between over how much grain to take or hold, how to maximize or minimize collective property, and how to expand or minimize state interference. Fitzpatrick unspools how this tension affected many different dimensions of rural life, including the division of labor in villages and comity between different social classes. The author also describes how these tensions created social traumas among the collectivized, who soon developed passive strategies of “resistance and adaptation” to cope with authorities’ use of such arbitrary and brutal tactics.
Fitzpatrick’s organic historical approach offers a stark reassessment of Soviet authorities’ idealized and distorted representation of rural life (what she calls a “Potemkin village” reconstruction) and replaces those misleading images with a more practical view that reflects the lived experiences of the Soviet peasantry.
August 8, 2018
Познавательный рассказ о перипетиях жизни крестьянства в сталинскую эпоху, включая коллективизацию и раскулачивание
November 3, 2018
Fitzpatrick's book is one of it's kind, it provides the reader with extensive documentation of the consequences of Stalin's collectivization drives upon peasants and the reactions of the latter towards it. It tries to take an objective view of this enormously impactful state sponsored social engineering but one must take note note of the fact that the author, owing to her approach, failed to make a proper appraisal of the devastating hardships it brought upon the peasantry who saw this as another attempt at imposing serfdom. The Soviet state and even modern day Communists find to hard to come to terms with the fact that the peasantry whom they often count amongst their most loyal support bases are actually not strictly "proletarian" in the Marxian sense of the term but rather petty bourgeoisie - they are not detached from the means of production or the produce, nor are they reliant on receiving "wages". But instead of coming to terms with this reality perpetually staring them in the face Communist dictators and theoreticians have always preferred to hush up the uncomfortable truths and try level-best to cast the peasantry in the mould of dictatorship of the proletariat : something the peasantry was, strictly speaking, never a part of. And the results were horrific, for instance in the Holodomor itself the death toll was something between 3.3 and 7.5 million.
March 6, 2022
This, as the author concedes, is a study bounded by the collectivisation of 1929-1930 and the Soviet Unions entry into WWII in 1941 and is said to present us with information gained from recently released Soviet archived documents.
I will admit that just as with 'Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance' I found this to be a slog. My main interest in rural Russia lies with the resistance strategies and this does give a broad sweep of what took place.
Again, I would say, aimed at the student and scholar of modern Russian history.
I will admit that just as with 'Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance' I found this to be a slog. My main interest in rural Russia lies with the resistance strategies and this does give a broad sweep of what took place.
Again, I would say, aimed at the student and scholar of modern Russian history.
December 29, 2011
A detailed, informative and useful book about its topic, but also boring. The narrative is very dry, the sentences are long and the paragraphs are dense. I often felt my eyes growing heavy after reading a few pages. The author no doubt is trying to appeal to both the academic and mainstream audiences, but don't even academics appreciate a compelling narrative to go along with the nitty gritty details?
May 27, 2008
Covers the social history of collectivization. Although the topic is interesting, Fitzpatrick tries to reach both an academic and mainstream audience. Very repetitive and could be at least half of the length with the same amount of content.
September 8, 2010
If you need some facts about Peasants under Stalin...this is the book for you! Not the most fun to read but the facts are really interesting!
Read
March 20, 2015An exceedingly detailed look at the other side. What was life like for peasants in the 1930s? And what did they do to fight back against the fickle leaders? The answers are here.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews